A thought occurred to Celeste. “Jeffrey,” she said. “What did… I’m trying to remember what we do with you during a full moon.”
He looked at her in exasperation. “You lock me in my room and go stay somewhere else. Sometimes you don’t come back for a few days.” He stared at the ground. “I don’t like that.”
Everyone at the table went quiet. They all knew the truth – that Jeffrey believed Celeste was his mother, and that she couldn’t convince him otherwise. Celeste saw the looks of disgust and anger on their faces, and she shared in their fury. The life that Jeffrey had lived because of Jennifer…
Jennifer, you vile, selfish bitch.
“It’ll never happen again,” Celeste said.
“I know,” Jeffrey said with utter confidence. “You’re better now. And I’ll be with my dad when I turn into a wolf, and then next month, he can make you into a wolf so you’ll be just like me.” He waved at the people at the table. “You’ll be like all of us. Like my pack.”
Taylor coughed and hid her face, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.
“Let me guess, allergies?” Celeste said, but she was shiny-eyed too.
“They’re terrible at this time of year.” Truman was blinking hard. Then he looked at Mandy. “What? I’m sensitive and in touch with my feelings. That’s a good thing, right?”
“Sure,” Mandy muttered. “I’ll go pack so we can get ready to leave.” She grabbed her coffee mug and got up from the table. “I’m coming too,” Taylor said. She glanced at Celeste and made “follow me” gesture. “Me too,” Celeste added, and hurried after them.
“What’s up with you and Truman?” Taylor asked Mandy as Mandy picked up the pace and walked faster.
“Nothing,” Mandy said. “Nothing at all, nosey parker.”
“Hey, you meddled in my relationship with Grant, so I get to meddle with yours, right?” Celeste said.
Mandy shook her head. “That is not how this works.”
“So you don’t like Truman?” Celeste persisted.
“I never said that,” Mandy protested as Celeste and Taylor followed her into her room. “Truman’s a great guy. He’s just not for me. I’m sure he’ll make some were-chica very happy.” As she said that, she crushed the coffee mug in her hand, and it shattered. Hot coffee splashed her shirt. “Oops,” she muttered.
“Yeah, I can see how you wouldn’t like him,” Celeste mused. “You’re probably holding out for someone with a lot more money and prestige. He just works security for the pack, right? Low-level drone. Kind of a loser.”
“Quit being such a fucking snob!” Mandy snapped. “Who the hell cares about money? Truman’s gorgeous and funny and sexy, and whoever gets him will be very lucky!” Then she flushed red. “Oops.”
Celeste was grinning hugely. “Got you. You’re in luuuurve,” she said. “With your mate.”
She looked at Taylor.
“How did I do?”’ she asked.
Taylor held up her hand and high-fived Celeste. “You did great,” she said. “You have so nailed this pack/best friend thing down. I don’t know why you thought you weren’t good at it; you’re a natural.” Celeste felt a warm glow settling inside her.
Mandy looked away, out the window. “You want the truth? I liked Truman from the first second I saw him, back when I was pretending to date Grant, and I avoided him because I knew I could never be with him. I consider you guys my friends. If you are my friends, please don’t ask me why.”
“Oh. Suddenly this isn’t so fun anymore.” Celeste looked at Mandy with sympathy. “I won’t ask why, and I won’t bring it up again. But if you ever want to talk about it, I’m all ears.”
And Mandy and Celeste split up to pack their bags.
Jeffrey was very excited to take the helicopter back to Somerville.
He was less excited when they went into court that afternoon and he had to talk to Rhona again.
This time, when they headed back to the house, they had a whole parade of cars with them. Grant had rented ten SUVs, all of which were the same make, model and color. He and Jeffrey and Celeste rode in one of the middle vehicles, to make it harder for any would-be kidnappers to figure out which vehicle they were in. They had a total of fifty werewolves with them, including Mandy and Truman. They would travel to and from town in a group.
When they went back to the house, Grant went to the media center to confer with Talbot and Ford, and Jeffrey played in the yard outside, with Reynaldo watching.
A little while later, Jeffrey came back in to the house. He was unusually quiet.
“Do you want to tell your mother something?” Reynaldo asked.
Jeffrey looked at Celeste. “Reynaldo and me were playing tag but he was too fast for me. So I changed into a cub and ran into the bushes because I wanted to win. I’m not supposed to do that.”
“Took me a couple of minutes to find him,” Reynaldo said, looking flustered. “I’m sorry.”
“Jeffrey!” Celeste said, exasperated. “You put yourself in danger doing that. If anything happened to you, I would be sad forever and ever. You need to have a grownup watching you all the time.”
“I know,” Jeffrey said. He looked so miserable that Celeste was taken aback.
“It’s all right. Nothing happened. All right, let’s go find your dad and see what time he wants to eat dinner.”
“I’m going to send myself to bed without supper or TV right now,” Jeffrey said. “I’m not even going to get a bedtime story.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Celeste protested.
“I’m not hungry anyway,” Jeffrey said quietly, and marched off to his room.
Celeste went and fetched Grant to tell him what had happened.
“I’ll go talk to him.” Grant closed up his laptop, went and got a plate of cold cuts for Jeffrey, and went in to his room.
She stood in the hallway, listening. Jeffrey refused to eat. So Grant started reading one Jeffrey’s favorite storybooks, but he deliberately got it wrong.
“That’s not how it goes!” Jeffrey said indignantly.
“You know what, you’re right. You’re better at reading than me. Can you help me?” Grant asked.
“Really, Dad. You need how to learn to read better. What if you see a sign on the road and you can’t read it? You might get lost.” Now Jeffrey sounded a little worried.
“That is very true. I bet if you practice with me, I’ll get up to speed really fast.”
“All right, all right.” She could practically see Jeffrey rolling his eyes as he said it. “My mom is teaching me, and I’ll teach you. But you should have paid more attention in school.”
She listened to Jeffrey reading to Grant, and felt a swelling of pride in her chest, so fierce and strong that tears stung her eyes.
Grant was amazing. He’d had this small, damaged boy dropped into his life, and he’d stepped right into the role of dad as if he’d been born to it. He knew just what to say to him. Grant was a big, terrifying killing machine, but when it came to his child he was so gentle and so patient.
She wiped tears from her cheek with the back of her hand as someone walked down the hallway.
“Yeah, he bores me to tears too.”
She looked up at the unfamiliar, gruff voice, and gave a start of surprise. It was Austin Bronson. She’d never met him, but when she’d been cyber-stalking the Bronson brothers, she’d seen him in one family picture online. Only one. Apparently he wasn’t too close to the rest of the family. Grant told her that Austin had left the pack and lived out west with a small pack of his own.
“Austin Bronson. Pleased to meet you. I’m Celeste. What brings you here?”
“Heard about the kidnapping attempt. I came to offer some backup, if it’s needed.”
She nodded. “It’s up to Grant, but I’m personally grateful for all the help we can get. Let me go get you a beer while we wait for Grant.”
“I wouldn’t say no,” Austin said, and followed her to the enormous drawing room. They
sat down with half a dozen other wolf shifters.
Grant came out later, and headed straight for Celeste, who was sitting with Mandy drinking red wine. “Something’s bothering him, and he won’t admit it or say what’s wrong,” he said to Celeste. “It’s more serious than his usual minor freakouts, though. I can tell. He’s asleep right now. Or pretending really well.”
Then he saw Austin, who was shooting pool with Reynaldo. “What a surprise. The prodigal wolf returns.”
Austin leaned his pool cue against the table and walked over to him. “You didn’t want me at the conference, so I didn’t know if you’d want me here. If you don’t, say the word.”
“Who didn’t want you at the conference?” Grant looked at him in surprise.
“I thought it was all of you. Although actually, when I think back on it, it was Cliff who called me and told me not to come. He suggested that my input wasn’t needed.” Austin raised an eyebrow. “Which was interesting, considering that I hunt down feral lone wolves for a living.”
Grant swore, shaking his head. “Fucking Cliff. Just when I think I can trust him… I had no idea, Austin. I thought you just didn’t want to come, which isn’t that unusual for you. And yes, if you and your pack are willing to stay here, I could use your help.”
He put his arm around Celeste, shaking his head. “Fucking hell,” he said irritably. “I just don’t know who to trust these days.”
Chapter Seventeen
Celeste stood in line at the coffee counter in downtown Somerville, feeling the familiar twist of tension in her gut. They were due in the courthouse for their final meeting with CPS in an hour.
She didn’t have any reason to be afraid. Reynaldo, Pete, Austin, Grant, Truman and Mandy were sitting at a table with Jeffrey. There were wolf shifters sitting outside in cars – there were fifteen vehicles in total accompanying them to and from the courthouse.
They were as well protected as a visiting statesman, but she couldn’t help but worry. The last time they’d headed home from the courthouse, they’d come close to losing Jeffrey.
“Excuse me.” An angry voice behind her made her turn around and frown. It was one of the coffee shop employees, a tall, lean, middle-aged woman with dirty blonde hair scraped back into a bun. A small plaque on her shirt read “manager”.
“Yes?” Celeste said, puzzled. Why was this woman angry? Celeste had never met her before.
“We told you if you came back again, we’d call the police.” The woman pointed at the door. “Get out.”
“I’ve never been here before,” Celeste said with annoyance.
“You were here yesterday.” The woman waved over a burly-looking barista. “She’s back. Call the cops. We’re pressing charges.”
“I didn’t even leave my house yesterday,” Celeste said, glaring at her. “But I’ll be happy to take my business elsewhere.”
“Wait,” the barista said to the manager. “You’ve got the wrong person. The lady who was in here yesterday? She didn’t have a scar.”
Celeste felt as if someone had dumped a bucket of freezing water on her. “The woman who was here yesterday…she…she stole something?”
Now the manager was staring at her. “You’re right,” she said to the barista. “I’m sorry,” she added to Celeste. “Do you have a sister? Because a woman who looks almost exactly like you was in here yesterday, and she tried to steal a twenty-dollar bill off a table. I mean, she had the same coloring, same eyebrows, eyes, facial features… Her hair was longer than yours, now that I look at you, and she didn’t have that scar.”
Jennifer. She was alive.
“Excuse me,” she said faintly. She hurried over to Grant.
“We need to talk,” she told him. “Now.”
Jeffrey was sitting next to Grant, sullenly pushing his cookie around the plate with a spoon. He was still being quiet and moody.
She and Grant stepped outside the shop, and she told him what the manager had just told her.
“She’s alive,” she said to him. “There’s no other explanation.”
“There was a dead person with her ID, found burned to death in a car,” Grant protested. “How could that be?”
Celeste hugged herself as conflicting emotions warred inside her. Her sister wasn’t dead. She didn’t want Jennifer to be dead, but she didn’t want anything to do with her, either. Jennifer was poison. She ruined everything she touched.
“All right, I’m thinking out loud here,” she said. “Let me go over everything I know about the accident. The car was found on the outskirts of Somerville. It went around a curve and hit a tree, exploded and burned, around two a.m. The body in it was burned beyond recognition – they couldn’t even tell what sex it was. The only way they traced it was they found a wallet lying in the road outside the car with several fake IDs and also Jennifer’s real ID. The cops told me that when they called me. I was still listed as her emergency contact.” She frowned. “It’s a small town. Jennifer was a nobody. It looked like a one-car accident. I imagine they rushed the police report and didn’t do much of an autopsy, probably just wanted to wrap everything up quickly.”
“Does it strike you as suspicious that the body and the car were destroyed, but a perfectly intact wallet with her ID was found outside the car?” Grant asked.
“Well, it does now that you mention it. That’s a great way to fake your own death.” She grimaced. “I haven’t seen Jennifer in ages, but would she actually kill a person? Because she would have to have put a person, probably female, in that car and set up the accident. As awful as she is, I’d hate to believe that about her.”
“Another question. Why did Jennifer need to disappear? And why leave Jeffrey behind? Granted, she was the worst mother in the history of mothers, but... What?” he asked, looking at Celeste.
“I just remembered something. When I first met Jeffrey, he was talking about a time when he and Jennifer were living somewhere under fake names, hiding from the bad man. In fact, I got the impression that he and his mother always lived under fake names. Seven years ago, she told me that she’d broken up with you, and then there was some weird thing with Boone… She didn’t specifically say why, but she told me that if he contacted her, I had to pretend I hadn’t heard from her. He called me a few times and he was really threatening, demanding to know where she was. I changed my number because of that.”
“Hmm. You think Boone might be the one who was after Jeffrey?” He scowled. “I’ll call Cliff and put the word out, but that makes it tough. Lone wolves are hard to catch. They live off the grid – they can hunt their own food and survive in the woods in extreme temperatures.” At the look of dismay on her face, he hugged her. “It’ll be okay. Once we get back to our pack property, I promise you, he’s not coming anywhere near us. And now that we’re close to having the database up and running, it’ll be easier to find these guys. I’m going to stop traveling and stay home with you and Jeffrey. We just have to make it past the full moon, and we’ll be fine.”
* * * * *
Celeste looked at her reflection in the mirror of the courthouse bathroom and grimaced. Even with makeup on, she had circles under her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Somerville and never come back.
The door to one of the stalls banged open, and Rhona Millhouse walked out. She came over to use the sink next to Celeste, avoiding her gaze. Weird. There were two other empty sinks that she could have used.
Rhona had been a little more subdued in court today. She had stopped demanding that Jeffrey be handed over to her; it was obvious the judge wasn’t going to do that.
“So, how’s Jeffrey doing?” she asked Celeste, pasting a big, fake smile on her face.
“Talk to my attorney,” Celeste snapped.
“My goodness, there’s no need to have an attitude.” The smile never wavered as Rhona pulled out a little canister of breath spray from her purse. “I’m just doing what’s best for Jeffrey. If you cared anything about him, you�
��d have let me help him. You’re really not a fit mother. You’re no better than your sister was.”
“What did you just say to me?” Celeste turned to stare at her in alarm.
“You heard me…Celeste.” Rhona squirted the breath spray in Celeste’s face, and Celeste felt a wave of dizziness sweep over her.
When she woke up again, she was lying face down on something fuzzy, and her hands were tied behind her. She kept her eyes closed as she waited for dizziness to subside. The floor bumped underneath her, and she heard music. She was in a car, and somebody was playing the radio. Country music.
“Turn that shit off,” a male voice growled from somewhere above Celeste’s head. She was pretty sure it was Boone, sitting in the back seat of the car.
The music stopped. “My goodness,” Rhona chirped in her annoying, syrupy voice. “You people use the most foul language.” So she was driving.
“We’re fucking paying you well enough, so do what I fucking say.”
“Remember, I get to see that woman punished,” Rhona said. “I get to watch. She was very disrespectful to me. She threatened to hit me.” Her tone was deeply aggrieved.
Fear and rage mingled in Celeste’s gut. What were they going to do to her? Why did they even want her? At least they didn’t have Jeffrey. Thank God for that.
Jeffrey would be devastated without her. Would Grant find her and save her in time? How could he? He couldn’t search every car in town, simultaneously.
“Yeah, yeah.” Boone sounded bored and disgusted. He kicked Celeste in the side, hard, and she stifled a cry. “Quit faking, bitch, I know you’re awake.”
She rolled over onto her back. Fine. Now he couldn’t see what she was about to do with her hands.
She’d learned a few tricks when she was working for the security company. One of them was to always carry a handcuff key concealed in her bracelet.
She wouldn’t be able to escape, but she wouldn’t let them take her alive. She’d fight until they had to kill her.
She stared up at him. She’d met him a few times, eight years ago, when Jennifer had first started dating him. The years had not been kind to him. He had been handsome in a lean, hawkish way, but now he’d lost teeth and the lines and hollows in his face had deepened.
A Cub For The Billion-were (Alpha Billion-weres Book 2) Page 12