There. That suggested my wolf form was boosting Bastion’s energy. Nothing I’d said implicated my pelt.
Both men nodded, but Luke was the one who took action. “Here.” Keys in his hand. Glistening, promising. “Go to my apartment. I’m not using it.” He rattled off a nearby address.
I opened my mouth, and Luke solved the other obvious problem before I even had time to voice it. “I’ll take care of Grace along with Clarence,” he promised. Then, turning his attention to Justice: “You will treat Honor with respect.”
My eyes were too watery to be sure of it, but something powerful seemed to pass between the two men. At last, Justice nodded. Gathered his twin in his arms like a lover. Nudged me with one toe.
“Come on.”
IN THE END, JUSTICE had to carry Bastion and me one at a time up to Luke’s bedroom. Because the so-called apartment was really a duplex, two well-furnished stories with the sleeping quarters at the top of the stairs.
This close, Justice smelled like his father, and I found myself snuggling into his shoulder. But the rose-tinted glasses shattered as he dropped me onto the bed rather than setting me down.
“Shift before you sleep,” he demanded.
I obeyed him, wriggling out of Clarence’s polo and into my pelt. I was asleep the moment my damp nose found safety underneath Bastion’s chin.
Hours later, I woke to voices, cordial but stilted. “How’s Bastion?” That was Luke, true concern in his question.
“No better.” Justice was scangry—that combination of terror and rage that left his words clipped and terse. “Honor needs to run. Soon. We have sixty hours remaining.”
Luke didn’t ask how my cousin knew the timeline of Bastion’s illness. Perhaps they’d already discussed that. Whatever the reason, he instead told Justice where he could find various family members. Clarence was undergoing chemo at the hospital with Grace as his companion. Mr. Smythewhite was at work. Mrs. Smythewhite was getting her nails done.
This was a changing of the guards. Or at least so I gathered when Luke asked: “Can Bastion be left alone?”
I could almost see Justice shrugging. “Won’t make any difference. He doesn’t even know if I’m present now.”
Up to this point, I’d been drifting in that half-sleep, half-awake zone where nothing seemed important. But the pain in my cousin’s voice pushed me out of the bed.
I had fingers instead of paws, I noted. My pelt had crept away from me while I was resting. Had spread itself across Bastion. Unfortunately, the effort had done exactly no good.
Because Justice was right. Bastion was breathing but showed no sign of noticing my presence. Eyes twitched beneath their lids. His cheeks were red and flushed, his breath had syncopated into breathy pants.
It was painful to look at him, but the solution lay just outside the window. Trees, starting in the backyard and extending so deep the ground grew black beneath them. Luke had chosen his den wisely. I slung the pelt around my shoulders, wishing the resulting surge of strength would energize my cousin.
It didn’t. Even when I pressed my damp lupine nose against Bastion’s dangling hand, his fingers didn’t curl up in protest. The house was silent as I turned away and padded down the stairs.
There, Luke waited alone by the back door. He cocked his head, asking a question without words as if he was already lupine.
Could he run with me?
I swallowed back memories sweet and sour. Nodded once. Then fled to the trees, leaving Luke to shift and follow if he so desired.
Chapter 19
As dark as it had been inside my head, sunlight sparked bright around me. The forest behind Luke’s duplex butted up against the same park I’d run in previously. By the time Luke caught up, I’d lost myself to the wild.
Breezes ruffled my fur. Birdsong overwhelmed distant traffic. The air smelled of honeysuckle while Luke was spicy and entirely male.
He drew me deeper beneath tree shadows, cautious at first then full of joy as I kept pace with him. We raced and romped, losing track of the past and the future in favor of the present. All I knew was that I needed to exert myself to recharge my pelt. What had once been a chore now turned into breathtaking joy.
Together, we chased a rabbit with no intention of catching it. Startled a doe and watched as she leapt, white tail blazing and legs twice as long as they had appeared at rest.
A poodle yipped from a nearby trail and Luke dropped to his belly to stalk the miniature opponent. We slid south, into a ravine and up the other side. The dog had quieted, but the reek of flea shampoo pinpointed its location. Luke scrambled up the side of a boulder, but I found myself turning in the opposite direction instead.
Because something was tugging at me. Almost like a finger stroking across my fur. Raising the hairs in the wrong direction...until I turned and turned and...there.
Following the tiny trickle of directional impulse, my ears pricked as a little girl’s sing-song chant called from the other side of a vast, spreading oak. “You are my best friend,” she caroled.
I stuck my head around the oak’s trunk, curious. The girl sat at the base of a tremendous cliff, the overhang arcing over her head to shade the ground into barren sandiness. Someone much older had strung a rope over a tree branch, threaded the line through a foot-long board, then tied a knot at the bottom. But the swing dangled empty while the child perched beside it. She was speaking to one member of the plastic menagerie scattered across the sand.
“And you are my best friend,” she answered herself, voice pitched even higher. She wriggled the doll jerkily with childish fingers, spread its arms wide so it gave her neck a poky hug.
The scene was cute...and lonely. At that age, there’d always been at least one member of my family so close I could reach out and touch them. It was strange to imagine a doll being this child’s closest companion.
Perhaps that’s why I sat there, peering at the child rather than turning around to follow Luke and his poodle. I watched as something silver and shiny fell from the girl’s free hand to settle around the doll’s neck. The chain was doubled up to prevent it from puddling at the feet of the toy human. Still, I could see what hung from the links.
Half of a silver wolf paw. B on the curved left side, half of an F on the jagged right side.
This adorable munchkin was the one responsible for rifling through my clothes.
PERHAPS ONE OF THE skinless would have dove in to retrieve the stolen possession. Or maybe not. Because as I backed away, my thoughts were interrupted by Luke and the poodle, racing into the forest together. No, not together—the mighty wolf was fleeing from the miniature poodle’s tiny teeth.
They came around the bend and caught sight of me at the same moment. Luke’s tongue lolled in greeting. The poodle froze, realizing its enemies had doubled. Still, the midget bristled and stood his ground.
For half a moment, we were all silent. Then the poodle began yapping furiously, barks interspersed with curly-headed snarls. Standing up to wolves was the highlight of the animal’s year, that much was evident. Especially when Luke backed away as if terrified. It was several seconds before the demanding calls of the poodle’s master drew the beast back into the trees.
Only then did Luke snort with amusement. His eyes twinkled. He’d been enjoying himself.
For my part, I was stuck between family and honor. My necklace was a promise I’d made to my twin. But I couldn’t very well snatch a dollar-store necklace out of the hands of an eight-year-old child.
Blinking against scratchiness in my eyeballs, I noted that shadows were lengthening. Katydids had begun their evening chorus. The moon was barely visible in the darkening sky.
My pelt was charged. Remaining wolf now was a pleasure, not a duty.
I left without a single backward glance at the child, sprinting back the way I’d come.
AN HOUR LATER, LUKE’S voice curled around me, drawing my gaze away from my sleeping cousin. “When I was a kid, I made a mistake.”
Ba
stion slept easier than previously beneath my pelt. But the receding energy hadn’t left me in a tsunami of pain, and Bastion hadn’t woken. No wonder I latched onto Luke’s conversational gambit like a flotation ring thrown to a swimmer caught in a riptide.
“A mistake?”
“A mistake.” He sank down on the opposite side of the bed, so we could still watch Bastion while speaking over my cousin’s motionless body. Somehow, Luke seemed to know that I needed to hear about someone else’s life rather than rethinking all the choices I could have made differently in mine.
“My father was one of those stereotypical alpha assholes,” Luke continued. “Domineering. Dictatorial. He solved his problems using his fists.”
I couldn’t help snorting ever so softly. That was exactly the stereotype I’d been told about the skinless as a child. Luke’s eyes crinkled, as if he could hear me making the comparison. Then he shrugged and continued with his tale.
It was simple when it came right down to it. Luke was raised with a brother as close as a twin. One year older, but with a much hotter head.
“When he was eighteen and I was seventeen, Gabriel got sick of Dad’s bullshit. He saw the pack as his inheritance. Couldn’t stand watching our father run it into the ground.”
I winced. I had a feeling I knew where this was going. “So he challenged your father.”
That wasn’t how woelfin families managed leadership. Far from it. Instead, our youngsters moved out of their family home with parental blessing when they started craving independence. Cousins split apart to start their own groupings when one set of twins chose a matched set of mates.
We definitely didn’t challenge each other for supremacy. We didn’t fight each other to the death.
Skinless, on the other hand, were bloodthirsty. Or, some of them were. I had a hard time matching up my understanding of the skinless with the man sitting on the other side of Bastion’s sick bed.
“I knew it was going to happen.” Luke’s gaze flew inward and I got the impression he’d lost track of the present as he delved into ancient history.
Or perhaps not. Bastion shifted uncomfortably, knocking the pillow out from under him, and Luke paused long enough to lift my cousin’s shoulders and tuck the soft support back underneath his head.
I ran my fingers through Bastion’s hair and he soothed back into stillness. “How could you know what was going to happen?” I asked once it was clear my cousin was as well as he could be.
Luke shrugged. “Gabriel was my brother. He was pissed and I heard about it. Frequently. Still, I thought he understood that challenging our father was equivalent to painting a target on his own back.”
“What happened?”
“Dad laughed in his face...then he killed him. Ripped his own son to pieces in front of the entire pack.”
I leaned all the way across Bastion so I could peer up into Luke’s gaze where it bored into the blanket. From the outside, fault so obviously lay with the father. But Luke, I could tell, still believed he was the one who shouldered responsibility.
“You blame yourself, but you shouldn’t. You were only a kid.” My words weren’t getting through to him, so I tried a question. “What did you do afterwards?”
“Left the pack. Spent a decade training hot-headed youngsters so they wouldn’t get themselves killed the way Gabriel did.”
“Sounds like you made up for your mistake and then some.”
The air-conditioner pushed cool air into the bedroom. Luke raised one eyebrow as he stared directly at me. “Like you made up for your mistake? Putting your sister and cousin through school? Working long hours so they could pursue their dreams?”
My throat tightened so hard I raised a hand to massage it. For a moment, I couldn’t even hear what Luke was saying. Instead, my mind was racing, trying to understand why Justice would have shared our woelfin nature with someone he was ready to punch earlier in the day.
“My mistake?” I was barely able to force the words out.
Luke shrugged. “Your cousin was vague.” Still, he glanced sideways at my pelt, spread atop Bastion. He didn’t know, but he was beginning to make guesses.
And that, from one of the skinless, was more dangerous than juggling a cocked and loaded gun.
“I think...” I started, trying to figure out how to send away someone who was helping my family entirely altruistically.
“Listen to the hottie.” Bastion’s voice was low and scratchy. “It’s time to stop beating yourself up and start living a little.”
And, just like that, running for the hills was forgotten. My favorite cousin was finally awake.
Chapter 20
“We have to head back to the Smythewhites’.” As I spoke, I was already rising, digging through the bags Luke had nabbed from our motel landing on his way back to the duplex.
Because it turned out our eviction had resulted from the most innocuous of reasons—lack of funds on my credit card. Luke had settled up with the owner, and I now had clothes to wear other than that little black dress Grace had crammed me into when we set off to invite ourselves in for a tour of the Smythewhite residence.
Bastion should have had clean clothes also, but his packing method was frustratingly random. One pocket of his bag was full of a box of bullets cushioned amid a layer of underwear, the next paired up stationary with socks.
“It’s alphabetical. Pants are with power cords.”
I blinked. “Really, Bastion?”
“Yeah. Justice packed it. But don’t bother. There’s no point in going back to that house.”
I sat back on my heels. “No point?” I waved my hand at him, trying to indicate the very obvious point. “We have to find....”
“You looked under the mattress?”
I nodded.
“Then it’s not there. I felt it. Strong, as if it had sat in Clarence’s room for days, or as if it had been used there recently. But I could tell once I was on the bed that it wasn’t there any longer.”
No wonder Bastion’s energy had so abruptly snuffed out.
I glanced at Luke, trying to decide how much to say in front of a werewolf. But before I could work my way around verbal gymnastics, he proved I’d already failed at the woelfin-secrecy test.
“You’re looking for a wolfsfell. Did I pronounce that properly?”
I hesitated. This was far too close to revealing woelfin secrets.
Bastion apparently had fewer reservations. “Wolfsfell,” he corrected.
“What would a wolfsfell”—this time Luke hit the stress point perfectly—“be used for?”
Shifting to wolf form. Sharing pleasure. Being a woelfin.
And...none of that was what Luke was asking. He wanted to know what a thief would do with our pelts. So that was the question I answered.
“I’m not really sure. Our wolfsfells weren’t the first to be stolen, but we usually don’t catch up to the culprit before....”
My voice trailed off. Bastion waved away my squeamishness. “You can say it.” He mimicked a damsel fainting back against the pillows. “Before we perish.”
My fun-loving cousin was trying to make this easy for me. But there was no easy. If we didn’t find the pelt, if Bastion didn’t rebound....
It wasn’t just the world outside the window that would turn unremittingly black.
I glanced once more at Luke, expecting him to do the easy addition. Wolfsfell plus life necessity equals woelfin.
The werewolf’s back remained to me, so it was hard to be certain. But he seemed only interested in the puzzle at hand.
So I ignored the tightrope we were walking and focused on the mystery. “As far as we know, no one died last night. Which supports the hypothesis that Mr. Smythewhite is the killer. He went after Clarence, then the police came and he couldn’t get away to try again.”
Luke hummed in such a way that it was impossible to tell whether he was agreeing or disagreeing. “How does that relate to the wolfsfell?” he asked the window, his shoulder blades cont
inuing to express nothing.
It was strange to talk to Luke’s back, but Bastion motioned me on with one hand also. So I shrugged and continued working my way through the puzzle pieces I’d started putting together in my head.
“If Mr. Smythewhite is the killer, then he might have stashed Bastion’s pelt under Clarence’s bed the day before to make the eventual killing of his son more powerful. I’ve noticed Bastion feels better every time someone dies. Presumably, the killer gets the same boost times a thousand.”
“Makes sense,” Luke murmured. He sounded like he was only half listening, but it was helping me to talk out thoughts that had been tangled inside my head for days. So I continued.
“Mr. Smythewhite couldn’t do anything to Clarence in the house, though. Not with his wife, me, and Luke all present. So he bundled up Clarence and the pelt, planning to take them far enough away so we wouldn’t hear the screams....”
“Hush.”
Luke’s interruption was soft yet demanding. I frowned. “What do you think happened?”
Luke’s head was cocked, his face so close to the glass he nearly touched it. Still, he answered as smoothly as if he’d been sitting across the table from us, sharing a coffee-shop conversation.
“No clue. Your guess sounds good to me. But there’s someone trying to break in downstairs.”
“STAY HERE,” I ORDERED Bastion.
“Hell no,” he answered.
Already, my cousin was standing and swaying. He’d get in the way if he came downstairs with us...and, more importantly, would use up energy we needed to track down his pelt
So I pulled the family card. “I need you to do this.”
And Bastion must have been tireder than I thought because he caved easily. “Okay, but you owe me.”
I shivered. Bastion was right. I did owe him, far more than I could ever repay. The agony he’d suffered over the last five days alone....
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