by Holley Trent
I guess I’ll be sleeping outside. “Great,” Eric said through clenched teeth. “When do Granola and I leave?”
“As soon as Maria is done with the investigation she’s on,” Bryan said. “Hopefully tomorrow morning. Obviously, I’m anxious to get my little cousins out of there, but all the usual rules apply.”
Tamara bumped her husband with her hip. “Shrew rules or Bear rules?”
Bryan rolled his eyes. “Both. Dana would take a chunk out of my ass if anything happens to Maria under my delegation, and I don’t know about you, but I like sitting.”
“She’s not that bad, baby.”
Bryan scoffed. “Whatever. I can’t believe I’m afraid of a bunch of paranormal midgets.”
“I’ll have you know I am average height,” Astrid said.
“Compared to most born-Bears, you’re tiny. All of you are.” Bryan pulled Tamara into his arms and kissed the top of her blond head while eying Eric. “I appreciate you doing this.”
“I’m just taking one for the team,” Eric said.
Maria was going to be a nightmare to be around. It would be easy for her to be sweet to the kids and cordial to most strangers they encountered, but when she got angry about why were there, Eric would be the one she turned to when she needed to blow off steam.
He’d taught her not to care how he felt, and that his feelings weren’t involved in the first place. He was more or less a stoic pincushion for her angry barbs and a machine that could fuck all her troubles away. But, they’d been at it for too long, and he couldn’t be her filter—her fixer—anymore. The toxicity was leaching into him and driving him crazy so he wasn’t sure what anger was hers and what was his.
Someone needed to fix her, and he was no longer convinced he was that person.
CHAPTER THREE
Maria took one look at Eric’s scowling countenance, then slammed the front passenger door of the RV. She’d gladly get knocked around the back of the metal monstrosity than to have to endure his toxic silence sitting next to him for six hours.
She hitched her bag up to her shoulder, slipped into the back, and he got the vehicle moving before she could find a place to sit.
“No reason to be unkind,” she said.
He flicked a hostile glance at her through the rearview mirror and turned his focus on steering the vehicle down the long, winding driveway that connected the Falk lodge to the mountain road. Felipe Senior had been kind enough to drive the vehicle west for them, though Maria suspected it was because Dana made it worth his while. Anyone would be incentivized with the right amount of money, and Senior would have certainly been able to use it. He’d been migrant and unemployed for nearly thirty years, and living hand-to-mouth.
Maria squeezed into one of the narrow benches built into the dining table unit and set her laptop and phone on the surface. “I’m going to call Dana and see if she found a retreat point for us and if Keely has figured out where she’ll meet up with us.”
“It really won’t matter so much if there’s a specific retreat point just yet, as long as we’re driving in the right direction.” His voice was snarly, and she couldn’t tell if it was because he was Bear and couldn’t help it, because the road was badly in need of resurfacing, or because he was annoyed. If she got closer to him, she would probably be able to psychically discern which, but she suspected getting too close to him at the moment was a bad idea for both of them.
She raked her hair over one shoulder and quickly twisted it into a braid, which she wrapped around itself several times and affixed closed to her scalp with a clip, which would likely come apart within an hour. She could blame her particular mash-up of genetics for that frustration. Her Jamaican father had coarse, cottony hair he didn’t bother combing because dreadlocks precluded the need for it, and her mother’s hair was an archetypically Jewish frizz pile that resembled an afro when it went unconditioned long enough. Ma’s hair had been how Maria’s parents had met, supposedly. They’d been at some kind of festival or other place where dyed-in-the-wool Rastafarians could mingle with white savior hippies.
From the back, her father had thought her mother was black, and apparently hadn’t minded too much when she wasn’t.
At least, for a while.
Like Maria, her parents hadn’t been the types who’d commit to anyone. They made a baby and sort of, kind of kept in touch. Maria had spent about fifty weeks out of every year with her mother, and the other two with her father’s family in Jamaica. Sometimes he showed up.
He did show up at the hospital in North Carolina after the Shrew disaster happened, so at least she could give him credit for that.
“Did you bring shoes?” Eric asked in that same snarly voice.
Maria glanced out the RV window and discerned he’d parked at the end of the driveway. Then she stared at him.
“Did you? Let me know now in case I need to drive you back up.”
She sighed and pulled her travel duffel closer. Unzipping it, she cut a look toward him.
His expression was blank, but hostility rolled off him in waves.
She straightened up and entwined her fingers atop the table. “Is there something you need to talk about? A burden you need to share?”
“Is there something you need to talk about? Some heavy thing you’d like to get off your chest? And I don’t just mean me, permanently. You don’t have to worry about me crushing you under my body anymore.”
Okay then.
She rooted through the bag, felt one sandal, then the other. “Yes, I have shoes.”
“Legitimate shoes?”
“They have soles and they fasten.”
“I’m not even going to argue with you about this.” He turned and put the RV in gear, and she closed the bag.
“I don’t see the purpose of an argument, anyway. For as long as you’ve known me, you’ve known I carry shoes more often than I wear them.”
“I hoped that at some point you’d grow out of that.”
“What is there to grow out of? It’s a personal preference.”
“You do private investigation for a living. It’s a job that requires not only a certain amount of handling of deadly weapons, but ownership of a pair of real fucking shoes.”
She shrugged and lifted her laptop lid. The topic didn’t frustrate her as much as it used to. Too many people queried her, and so her responses had become automatic.
She didn’t wear shoes very often because growing up, she’d never had to. She’d lived on a commune farm—that is, when her mother wasn’t on the activist trail and dragging Maria along behind her. Being barefooted so much, she’d grown acclimated to walking a certain way, and the soles of most shoes changed her foot strike in ways that hurt her shins and knees.
Dana kept threatening to tie her down and get her something custom-fitted. Maria didn’t mind the idea so much. It was just the matter of finding the time to have it done.
Maria set up her phone as an Internet hot spot and curled her legs up beneath her on the tiny bench. She glanced at the clock, then at the back of Eric’s head, then groaned.
She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten, and her stomach was growling itself into knots. After Eric had dropped her off following their tryst, she’d gone straight to her job for the day, and then to the inn when she’d finished earlier than expected. She’d gotten there at around ten and all the food had been put away, but the residual smells had made her mouth water. She felt guilty for that. She’d eaten meat probably two or three times in her life, but she was always so tempted to indulge when Eric cooked.
Gotta eat.
Shrews had a bad habit of ignoring their bodies’ cues and doing that would lower Maria’s effectiveness in the field. They were going to have to stop somewhere.
She took a deep breath, and braced herself for his retort. “Eric, when we get on the highway, I need you to find something that’s open so I can grab dinner…and possibly something for breakfast. I don’t know what the next twelve hours are going to look l
ike. I haven’t read Dana and Tamara’s work order yet.”
“Basically, we’re going to snatch the kids from school.”
“Eric—”
“I’m sure that’s a trigger for you, but these kids have been yanked around so much in the past five years, that they’re likely expecting it.”
“Damn it.” She opened her email program. Kid-snatching wasn’t so much a trigger, but the idea of it made her sick to her stomach. She’d encountered a lot of desperate scenarios back when she’d worked for Child Protective Services, and she’d had too many kids in her caseload abducted by their non-custodial parents while they were at school. It wasn’t always the schools’ faults—they went by the information on record. If the custodial parents couldn’t get the non-custodial parents expunged from the list of people the children were allowed to be signed out by, the schools had no rights to withhold the children.
More often than not, the non-custodial parents would grab the kids and use them as pawns against their exes. They wouldn’t bring them back until their exes complied in some way, and it was just an awful situation all around.
“We’re on the pickup list?” Maria asked.
“You are. You’re the only Shrew left that Gene’s Bears haven’t seen. It’ll take their stepfather a little while to figure out who Maria Weisz is and how she got onto the list.”
“And by then, we’ll be far, far away.”
“Far enough, I hope.”
Maria skimmed the job order, and it was basically everything Tamara had said verbally about the little mission. There was the address for the school the kids were enrolled in and confirmation that Maria and Eric should deliver the children to Keely at a location to be determined.
“It makes sense that after we take them, we head in any direction except south,” Maria said. “They’re going to expect south since that’s where the kids’ mother’s last known location was.”
“Yep.”
“Any ideas?”
“I’m thinking we should probably head west and then arc down through West Virginia and Kentucky, depending on where Keely goes.”
“Let’s see if she decided.” Maria sent a query to Tamara to forward to Bryan, then scrolled through the rest of her messages. She usually only got around to checking her email once every three or four days, and sometimes not even that often. If anyone had anything pressing to say, they’d call or text, and Dana always gave her a heads-up about any work-related stuff she was going to send, knowing that Maria wasn’t reliable for checking her inbox.
At the sight of her mother’s name, Maria furrowed her brow and clicked the message with the subject line marked, “FOUND THIS FOR YOU!”
“What now, Ma?” Maria whispered.
With the slow connection, the message loaded line by line, and three sentences in, she was already sighing.
“I can’t help the condition of the roads,” Eric said with a growl. “I pay my taxes like everyone else and hope that they’ll use some of that money to improve the highways.”
“The sigh wasn’t meant for you. It was for my mother.”
“Ah, the mystical Anastasia Weisz.”
“She’s not mystical.”
“Oh. Right. She just wishes she were, huh?”
Maria couldn’t debate it because he was right. Her mother had been trying to connect with the vibrations of the universe for as much of Maria’s twenty-seven years as she could remember, and she thought Maria was some kind of avatar of spiritualism. The truth was she’d simply been with the wrong man at the right time. Her ex had referred her to the Shrew study—and that had been the case with the other Shrews, too. They’d all been referred by loved ones who thought they could use a little sweetening up. Of course, none of the women knew what the study actually aimed to do. They were told it was about stress management and they’d believed it. They’d all come out of stressful situations.
Dana had been a promising young detective for the Durham police department. Sarah had been fresh out of the military and still trying to heal from her battle scars. Tamara was the daughter of a diplomat and had a life that was pretty plush in comparison to her sister-Shrews, but because she was a Bear, she was naturally programmed to be surlier than the average woman. In other words—she was a woman that only a particular kind of man would want. Astrid had just finished law school and had been studying for the Bar exam when her ex referred her. And Maria…
Well.
Her ex had suggested she look into the study after the second time she’d been attacked on the job. She’d left the emergency room with dozens of stitches from a knife wound. An angry parent who didn’t want CPS in his business had lashed out.
Maria had thought her ex was a safe person to vent to—to unload her frustrations on—because he was a civil servant, too.
But, it turned out, he was just there for the paycheck and the future pension plan. He wasn’t passionate like she was.
He’d just pretended.
Knowing she had misjudged him had obliterated her mind nearly as much as the Shrew study had done to her body. Up until that point, she’d thought she was a good judge of character, and that if she were kind to people, they’d return the favor. That was one of her mother’s big laws of the universe, that do-unto-others thing.
Apparently, some people thought the rules didn’t apply to them.
And that was okay. She’d never make that mistake again. That would be easy to accomplish if she followed her parents’ leads and avoided committing in the first place.
“There’s not gonna be a whole lot open this time of night,” he said, “save for the usual fast food joints and highway rest stops. I know how picky you are.”
She held her tongue on a retort and quickly triaged the remainder of her emails. She wasn’t picky. She simply didn’t eat meat. Justifying that choice got wearying, and she suspected Eric was trying to incite her.
“Might be better if we wait until we’re in a more metro area, anyway,” he said. “We can make pretty good time in the dark.”
“Is the plan to take them tomorrow or the next day?”
“If we miss our window, it’s gonna be the next day.”
She closed her eyes and put her head back. The Shrews were used to making plans on the fly and enacting them quickly so no one caught wind of what they were doing. Their adaptability was one of the things that made them so good as investigators and problem-solvers. Lately, they’d been doing a lot more problem-solving than investigation, though—using more muscle than brainpower. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, Maria wanted to work those jobs where being a little angry was a requisite, but she did miss doing pure investigation.
Maybe by the time this Bear drama dies down I’ll have myself under control and will want the quiet jobs.
She straightened up and let out a breath. “I that imagine our goal is to get to the kids’ school shortly after drop-off time?”
“Yeah. Bryan’s spy up there said the stepfather sits outside for about an hour making sure the kids don’t come back out, but he leaves by ten, and sometimes goes back when the kids are outside for recess.”
“And, he what, just sits in his car like a weirdo staring at the school? Most school officials would find that concerning.”
“That’s what he does, and I don’t know how the school officials feel about it. If they recognized him as a parent, they’d probably think he was weird, but unless there were community covenants that say he can’t be parked on the street around the school during the day, they can’t really do anything about it.”
“I hate these jobs that have kids caught up in them. I really do, Eric.”
“This might not be the last one. Bryan’s trying to convince the Bears still allied with Gene to, at the very least, send him the kids even if they’re too afraid to defect with them. It would take longer for Gene to figure out the young ones were missing than if the adults just stopped showing up for those mandatory Bear gatherings.”
“He’s head-c
ounting?”
“Yeah. Numbers are important to him.”
“Why do you think that is?” She rubbed her eyes. So much about shifter politics was foreign to her. The usual rules didn’t seem to apply.
“I think it’s an image thing. There aren’t that many Bear groups in the country, but Bears are known to be the most powerful. He wants to be respected as the leader even if he isn’t the rightful one. He’s more like a mobster CEO than a community leader. His acolytes benefit from kissing his ass and being complicit in all that illegal activity, and the people who aren’t okay with it do what he says anyway because they’re afraid of retribution.”
“Is it true that he asked to be turned?”
“Yeah. Bryan was able to confirm that when he was snooping around a couple of weeks ago. From what he was able to piece together, Bryan’s group at the time he was a teenager had a very quiet alpha, which suited them fine because the Bears in the Appalachians were supposed to be peacekeepers. Most of the Bears in the area were at least loosely related or were born-Bears adopted from other groups in the country.”
Eric merged onto the highway, quiet as he brought the RV up to the speed limit. After the transmission had settled into gear and some of the engine noise died down, he said, “The group got bigger under Gene’s watch. He’d challenged the alpha and won. He turned his friends into Bears and brought them all in, and the made-Bear population has been a bleeding artery since then. There aren’t supposed to be as many as there are.”
“Well, that much I know. The groups are supposed to be hidden—discreet. You can’t do that if your numbers are growing out of control, and your bread and butter comes from running scams and selling people and drugs.”
She shut the laptop lid and peered out the window into the darkness. Nothing but mountain walls and the occasional car zipping past.
The drive reminded her of the night she and her mother had entered North Carolina during their move. They’d driven from Illinois and had crossed the state line from Tennessee at around midnight, but Maria had stayed awake because she didn’t want to miss that Welcome to North Carolina sign.
