by Holley Trent
Blue put his mug in the sink. “I gotta go. I’m sure you can entertain yourself for a couple of hours.”
Diana turned the water off and grabbed a dishtowel to dry her hands. “Where are you going?”
“Need to go have a chat with the pack patron,” he said over his shoulder as he left the room. He grabbed his phone from the table and nodded a farewell at Kenny and Lance. “She works at the middle school. Walking distance from here.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t need to watch me that closely.”
Diana blew a raspberry and pressed her fluorescent pink purse beneath her arm. “I’m not spying. I mean, not totally. Mostly, I’m nosy. Besides, I’ve never met a pack patron before. Not many packs have them anymore.”
“Yeah, well,” Blue muttered in vexation, “I doubt you’ll ever meet anyone like this one again. And for that, you should be thankful.”
Chapter Five
Willa was in the corridor that connected the band, art, and music rooms in Maria Middle School’s expansion building, head-down inside of a huge box of marching band folios when the band room’s phone rang.
“Crap,” she whispered, mindful that Sophie Sears had eighth grade art in session less than five feet away. Scrambling upright, Willa knocked the dust off her shirt and hurried into the room in time for the fifth ring. “Hello?” she answered breathily.
“You finally got yourself a couple of volunteers?” Paige, the school secretary, asked cheerfully.
“Huh? I don’t know what you mean.”
“I just sent two down for you. I thought you were expecting them. You’ve been having such a hard time rallying folks this year, and I thought maybe a couple had finally pulled their heads out of their patoots.”
“Um.” Scratching her head, Willa leaned back to see past the cabinets. There was a huge bank of windows at the rear of the band room that anyone approaching from outside would have had to pass before trying the door. No one was out there yet. “What names are on the visitor’s log?”
“Let’s see. Hmm, a Blue Shapely and a Diana Shapely.”
“Blue?”
Ugh.
Willa groaned inwardly. She had no idea who Diana Shapely was, but anyone with that name attached to her wasn’t going to be a neutral party. Willa was being ganged up on, and she hadn’t even had a proper meal to fuel herself for battle.
“Know ’em?” Paige asked.
“Sure,” Willa said through clamped teeth. “Thanks for sending them down. I’m sure I’ll find plenty for them to do.”
“Yay for you! Bye.”
Willa hung up and allowed herself ten seconds to get her head on straight.
Blue had never bothered her at school before, and she’d been counting on that. As soon as she drove into the parking lot every morning, a sense of peace settled into her because she knew that her day would be stressful, but the stress would be the predictable sort. She thrived on the predictable, and for her, Blue was chaos embodied. He was her kryptonite.
She knocked a few dust balls off her shirt, smoothed down her hair edges, and walked to the door. She was kicking the rubber doorstop beneath the heavy metal thing when the alpha approached with a tall, thin, glamorous, model-gorgeous woman at his side. Even from ten feet away and with her stunted magic assessment abilities, Willa could feel the heated energy pouring off her. Coyote. The energy seemed similar enough that Willa could even make a leap and say the lady was related to Blue, but her abilities as an energy reader were about as good as her skill at reading Sanskrit.
Willa heaved a sigh of reluctance and ducked into the classroom without wasting time on eye contact.
“How long before kids come in here?” Blue asked without preface.
Willa adjusted the rearmost semicircle of seats. The tuba players’ chairs were always too close together. “About fifteen minutes.” You arrogant jerk.
The lady in leather sauntered over and thrust out her hand. “Diana Shapely, since apparently Blue’s not going to introduce me. I’m his sister.”
Oh goody. Willa pulled in a bracing breath and forced a smile onto her face. Two of them.
Willa offered her a weak handshake, met the woman’s gaze long enough to see that her eyes were bright blue where her brother’s were deep brown, and then cleared her throat.
That’s enough of that.
“I’m . . . kind of pressed for time, so what can I help you with?”
“For one thing,” Blue said, leaning his palms onto the stool behind the concert snare, “the Lamarrs. For another, Wednesday.”
“The Lamarrs . . . Um.” In that moment, Willa couldn’t think well enough to remember why the Lamarrs were important, much less what she had to do with them.
Something about . . .
She needed to get out from under their judgmental stares so she retreated to the corridor and the box of folios and lyres.
Right. Coyotes . . . Mechanics on roofs.
Blue followed her to the doorway and leaned against it. He tilted his head toward the chorus room, where the kids were currently belting out “De Colores”—again—and then crooked his thumb to the band room as if to say, “Go that way.”
She scoffed and kept rooting. She had a sneaking suspicion she wasn’t going to have enough trumpet lyres.
“Okay.” Blue stepped into the hall, nudged her away from the box, and carried it into the band room.
Throwing up her hands in frustration, she followed, not that she had a choice. There was only so much stalling she could do in a near-empty room.
He closed the door and set down the box. “What do you need done with that? Diana will do it.”
Diana raised a pristinely arched brow and asked, drolly, “I will?”
He tapped the bright orange MMS Volunteer paw print sticker affixed to her crisp white shirt. “Yep, you will.”
“Okay.” Diana gave an indolent shrug. “I will, then.”
Cringing, Willa knelt and pulled examples of the different items inside. Clamp-on lyres. Flutist’s Friends. Folio pages. “Honestly, it would help a lot if you’d just start by sorting all these things. They’re leftovers from the high school band, and the director never sorts them before sending them out.”
“That savage.”
Willa was halfway into a sigh before she realized that Diana hadn’t intended any sarcasm. Diana was already on her knees pulling out plastic music protectors and putting them into a tidy stack to her right.
“It only takes a few seconds to organize things up front instead of having to do it later. Ugh.”
Willa blinked.
“Don’t get her started,” Blue said, “or she’ll rant for twenty minutes. She’s a professional organizer, though I wouldn’t say she does it for a living.”
“Oh no,” Diana said, squinting at a suspiciously mangled trumpet lyre. “As of two days ago, I spy and meddle for a living.”
At the press of Blue’s hand to the small of her back, Willa started away, reflexively ducking while arcing out of the realm of his reach and covering her lower spine protectively.
Her heart was beating so hard that she couldn’t hear his words over her pulse in her ears, but she watched his lips move.
“You all right?” she thought he said, so she nodded, licked her lips, and gestured to the built-in desk at the right side in the wall of cabinets.
It’d been centuries since she’d been comfortable with having people behind her or touching her back—not since a man had stalked behind her and snatched her off the street in Spain to take her for questioning. Lines of people made her sweat, so she avoided them whenever she could—even going as far as to do curbside pickup of her groceries even though the store clerks never got the product substitutions right. She had no idea in what universe it was fine to substitute turkey with ham.
He pulled her stool out and gestured for her to sit.
Casting a glance over her shoulder at Diana, Willa sat.
“What do you do with these?” D
iana held up one of the small folio sleeves—a clear plastic sheath with two holes punched at the top.
“Sheet music goes into it,” Willa said after swallowing down the lump in her throat. “The kids attach their music to their forearms or to their instruments when they’re marching. At least, until they memorize it.”
“Huh.” Diana set the sheet into the stack and reached into the box again. “The things you learn on random errands.”
Willa was certainly curious about what that errand was, but she didn’t dare ask. She fiddled with the battery cover of her electronic metronome. “So, you were saying?” she said to Blue.
“Yeah. The Lamarrs.”
“Right.” She remembered. The whole sordid mess was all coming back to her. “Look, I’m sorry I jumped on your back. It was a reflex. I was moving before I could think. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You assumed I was going to beat him up.”
She cut him a look. “Weren’t you?”
His eyes narrowed. “Why do you assume that brutality is my go-to response?”
“I’ve been around Coyotes for a long time.”
“How long?” Diana piped up.
When both Willa and Blue turned to look at her, she shrugged.
“I’m a shifter. You’re not so far that I can’t hear you.”
“If you relay any details of this conversation to OG—”
Diana waved off her brother’s concern and bent the ring of a trombone lyre back into something that almost resembled the circle it had once been. “He’s not getting any details from me, I assure you. All I’m going to do is either confirm or deny that you’re still here. If he wants more than that, he’s going to have to find another snitch.”
“Does he know that?” Willa asked.
Diana’s guffaw was practically operatic. “If he doesn’t, I’m sure his wife will help him figure it out.”
Willa furrowed her brow. Evidently, there was some intrigue going on in the Shapely clan that she didn’t have time to concern herself with. She suspected, though, that she’d eventually succumb and ask in spite of herself. Although she tried to avoid hers as a matter of principle, supernatural families had the best drama.
“Still wanna know how long,” Diana said, grinning at Willa.
Pretty lady. No rings. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, but most Coyotes went through the trouble of getting married if they took mates. Willa couldn’t think of a single Coyote woman of about Diana’s age who hadn’t been married at least once. If she had a mate, he would have been nearby.
Willa groaned quietly.
Another one to watch out for.
Somehow, Willa managed to smile at her. At least Diana was easy to make eye contact with. She was one of those rare people who didn’t read as a stranger, but rather a friend she didn’t know yet. “Can’t tell how old I am?”
“Probably no better than Blue can, and he’s usually pretty good at guessing.”
“Well, he can keep on guessing. I will tell you, though, that I’ve been attached to what became Maria’s Coyote pack since 1870.”
Diana whistled low. “And they knew what you were?”
“That first group of Coyotes? No. They were too busy being deplorable outlaws to pay much attention to what was different about me. The magic that connected them to me made it so they didn’t ask questions about what made me different from them. They just knew I wasn’t to be hurt. Then they all died off, and the second generation wasn’t much better, nor the third. There’s something fouled up in the constitution of the pack that makes it more dysfunctional than it should be. I don’t know if early inbreeding comes into play, or . . . ” She shrugged. She was getting off-message, and thirty eighth-graders were going to pour into the room soon. She needed to tell the Shapelys whatever they needed to hear and get them out of her band room.
“I’d like to hear the rest of that statement,” Blue said.
She sighed and nudged the metronome into the corner of her desk.
“Really. I’m curious. Everyone I’ve ever encountered who had a pack patron suggested that the person had special abilities.”
“Yes, well, most gods and demigods do tend to have those. I’m the rare exception.”
“Were you born like that?”
Willa slapped her hands onto the counter and groaned. He wasn’t one of her Coyotes so he didn’t have the confusion of the rest. He drilled right down to the meat of the matter, rent away the flesh and left her bloody and exposed, and he wasn’t going to go away.
And I brought him here.
If regrets were money, she could take a twenty-year vacation.
“Why do you care?” she asked with exasperation.
“Because it doesn’t pay to be stupid.”
“If I tell you, will you go away? I need to teach a class.”
“There were a bunch more questions I asked before that one, but that’s a good one to start with.”
“You’re insufferable,” she muttered.
“I’m just doing my job. Maybe you’re used to the alpha putting his head in the sand and washing away any questions he might have had with liquid of the eighty-proof variety, but that’s not my style. The faster you talk, the sooner I’ll leave.”
“Why does everything have to be on your terms?”
“Because they’ve been on your terms since 1870, and, in case you didn’t notice”—he breathed out a mocking huff—“your terms don’t work, honey.”
Chapter Six
Willa sometimes wished she could bring herself to commit violence. Peering up at Blue’s smug countenance certainly triggered a kind of revulsion in her that she’d never felt before. Alas, brute force simply wasn’t in her constitution.
Have to find some other way to make him go away.
“I think you’re forgetting you’re here at my sufferance,” she said.
“Be that as it may, I’m still doing you a hell of a favor.”
She sighed and rubbed her eyes. So tired. She’d given up on trying to sleep after two hours of anxious, horizontal fretting about things that had happened so long ago that the only people who cared were the ones writing history dissertations. She’d ended up walking King until dawn and then she’d gotten herself ready for the school day. It was a wonder she was upright.
“No, I wasn’t born like this,” she said, ready for the conversation to be over. “And I checked on Ralph yesterday, and as of right now, his wife hasn’t kicked him out of his house.”
“Wanna know where his brother is?”
Willa raised her brows and let them fall. “Hopefully, not in a shallow grave,” she said in an undertone.
Blue laughed. “Nope, though by the time I’m done with him, he might wish he was in one. I hear coming off the sauce isn’t a hell of a lot of fun.”
“You can’t make unilateral changes to people’s lifestyles. They have to want to do better.”
“You don’t understand shapeshifters very well, then.”
She grimaced. Maybe after so long, she still didn’t.
“In the absence of strong dominants, weaker pack members are more likely to act on more primitive urges,” he said.
“As our father would say,” Diana added, carrying what appeared to be the emptied supply box to the recycling bin at the rear of the room, “dominants keep the dogs on two legs. In a perfectly functional pack, the will of the alpha and his lieutenants is the will of the pack.” She cast Willa a sidelong look. “The body fails if the head is sick. You get me?”
Willa nodded gravely. That didn’t mean she had to like the idea of any of her Coyotes being locked in basements.
“We all need to get on the same page,” Blue said. “You having meetings behind my back isn’t helping things.”
“The pack doesn’t feel like you’re approachable. I worry they’ll defect, so I do what I can to make them feel like this is the home they’ve always known.”
“But it can’t be the home they’ve always known, and maybe i
t’s best if the ones who can’t straighten out find a pack elsewhere.”
She huffed with dismay. “That’s exceedingly reckless. The last thing the pack needs is more outside enemies.”
“I have to agree with her there,” Diana said. “If OG finds out you’re leaking dogs, he’s going to assume you don’t have a grip down here and he’ll snatch you back. Don’t give him an avenue for criticism.”
“As if he didn’t just lose four dogs of his own?” Blue pointed to himself.
“Temporarily, Blue Boy.” Diana was peering out the window, likely at the tumbleweed of a child who had just passed.
Willa groaned inwardly.
Sheesh, why today?
She scrambled off her stool and was halfway to the door when Quinn stepped in.
Shifting her trumpet case’s handle to her other hand, the little sparkplug of an eighth-grader scanned the room in the wildly tactless way pubescent Coyotes were so prone to.
Blue snapped his fingers. “Quill, is it?”
Quinn blanched. Swallowed. Shook her head hard as though fleas that had just discovered that people were tasty had picked her for a meal.
“Quinn,” Willa whispered to the alpha and then continued the rest of the way to the child. Quinn, who tended to have lunch alone, was habitually early. Normally, Willa didn’t mind. Quinn liked to help her make photocopies and trim down sheet music for folios, but generally Willa didn’t have “special guests” when she was there.
Willa took the trumpet case from the child, eager to distract both Quinn and the Shapelys. “I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear your trumpet came back from the shop. I didn’t test it, but Otis assured me he got the kink out of the tuning slide. Wanna go try it out? It’s back in the workroom.”
“Uh. Okay.” The child set her backpack onto her chair and swatted her hair out of her eyes. She’d probably made a valiant effort at taming it that morning, but there was something about Coyotes that made them tend toward unkemptness, even when they were trying to be respectable. The Shapelys were the obvious exception. Blue always managed to seem put together, even when he was semiclothed and slouching indulgently against the big boulder at the Coyote gathering ring in the desert.
