“Should be,” I said, rising up from my own spot on the bench, groaning at my sore legs and back. “Lemme grab you one. Red or white?”
Selections made, beer orders placed, and empties gathered up in both our hands, Frank and I headed in through the sliding glass door. We deposited all our empties in the recycling bin before going to the fridge and beginning to pull out drinks for everyone.
“If I’d known we were going to have twelve people drinking tonight,” I said as I surveyed the extravagant amount of beer and wine stuffed in my fridge, displacing all the food for Mary and my planned meals for the week, “I would have just filled up an ice chest and put it on the damn deck.”
Frank chuckled a little. “Hey, man, which would you rather have? A whole group of people who love you and want to drink your booze? Or a whole bunch of booze and no one to drink it with?”
“Point taken,” I grumbled as I crouched down and began pulling beers from the fridge and passing them back over my shoulder.
“Tell you what, though,” Frank said as he took beer after beer from me, followed by a bottle of white wine for Vanessa and Jessica, “I gotta say I’m kind of digging this whole thing. All of us together, you know.”
I glanced back over my shoulder at him, nodding. “It feels good,” I admitted. “Feels like this is the first time we’ve really been able to do this, other than the wedding.”
Beers transferred to the counter, I got up from my squatting position and closed the door. I turned back around to Frank, who suddenly had a serious look on his face. Probably the most serious look I’d ever seen on him, if I were to be honest.
“Boss man,” he said finally, his voice low and measured, “I got a question. A serious question.”
For most people, his voice seemed lower than necessary, even for a private conversation in a house with a party going on outside. But I knew better. He was speaking low enough so even the shifters outside would be hard-pressed to hear him.
“Shoot,” I said, grabbing a bottle opener from a drawer and popping the cap on a beer.
“This shit with Jaeger-Tech. This is serious, ain’t it? Like, real goddamn serious?”
“As a heart attack,” I said, taking a big drink of my beer. “Wouldn’t be pushing you guys so hard if it weren’t, and you know it.”
He nodded slowly as I handed him the bottle opener. He popped the cap off his beer and took a long drink. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Damn. Reckoned we were putting all that shit behind us after the war, you know? Figured the last time people would be seriously shooting at me was all that crap a year ago with my wife and her daddy.”
“Want me to tell you the truth?” I asked in a low voice.
He nodded, sighing. “Give it to me.”
“This is going to be worse than when the cartel came to town or when those security buddies of yours tried to pump us all full of lead. This is the big one, Frank. The big show.”
His chin set and his jaw clenched. He gave me a solemn nod before scooping up the beers.
“You thinking of leaving?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t think it’s the right course of action to take, but I wouldn’t blame you. You’ve got a wife to consider now.”
“Leave a fight?” he asked, his lips quirking up into a half-smile. “If I did that, I think my uncles would hunt me down and kick my ass. Besides, we’ve all told our mates. We know what’s coming down the pike, and we trust you to lead us through it.”
“They’re on board, too?”
“Think Ashley wants to leave her first job behind? Or the friends she’s made here? This is the only place she’s felt like a normal human being, where there ain’t nobody trying to pal up to her cause of her daddy’s money. Ain’t the kind of thing you just leave behind.”
Ashley had come a long way since she’d first arrived Enchanted Rock as a trust fund girl, blissfully unaware of what was going on with her father’s company. Her father had fled to the little town on the eve of his investment firm being closed by the SEC for embezzlement, fraud, and money laundering. What had started as an investigation of a simple breaking and entering case soon evolved into an international incident involving members of the Russian mafia and a Mexican drug cartel. Overnight, she’d become penniless.
I nodded. “Think I understand.”
“And you know Richard’s wife ain’t just gonna leave. Hell, she stood up to that biker gang right alongside us. If they couldn’t get her to sell out, I don’t see how a bunch of weirdos from Oregon are going to get her to move on.”
I gave him a small grin. “Good man.” I turned around and found the bottles of red I’d stashed on the counter behind me. With our bounty in hand, we headed back outside to rejoin our family.
Still, though, at the back of my mind was Vanessa’s warning about the fantastical threat Jaeger-Tech posed. Giants? Immortals? Was I not telling my men about them because I was worried they’d leave the pack behind and go running for the hills?
Or was I not telling them because of the reason I’d given? That because I couldn’t confirm the intel, it wasn’t solid or actionable.
The worst thing a leader can do is waver. If you make a choice, even a bad choice, you should follow through with it unless evidence presents itself that’s completely undeniable. If you’re a general and you say to take a hill, you don’t suddenly decide halfway through the battle that the hill your men are going up isn’t the objective you want. Because telling them to come back down with the enemy firing is just as dangerous as going back up.
Too bad the choice about letting them in on the knowledge of giants and dragons of faerie-land Jaeger-Tech was about to be taken out of my hands.
Chapter Five – Vanessa
“And you totally need to check out our jewelry collections!” Ashley said, reaching across the table to lightly touch my hand, her eyes lit up like a kid’s on Christmas. “I picked everything out myself for this season!”
Her words dripped with desperation, like they were trying hard to make me feel as welcome as possible to their little girl gang of shifter mates. I was nice, though, and fought back my cringe. “Sure,” I said, keeping my eyes from rolling in their sockets, “that’d be great!”
“I mean, it’s not the kind of jewelry I normally go for,” Ashley said, idly fingering the Sheryl Lowe earrings dangling from her lobes, “but I know what the customers like up here.”
I’d had my eyes on her jewelry all night. They weren’t exactly something that I would’ve taken for sale to my various fences around the world, or my few select private clients, but I might have grabbed a couple of her pieces for my own personal use if I’d been in there. I rarely did that kind of thing, though. You didn’t want to go traipsing around in the evidence.
Not that Ashley was the type of person I’d steal from, of course. I knew all about her family’s well-publicized fall from financial grace, and there were fatter calves out there just waiting for the slaughter. But she had good taste, I couldn’t deny that.
“Yeah,” Jessica added, “you could come in and, you know, look over our security.”
I licked my lips and smiled a little, glancing over to where Elise Moon had joined her mate and the rest of the guys. When we’d been speaking earlier, she’d struck me as the least like Ashley and Jessica. She was more the beer drinking, outdoorsy type, and less of the type to relax in an art gallery and drink wine.
“I guess Peter told you, then?” I asked. “About what I do for a living?”
“Well, not directly,” Ashley replied, brushing a strand of her long blonde hair out of her face as she leaned across the table. “Frank did. He can’t ever keep anything secret from me.”
I snorted a little. Guess it was true, even with shifters. A husband told his wife everything.
“I mean, I don’t necessarily approve of stealing or anything,” Jessica said with a little smile. “But, it is kind of cool. Way better than my job.”
“At least you get to be your own boss,” I said, takin
g a sip of red wine, the dry back end filling my mouth with a light taste of oak and cherry. Peter had gone around the table, refilling our glasses like a proper host just a few minutes prior, and I was still impressed that he had decent wine in his little cabin. I figured that, with his years of security and military training, he wouldn’t have ever picked up on the finer things in life.
“I might be my own boss,” Jessica replied, “but I still have to pick what sells. And, believe me, retail can be brutal with that. The customer might always be right, or whatever, but you can’t force them to buy.”
“Believe me,” I said, smiling a little, “you get the same thing even in my line of business. Some of the pieces people want nowadays, I just don’t understand—like an original Banksy. He’s a graffiti artist, for heaven’s sake. What happened to the masters?”
Both women laughed as we continued to sip our wine. By my next refill from the bottle Peter had kindly left on our table, I’d begun to feel the effects of the vino and was able to relax a little more. We were, after all, just a bunch of ladies sitting around drinking wine on a beautiful summer evening, weren’t we? It didn’t matter that I could turn into a wolf and tear their throats out in a moment’s notice. Besides, they seemed nice.
Our conversations flitted back and forth between work and the lighthearted, until Ashley finally brought it back around to Peter.
“So, Vanessa,” she said, her finger lightly tracing the rim of her wine glass, “I have a question. You’ve known Peter for a long time, right?”
“Mhm. Since we were kids.”
Both women settled in closer, their elbows on the table. “I’ve always wondered,” Ashley began in a hushed voice that probably did nothing to hide what she was saying from Peter, “what was he like growing up? Was he always so serious?”
Shaking my head, I laughed a little. “Oh, I don’t think I should talk about that. Might ruin his mystique.”
“No, no,” Jessica assured me, “he’ll maintain his mystique. Promise. Cross my heart.” She even did the motions with her fingers across her chest with wide, earnest eyes. I couldn’t help but laugh.
I leaned back in my chair and took another sip of wine as I let my mind drift over the years to when we were both growing up on the Frost Estate in Pennsylvania. We’d had an insular life, even though both of us attended public school. No television or internet, really, so most of our news came during the school year. After we’d finally been able to shift, we’d sometimes sneak out together to a local drive-in movie theater, one of those revival ones that had reopened, and hide on the outskirts. With our more sensitive ears, we could hear the movie just fine from the car stereos tuned in, and easily see the screen from the back.
“Peter was always…” I said, pausing to select my words carefully, “…earnest. He felt like we owed the world something for the gifts we were given, even if humans didn’t really believe in us or know what we were. That hiding from the outside world like his father wanted didn’t help us in any way. If they were going to discover us and make a big deal out of it, something was going to happen regardless of that, and we’d all be found out.”
Both women nodded along as I spoke.
Ashley was the first to reply, though. “I guess that makes sense, with the security agency and everything.”
“Sometimes, though,” Jessica added, “I wish they’d just take up non-profit work or something else entirely. I mean, I know it’s almost impossible for Richard to get hurt out in the field, not long term at least.”
Ashley picked up her glass again, bringing it part of the way to her lips. “But still, you worry. You’re not alone, I’m the same way. Every time Frank goes out of town on an assignment, I stay up all night in that empty apartment of ours, just worried out of my mind that he’s not going to come back in one piece.” She paused, sighed, and took a sip of wine. “But he always does,” she finished as she set the glass back down. “He always comes home.”
Just listening to them about their worries about their mates being in danger reminded me of my years apart from Peter. I thought about the nights I’d wake up in a cold sweat in some hotel bed, or come to my senses while in a Euro train car darting between Germany and France, thoughts of my errant mate firmly at the front of my mind. I swallowed hard, picked up my own glass, and took another sip of wine. They may not have been shifters, and the three of us may have shared different tastes, but that didn’t mean we had nothing in common. We still loved our mates no matter what, and were constantly worried about their safety and if we’d ever see them again.
But now, as I glanced at Peter over the top of my wine glass, my thoughts traveled back to earlier that day, to our embrace in the cabin. How my soul had suddenly stopped aching as his arms had encircled me in their warm embrace, how my heart had felt close to mending for just the briefest of moments. It had felt, for the first time since I’d arrived in Enchanted Rock, that my years-long torment at having lost Peter had almost finally come to an end.
“So,” Ashley said finally, pulling me out of my reverie, “Jessica and I have been thinking about something.”
“Yeah,” Jessica added, brushing her darker hair behind her ear and pressing her full lips tightly together as she locked her green eyes on mine, “we’ve been wondering about…about what’s going on.”
“What’s really going on,” her friend added, giving me a knowing look.
“What’s really, really going on,” Jessica finished. “Really.”
I sighed and looked away. My eyes traveled back to Peter, who was now locked in conversation with Rebecca and his adopted daughter, Mary. They were talking about her schoolwork, about what he expected of her as she went into her holiday break. About how he wanted her to start applying to colleges after a gap year, something he’d never had a chance to, even after he got out.
I frowned. Something I hadn’t had a chance to do, either. It was just one more thing, other than my pack, my family, and my mate, that those bastards had snatched from me.
They’d told their mates about Jaeger-Tech. About how they were coming, how they were going to do God only knew what to all of the shifters in Enchanted Rock if they got hold of us. Maybe they’d kill us, maybe they’d capture us. We didn’t know. No one knew. We just knew corpses littered the ground in their wake.
But, just after Richard, Jessica, Frank, and Ashley had returned from their honeymoons, Peter had laid it out for them without me present. Of course, the whole pack had chosen to stay. Why wouldn’t they with a man like Peter leading them? He’d brought them through plenty of scrapes in the past, hadn’t he?
The only problem was, he hadn’t given them all the information he had. He hadn’t told them about the things I’d seen.
But I could sense the fear and uneasiness from the women and I was sure their mates could, too. Maybe they were ignoring it or they were looking past the trepidation as best as possible, and instead just trying to put on a brave face.
Would they, if they knew the truth about Jaeger-Tech?
Didn’t these women deserve to truly understand just how afraid their men should be? How unsure they should be of the outcome of this battle? Didn’t we all deserve to know what the future could hold…whether or not we’d even have a future?
“They’re hunters,” I said flatly as I turned back to the two women, my voice cold as a winter gale blowing down from the mountains. “Plain and simple. They find shifter packs and they murder them in cold blood. They cut out our hearts, burn our homes, and leave nothing but our corpses behind. And they have monsters, things like you wouldn’t believe—giants, men who have lived since before the last World War. Creatures and things we can’t begin to imagine.”
My words hung in the air, resounding like a church bell. I realized as I finished speaking that everyone else on the little patio, all twelve souls, had abruptly gone silent, letting my words ring out clear as day across the backyard.
A pin could have dropped somewhere in Enchanted Rock fifteen miles away and
we would have heard it. The silence was so pristine and perfect as all eyes turned to me.
Peter cleared his throat. If his eyes had been daggers, I would have had two puncture marks in the side of my head.
Ashley and Jessica both just looked at me, their eyes as round as saucers as they tried to take in this redheaded, crazy shifter-woman in front of them. They each swallowed a healthy dram of wine.
I slowly began to shake my head as I realized I was the center of attention. Shit. “At least, that’s what the other shifter packs say.”
More silence. A seemingly impenetrable veil that descended over us just as the unseasonable heat of the day began to dissipate.
Across from me, both women shivered.
Mary Waynescott, surprisingly, spoke first. “She’s right, you know,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper. But still, her words seemed to cut like a knife.
I nearly gasped. She’d seen him, too? Why hadn’t Peter ever said anything to me when discussing this? Was he just that unwilling to believe that there could be something more fantastical than shifters in the world?
“Mary,” Peter said, his tone stern and surprisingly fatherly.
“What, Pete?” she asked. “I told you what I saw that night at my…” She trailed off and took a deep breath like she was trying to get up the strength to continue. “At my parents’.”
“You were distraught,” Peter said, reaching across the table, “and your eyes may have been playing tricks on you in the night. It was probably just some big guy, that’s all.”
“I know what I saw,” Mary said in a wavering voice, withdrawing a little. A look of hurt passed over Peter’s face.
That look, and the knowledge that I’d helped cause it to appear, felt like a stab right in the heart.
She stood from the picnic table bench and ran inside, mumbling, “I’m sorry, everyone.”
We all sat there again in silence for a long moment. I swear even my heart stopped beating as it waited for this new information to sink into everyone’s psyche. My own thoughts went to the man I loved, and had just inadvertently hurt, as well as the poor teenage orphan who’d just rushed inside.
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