by Holley Trent
As the dog blinked at him through his one visible eye, quiet with apparent surprise, Blue pushed his alpha will through him—a magical reminder of who was in charge. A reteaching of pack order, and that Lamarrs were followers, not leaders.
Get in line, dog. Don’t fight it. Get in line.
Ralph’s eyelid drifted downward and his panting tongue retreated into his mouth.
Get back into your skin. Now.
Blue didn’t wait to see if Ralph would follow the order because Billy had turned his attention down to the ground and was watching Blue with intensity, suggesting that the Coyote was about to bolt.
“Not today, pup,” Blue said, wagging a finger at him. “Not chasing your pale ass through the desert tonight. Shift back and climb down here. Disobey, and I swear I’m gonna put a hell of a hurting on you when I catch up to you.”
Billy backed away from the roof’s edge so that only the tip of his snout was visible, and barked. Whether it was a “Screw you” bark or an “Understood” bark, Blue couldn’t tell. Billy was rarely coherent in either of his forms.
“I’m giving you to the count of three,” Blue said, folding his arms over his chest. “One.”
He observed a ladder propped against the side of the garage. That was likely how Billy had gotten up on the roof. Blue didn’t particularly want to test the steadiness of the rickety-looking thing given that he outweighed Billy by at least forty pounds. He’d do what he had to do, though, to make the exploits of the Coyote population fade into the memories of the locals. In his father’s pack in Sparks, nobody—save for the few witches in town—knew the shifters were there. They were a long-established pack that Shapelys had been competently shepherding for a hundred years. No one could dispute that his father kept his pack in order. Blue hadn’t wanted to be like him—hadn’t wanted to resort to the old man’s strong-arm tactics—but he was starting to see the appeal of them.
“Two,” Blue said, impatiently clearing his throat.
Ralph’s body gave a final twitch into its human form and the lush expelled a wet-sounding, twenty-five-proof belch.
Gravel crunched beneath tires rolling into the lot, and Blue caught the familiar ticking of the engine just before the driver killed it.
“Stay out of my way,” he shouted without turning to look at Willa. To Billy, he said, “And three.”
Billy emitted another of those impertinent barks, and his nose disappeared from the ledge.
His canine feet padded across the roof to the backside.
The dunce was going to jump and try to escape into the desert.
Growling, Blue took off for the backside of the property and was about to scale the chain-link fence between front and back when approximately 120 pounds of reckless demigoddess slammed into his back.
He stumbled, but quickly righted himself. Spinning around on his heel, he spat, “What the hell are you doing?”
Billy was getting away.
The dumbass had hit the ground with a plop, let out a little howl of the whoopsie sort, and started running with a shuffle. Blue could track him, no problem, but he didn’t see why he should have to.
Grimacing, Willa fidgeted with the bottom of her pajama top. “Have some mercy,” she whispered.
“Mercy? Are you kidding me? You must be kidding me. This is all an elaborate joke, and any moment now, the folks with cameras are going to leap out and say, ‘Surprise! It’s all a prank for YouTube views, man!’ So, where they at?” He spun around, scanning the area for the interlopers he knew weren’t there. He would have smelled them if anyone else was there.
He gave her shoulder a poke because she wouldn’t look at him, and she owed him at least that much. “What exactly do you think I was going to do to him?”
She shrugged. “You were mad.”
“And?”
“And anger usually comes with a certain amount of violence, so . . . ”
“You’ve got to be fu—” At her preemptive grimace, Blue shut his mouth, pinched the bridge of his nose, and closed his eyes.
She hated him. She hated him so much that she wanted to kill him in increments—to draw out his suffering by punishing him for daring to step foot into her town. He was starting to wonder if he’d made a grave miscalculation in going there.
Nah.
He could have been married to a too-damn-young stranger and miserable for six months. Maria was still the better option, even if he was just buying himself time. He’d have to go back to Sparks eventually. His would-be father-in-law would demand it. After all, Blue was the payment due for his father’s old debt to another alpha.
When he could stop grinding his teeth, he risked opening his eyes.
Willa had backed away from him and was peering in Ralph’s direction with the sort of pity that unhardened mothers of preschoolers had for their children when they fell and scraped their knees.
Ralph was twenty-seven years old and had a preschooler of his own whom he should have been at home setting a good example for. He didn’t need her to baby him. He needed a swift kick to the ass.
Yelling at Willa was pointless when he could put it off until the next day. Getting the lush home was the issue of more critical importance.
“Grab the bottles and cans and toss them into the recycling bin,” he said to her. “Then get their clothes off the ground.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to put him into the back of your Jeep, and we’re going to take him home to his wife.”
“If we take him home like this, she’s probably going to divorce him. I think she’s about at wit’s end.”
“Oh well. Not my problem.” Blue hauled Ralph up and onto his shoulder, going rigid when the limp man convulsed and expelled another belch. Blue didn’t have sentimental attachment to the shirt he was wearing, but he didn’t particularly want to be riding around Maria with some other jackass’s vomit on his clothes.
When it didn’t seem that Ralph was going to let off anything other than flammable air, Blue carried him to the Jeep.
“Do you have any mercy at all?” she asked.
The glass wine bottles shattered against the bottom of the empty recycling bin.
Blue tugged the Jeep’s back door open and plopped Ralph onto the seat. “This is what mercy looks like. Sometimes, mercy is about not letting people destroy themselves, even though they’re trying so hard to.” He closed the door and turned to her. She was actually looking at him, eyes like flickering torches in the dark.
“Can’t mercy be kind?” she asked.
“Kindness would have been not allowing them to get like this in the first place.”
“This is my fault, then?”
He didn’t answer. There was no good answer.
Chapter Four
“See. I can be kind,” Blue muttered into his coffee the following Monday morning.
He was starting to get used to the pitiful scratching sounds coming from the basement of the Coyote headquarters. The sixty-year-old bungalow had been the previous alpha’s home, but Willa had converted it into the pack’s gathering space after the head dog had vanished. Blue preferred to handle business out of his rental house near the airport, but Coyote HQ had something Blue’s house didn’t—a windowless cellar.
And in that cellar was a certain alcoholic Coyote whom Blue had dragged—naked and dehydrated—out of the desert early on Sunday morning. Billy had never made it home, so Blue did the alpha thing and went to find his dumb ass.
Kenny straightened his glasses, then twined his fingers atop the tabletop. “How long are you going to keep him down there?”
Blue shrugged and took a big gulp of black java. Nasty shit. The local grocery store only carried two brands, and one of those was private label. “Dunno. My father would keep him down there until he dried out, but who the hell knows how long that’ll take?”
“If you keep him down there,” Lance said from the bureau where he was cleaning his gun, “you may as well toss half the pack down th
ere with him.”
“Then maybe that’s what we should do,” Blue murmured.
They could keep the dogs locked up until pack order was asserted, and if they weren’t out running and ripping, the tenderhearted demigoddess wouldn’t keep getting in his way.
He’d given her the gift of a Blue-free weekend, not because he was backing down from what needed to be done, but because he had a new distraction. A certain groan-inducing female emissary had arrived from Sparks, and at that very moment, she was probably in his closet stealing his shirts. His father had sent Blue’s sister down to spy on him, and she hadn’t even bothered lying about it. To be so smart, the old man really was stupid. Diana’s loyalty to Blue was stronger than her fear of their father, but Randall Shapely didn’t really understand loyalty. Not the purest form of it, anyway.
“Supposed to be a pack meeting on Wednesday night,” Kenny said. “Or rather, Wednesday was the scheduled meeting day for the pack before we got here, but those events have mysteriously fallen off the group calendar.”
Blue snorted. “Yeah, because they mysteriously have them at the Watering Hole now. By the way, does the origin of that mystery wear a Maria Middle School polo shirt five out of seven days of the week?”
“It’s a trap, Kenny,” Lance said, cutting his cousin a scolding gaze. “I wouldn’t answer.”
Blue swung his head toward his lieutenant and gave him a reprimanding glare.
Lance shrugged, found a chair to slink into, and put his feet up on the table corner. “Anyhoo. Did you—”
“Okay, well this is cute, I guess.” The screen door slammed closed, and the trio at the table let out a collective groan.
“Of course she’s here,” Blue muttered to the ceiling before straightening up. How Diana always managed to track him so fast, he’d never guess.
Diana sauntered into the room with her hands shoved into the pockets of her leather pants—which in Blue’s opinion was an act that defied the physics of the skintight garment—and wearing one of his ninety-dollar white button-downs. He was going through them at a hellacious clip in Maria. They were like disaster magnets. Too often when he put one on, there was Coyote nonsense that threatened him with splatter of some sort.
“Dammit,” he said. “You’re gonna get lipstick on my shirt and leave me with all the laundry.”
She peeled her gray-slicked lips back from her teeth and dragged her tongue across her pearly whites. “Color-stay formula, Alpha. Your clothing is safe from me.”
“Until you steal it. Buy your own.”
“Why? You’ve got money to burn.”
“And you don’t?”
“Not nearly as much.” Diana plopped into the empty seat at the opposite end of the table and studied her nails. “Not anymore.”
“Oh, hell.” Lance dropped his booted feet from the table and leaned in with keen interest. “What happened?”
“Got cut off.”
“Ah.” Blue tipped his chair back on its rear legs. “So, that’s why he sent you here. Did Old and Grizzled tell you he’d reestablish your line of credit if you came down here to make sure I’m actually doing what I claimed to be?”
Coyote children rarely—if ever—defected from their parents’ packs, but Blue moving around had been something of a necessary evil. He couldn’t make money in Sparks, and making the place his base of business had been inefficient, to say the least. He’d moved out to Vegas part time, and that’d been a better situation for him. Hadn’t hurt, either, that he’d taken a couple of the spare dominants with him. With them gone, there was less fear of a coup on his father’s part, but they’d all still technically been part of OG’s pack. OG likely—and wisely—feared that Blue would get too comfortable in Maria, and if he did, he’d defect in truth. If Blue did that, Bruno Esposito in the territory neighboring Sparks’s domain wasn’t going to be too happy. He wanted a groom for his daughter, or there was going to be some trickle-down hell to pay for OG and the Sparks pack. There was rarely a moment when he didn’t worry about the consequences of his avoidance. Of course he didn’t want the innocents in Sparks to get tangled up in a pack war, but in a way, he was an innocent, too. Neither he nor the animal inside him wanted to marry that stranger.
“Bribery.” Diana curled back her lip again in apparent disgust. “Yes.”
“I didn’t think you were that kind of sellout,” Lance quipped.
“Money talks, and I’ve got a standard of living to maintain.” She slid a hand through her glossy hair and sighed. Apparently, highlights didn’t come cheap.
Blue clucked his tongue, set his chair down flat, and pushed back from the table. If he was going to get any work done at all, he was going to need another cup of coffee. He wished there was some way for him to concentrate the caffeine into an easy-to-swallow pellet.
Diana followed him into the kitchen. “I’ll try to stay out of your fur,” Diana said, twirling the end of her long ponytail as she leaned against the counter.
“What does that mean?” Blue topped off his coffee and squinted through the window over the sink. The house was situated near the closest thing Maria had to a deli, so there was a good amount of foot traffic in the alley between the house and the town square. He was pretty sure he’d just seen the Cougar alpha, Mason Foye, walk past. Blue needed to have a little chat with that sabotaging asshole, tout suite. “Welcome to Maria, my ass,” Blue muttered against the rim of his coffee mug.
“Huh?” Diana asked.
He grimaced. Diana had six months of backstory to catch up on. “There’s a Cougar group in Maria—a glaring. I guess they’ve got some old beef with the Coyotes.”
She arched a brow. “More likely, the other way around, Blue Boy.”
Coyotes often scavenged territories other groups had staked out, and they caused generational rifts from doing so, so she was probably right. He hated to admit it, so he didn’t.
He pushed away from the sink and made a mental note to call on Foye later. That beef wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“Old and Grizzled didn’t get into specifics about his arrangement with you and why he let you come down here.” Diana snatched a dish sponge from the counter and dribbled detergent into the army of dirty mugs lined up in the sink. “I may not have your education, but I’m pretty good at putting two and two together.”
Curious, Blue waved her on. Diana didn’t need a fancy degree. She had more common sense than was fair, and that made her terrifying.
“I was only around twelve, but I remember it like it was yesterday. OG had that hasty meeting with the alpha from NorCal, and when he came back, he and Mom had that screaming match.”
“You know why, then.”
“Yeah. I do now. OG promised you to his daughter because he owed him scads of money and wasn’t going to make good on it.”
Blue sucked in some air. Sounded even crasser when she said it than when he thought it. As a younger man, Blue hadn’t thought the deal would ever come to fruition. He’d thought that by the time Sheena was of marrying age, her father would have let her off the hook.
No.
Bruno wanted a wedding. He wanted a merging of territories and to receive his overdue payment for a long-ago insult.
Blue tented his fingers and leaned back. “I told him that dealing with this pack in Maria could be beneficial and that we could probably annex it if we played our cards right. I said I needed time. I guess that’s what he told Bruno.”
“So, you have a long-term plan, then?”
He scoffed. “No. All I know is I don’t want his pack or Bruno’s. I didn’t want to be associated with either of them at all. OG knows nothing about what I’m doing here, and I plan to keep it that way for as long as I can. I could actually have a personal life if I wanted one.”
A personal life that didn’t involve dating or romance. He was trying to be decent, and it seemed unfair that he had to be, but Sheena hadn’t asked for the mess any more than he had. The least he could do was not humiliate her by bei
ng seen with other women.
She shrugged and scrubbed at a particularly stubborn spot of coffee on the side of a mug. “I can understand you not wanting him to have a say in your personal life, but at least you’re allowed to have one.”
Grimacing, Blue rubbed a hand over his beard. He didn’t envy his sister. He’d always thought he had things tough, but things were arguably worse for a pack princess who had very little agency in her home territory.
Somewhere in the dining room, Blue’s phone chirped a calendar alert. The coffee hadn’t completely surged through his system yet, so he needed a few beats to recall what the reminder was.
Ah. He snapped his fingers. Planning period.
The demigoddess had a break between second and third period, and Blue intended to exploit that. It wasn’t like she could run far, given that she was on the clock. Shitty of him, probably, but he didn’t get paid big bucks in his professional life for being timid.
“What I think,” Diana said, “is that OG is actually in no huge hurry to merge the territories yet. He doesn’t want Bruno to find out about all the assets he hasn’t disclosed. As long as you’re here and in charge, he won’t recall you or push the marriage issue. He’s going to tell Bruno it’s charity and say it’s a good thing for the packs. Then in a year or two, because he has nothing to lose, he’s going to try to groom me to marry some dipshit alpha wannabe who’ll let OG pull the strings behind the scenes after he has to step down. We already know how badly that’ll go.”
Blue grimaced again. “Yeah. I know.”
It wasn’t that his little sister wasn’t the marrying type. It was that no person truly suitable for her could have alpha potential. As far as Blue knew, there’d never been a female Coyote alpha in the United States.
“But if there’s even a whisper that things down here aren’t going as they should be . . . ”
Diana didn’t need to finish the sentence. He knew what would happen. There’d be an embarrassing tussle between him and his father, and Blue would probably get dragged back kicking and screaming to Sparks and down the altar toward his perfect Coyote bride. OG had way more lieutenants than Blue, and they weren’t nearly as concerned with morals as Kenny and Lance.
