And I have got to stop thinking about her panties.
“It’s very nice to meet you. I appreciate you coming here,” Stef said to her.
“Sure, sure. What’s a little blackmail between friends?” Krista returned Stef’s sunny smile with a sour look.
“No pretenses. I like her,” Stef said to Blake, flashing a big, white-toothed smile.
“Damn, she’s good,” Krista observed grudgingly to Blake. “You know, you were right. I’d find her very likeable if I didn’t know she was an underhanded sneak who had you threaten my livelihood and my family.”
“You could just speak to each other directly, you know,” Blake said to her.
“Nah, I plan to make this as awkward as possible.” Krista marched into the cabin, head held high.
Mal and Dexter were already there, rumbling around in the dining room, setting up a bulletin board. The cabin had high ceilings, framed paintings of wildlife, and deer-antler chandeliers. The furniture was polished hewn wood, decorated with red plaid cushions.
Unlike most of the cabins in the area, it had small windows rather than picture windows, which was probably why it had been useful to whichever clan had been using it for illegal activities—they’d want privacy.
Krista and Blake grabbed roast beef sandwiches from a cooler that Dexter had brought with him. They sat in the living room and scarfed them down while debriefing the team with what little information they’d managed to dig up.
“All we’re getting is vague threats, and it’s impossible to tell if it has anything to do with Ethan,” Krista said wearily. “It might… well, there are a number of reasons why they might not want outsiders poking around here.”
“You mean the Reeds’ moonshine business?” Stef asked. They knew it was big business. The moonshine was rumored to be more addictive than cigarettes, and it sold all over the region known as the Zoo, not just in the little holler known as Flowering Dogwood.
Krista hesitated just long enough to make Blake’s wolf twitch. “Yeah, that, and whatever else people are up to around here.” Then she cleared her throat and straightened up.
“I don’t think that Dawnie had anything to do with it, even though her daughter was acting weird. Actually, not that weird, for Eva-Jo. She’s always defensive and on edge.” She said that to Stef, looking her straight in the eye. Blake felt like Krista was trying to steer the conversation away from… something.
“We don’t think so either, because Michael is working with Dawnie on a plan to re-open the mines,” Stef said. “He’s already paid her some money, and there will be a lot more where that came from if she gives her blessing to the mines opening again.” Krista’s eyes widened in surprise.
Before he could question her further, the sound of an approaching vehicle perked their ears up. Blake hurried to the window to look out, then relaxed a little. “It’s Mr. Coffman,” he called out to them.
His gaze flicked up at the wall clock. Michael Coffman and his men were ten minutes early to the meeting. That told Blake a lot. Men like Coffman, the richer-than-God CEO of a multinational corporation, usually made a point of rolling up ostentatiously late, as a message that their time was so much more important than anyone’s else’s. It was a measure of how worried he was about his boy that wasn’t posturing or blustering.
Most of his pride members were apparently out searching for Ethan, roaming through the woods, trying to pick up his scent, knocking on doors. From what Krista had said, that would get them exactly nowhere, and might even get them killed, but Blake understood that Michael was a desperate father who would do anything to find his cub.
Ethan’s mother had died giving birth to him, and Michael had never chosen another mate. Ethan was an only cub. This had to be absolute torture for him.
Blake glanced at Krista and the look on her face made his heart hurt. Guilt, sympathy, pain. Her shoulders slumped. She wanted to help, she was born to help, and she believed that she might actually cause harm instead by her mere presence in the holler.
And she could be right. But the mere chance that somebody might be brave enough to at least whisper a hint about Ethan was worth the risk.
Coffman and half a dozen men bustled into the cabin with an air of urgency. Coffman was a handsome man with a square face and a tawny mane of hair. Blake suspected he deliberately cultivated a leonine look even in human form, and he had to admit it was impressive. His pinstriped suit was pressed knife-edge sharp, and Blake would probably have to sell his liver to be able to afford even the vest.
Coffman barely bothered greeting them before settling into a chair in the living room. His bodyguards remained standing. They were massive and expressionless, wearing stark black suits. Four of them stood to the right of the chair, and the other two stood about six feet away. The two who were standing further from the chair wore big mirrored shades and tension radiated from their bodies, no matter how hard they tried to hide it.
Richard and Alfonse. Their faces bore fading bruises. Shifters healed fast, which meant that they’d gotten the bruises within the day.
It was clear that those were the two who had screwed up. He could smell their fear, bitter and tangy, and see the strain in the taut muscles of their jaws.
“We need a debriefing on what exactly happened when Ethan went missing,” Stef said, getting right down to business. She inclined her head at the two tense body-guards. “Names? And I assume these are the men who were assigned to watch Ethan?”
“Alfonse,” one of them muttered. “And yes.”
“I’m Richard,” the taller one said. “Mr. Coffman was on his computer after breakfast. Ethan got bored and wanted to go for a walk. And we’d had no threats, no indication of any danger…” he trailed off, withering under Michael’s glare.
“For a man in my position, there’s always the threat of kidnapping.”
“Nobody took him,” Alphonse said, looking at Stef with desperate appeal. “Ethan, he’s a joker, he likes to play games. And he was mad at his father,” he added defensively. “He didn’t want to come out here in the first place, he wanted to go to his friend’s birthday party, and he was sulking the whole way up here.”
Michael let out a snarl of rage and slammed his fist down so hard that his chair arm broke. Alphonse seemed to shrink in on himself, going very still as Michael’s jaw lengthened and his enormous fangs shot out.
“Is that true?” Stef demanded.
“Yeshhh,” Michael said, the words coming out slurred. He shook himself and his jaw went back to normal.
“Yes,” he repeated. “Ethan was annoyed. But I know my boy, and Ethan would never, ever do anything like this to me. And his scent trail vanishing? How would he have pulled that off?”
Blake’s gaze drifted over to the two guards.
“Why did you run?” he asked.
“Because we knew that Mr. Coffman would blame us for what happened.” Alphonse’s voice was whiny and defensive.
And they were hiding something.
"Take off your shades,” Blake snapped.
When they just set their jaws mutinously, Coffman gave a low growl. It was quiet and subtle, but it sent a ripple of power through the room. The two guards obeyed, folding up the sunglasses and tucking them into their breast pockets.
Alphonse had a nasty gash on his cheekbone. Richard had a massive purple-and-yellow shiner that made him look like a lopsided, technicolor panda.
“Did you do that to them?” he asked Michael, who shook his head.
“When I deal with them, it’s not going to be with some sissy bitch-slap.” His voice rumbled up from his chest, and his eyes glowed like liquid gold.
Both men swallowed hard.
“We were injured when we went looking for Ethan,” Alphonse one muttered. “Running through the woods.”
“Horseshit. You would have shifted to search for him, so you wouldn’t have injured yourself like that. That’s from a fist-fight. Tell me what happened,” Blake commanded, and the Tweedle-dumber must
have been ex-services because Blake’s tone of voice reached straight down his spine and pulled the lever marked “superior officer”. He rattled into a shame-faced report.
Michael Coffman’s face flushed with fury as they spoke, and his cruel cat’s claws curved out of his fingertips.
Seemed they’d left out a few details when they talked to Michael after his son first went missing. It turned out that the two guards had gotten bored enough with their babysitting gig to accept a flask offered by some lady who’d come strolling up to them. Out there in the middle of nowhere.
Defensively, Roger muttered that they didn’t want to insult a local by rejecting her hospitality. He was fooling nobody. It was clear that the “lady” in question had been a hot ticket, probably flashing her cleavage and fluttering her lashes, and the big dumb bozos hadn’t stopped to ask themselves why she was fawning all over them.
But after finishing the contents of the flask, they’d found themselves feeling… off. Snappish and ill-tempered. For some reason, they started arguing, but they couldn’t remember what the argument was about. A spat had turned into pushing and shoving, then punches, and then fur flying. And when they came to their senses, Ethan and the woman were gone.
“And my head still hurts,” Roger complained.
“Not as much as you’re going to hurt when I’ve finished with you,” Coffman promised in a low, deadly voice, and Blake saw Krista suppress a little shiver as the power in his voice washed through the room. He didn’t envy the bodyguards, either.
“Describe her,” Krista said to them. “The woman with the flask.”
They glanced at each other nervously. “Umm… straight blonde hair,” Roger said, and Alfonse nodded. “But it kind of looked like a wig. Caucasian. Maybe in her twenties.” He glanced at Michael, sweat beading on his forehead. “Wearing jeans. I don’t remember much else.”
“Skinny, fat? Tall, short? Eye color? Human, shifter?”
They both just stared at him.
Dexter spoke up. “She had a hot body and a pretty face. Right?”
The bodyguard nodded miserably. “I think so.” Michael turned his attention to Krista.
“They said you were an insider. Does that sound like anyone you know?”
Krista winced, and she hugged herself. “Unfortunately, that’s pretty vague. I mean, I can tell you it obviously wasn’t Dawnie and it doesn’t sound like her daughter Eva-Jo. Eva-Jo’s the opposite of seductive. Other than that, there are plenty of pretty young girls in Flowering Dogwood, and if she was wearing a wig, that makes it even harder.” Her voice softened. “I’m sorry, Mr. Coffman. I’ll do everything I can to help.” She slumped back in her chair, looking glum.
Michael wanted to stay for the rest of the debriefing, which was natural enough. He was frantic about his kid and desperate for any scrap of information, but Stef was firm—Shifters, Inc. would do everything in their power to return Ethan to his father alive and unharmed, but they had to be allowed to operate independently. A father’s love for his son could only lead to clouded judgement and hasty decisions that could put the whole operation at risk.
Eventually, he relented and left, along with his security team. The two morons who’d lost track of Ethan were as pale as death as they slouched out the front door like condemned men marching to their execution.
Chapter Nine
Krista
Mal, Dexter, and Stef sat on one side of the table in the cabin’s living room. Blake sat next to Krista on the other side, his chair scooched up close as if they were together for real. Part of Krista wanted to rip into him, tell him that he didn’t have to pretend, but she didn’t say it because she could feel her fox’s restlessness, and her fox craved Blake’s warmth and his calming presence.
“Krista!” Stef’s voice cracked like a whip, making Krista start. Blake reached out reassuringly and put his hand on her knee, and her anxiety started to fade just a little. “I saw your hesitation earlier. We need to know what you’re not telling us. What is Dawnie up to that she doesn’t want people to know about?”
All eyes turned to Krista, and she sucked in a breath, steeling herself. She’d been raised to believe that family business was sacred. Sure, gossip was currency in the holler, but scuttlebutt about who was diddling who and was so-and-so knocked up or just getting fat was one thing—this rumor was something much darker. If it wasn’t true—and it couldn’t be—she’d be doing something really wicked by sharing it with outsiders.
And worse, she might be steering them in the wrong direction.
“As you know, my mother kicked me out when I was fourteen.” She couldn’t keep a hint of bitterness out of her voice as she thought about how Blake and his friends had prowled around her life, sniffing and snooping. “I was taken in by Dawnie Reed and her clan. They’re the local ‘Powers That Be’, and they run a lot of the extracurricular activities in this holler. Or Dawnie and her daughter Eva-Jo do. Her boys are loyal, but they aren’t very bright. Let’s just say that somewhere back in their family tree, there are a few branches missing. But what you need to know is that nothing much happens in the holler without Dawnie knowing about it. And Dawnie’s a mama bear—she takes in waifs and strays, gives them a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, and all she asks for in return is their loyalty.”
“And her main business is running moonshine,” Stef put in.
“Right,” Krista agreed, “but if normal moonshine is regular gas, this stuff is rocket fuel. Over the years, the Reeds have developed half a dozen different herbal and mineral additives and refined their still processes to produce shifter drugs that make your run-of-the-mill meth lab look like a lollipop factory.”
That had Stef’s full attention. “What do you mean? None of this came up in my intel.”
“And it wouldn’t have,” Krista said. “Country shifters are very different from city shifters. We stay offline. We keep everything tight within our community. I mean, they do,” she corrected herself hastily. She wasn’t one of “them” anymore.
“That’s why we’ve got you here. You’re our offline expert. So, are you saying one of these drugs could have been what set the Brothers Dim off fighting instead of watching Ethan?” Stef said.
The old mistrust of outsiders reared up, but Krista nodded resignedly. “That’s what it sounds like to me.”
She trailed off and looked down at her hands where they rested on the tabletop. Had she started biting her nails again? Damn it, she had without even noticing it.
“But anyone could have been behind this,” she added. “Not necessarily Dawnie. And I’m not saying that to stick up for her, I’m saying it because I don’t want us to focus just on her when it really could be anyone. Rich kid? Opportunity for ransom? I know that nobody’s sent a ransom demand yet, but they could be just letting the dad sweat for a few days. Dawnie sometimes gets orders for specific recipes that have a particular effect on people—like, say, turning them into rage-monsters. So someone could have purchased the bad moonshine from her at any time.”
“We could get a list of those people…” Dexter suggested, but Krista cut him off with a quick shake of her head.
“She’d die before she gave up her customers. And she might not even know. That moonshine passes through a lot of hands.” She hugged herself, frustration welling in her throat. “Damn it. I feel totally useless here.”
She could feel Blake’s eyes on her, and she didn’t dare look up to meet them. What would she see there if she did? Judgment? Contempt? But when he spoke, his voice was soft and understanding.
“That’s not the big secret you’re keeping, Krista. Okay, Dawnie makes some kind of super moonshine and Dawnie knows everything that goes on in the holler. But there’s something else. You need to tell us… please.”
It was the “please” that did it. Even though she knew she had no choice, even though he’d blackmailed her into coming back here, the fact that he was asking her to tell them what she knew made all the difference.
&n
bsp; She straightened up and looked at them. She hated giving up holler secrets, especially the kind that would make outsiders look down on the residents even more, but it had to be done. “I don’t necessarily think that this is relevant, but you want my insider knowledge, so here it is. The roots of the Reed family go back a long, long way in these parts. And they’ve always been outlaws. There are all sorts of strange fruit back on their family tree, and legend has it that they used to bring strangers into the valley so they could train their bears to hunt humans. And it was kind of whispered that if anyone who made an enemy of the Reeds—shifter or human—they’d set you running as prey for the Hunt.”
The looks of disgust and anger that flashed across the faces of the shifters looking at her were brief but impossible to miss. The only person who didn’t look at her that way was Blake. He looked at her with pity, which was almost worse.
She knew what people thought about deep-woods shifters like her and the folk she’d grown up with. Country shifters, one step up from animals…
But they were all staring at her expectantly. Waiting for answers—answers she didn’t have. “The hunt, if it had ever happened, was supposed to have ended with Dawnie’s grandparents. But I’ve been hearing… well… It’s hard to get a clear picture of what’s actually going on these days because Aunt Hattie sugar-coats things—to hear her talk, you’d think Flowering Dogwood was all Sadie Hawkins dances, home-made potato salad and neighborhood welcome wagons—but sometimes she lets things slip. There have been more disappearances over the last couple of years. A lot more. At least seven that I know of. One of them was a DEA agent, so maybe he just got too close for comfort to Dawnie’s business, but… that’s not what the grapevine says.”
She looked around the table, at the circle of blank faces, and a surge of defensiveness swept over her. “I know that’s going to make you think that Dawnie took Ethan. There have been some whisperings around Flowering Dogwood that the Reed Hunt has started up again, and that’s the reason for the recent disappearances.” She winced as their eyes widened. They glanced at each other with looks of dismay. “Listen. You guys dragged me out here because I know these people and their ways. I haven’t lived here in a long time, but some things don’t change. Dawnie would never hurt a cub, you guys. I would stake my life on that.”
Blackmailed By The Wolf (Shifters, Inc. Book 6) Page 7
