by Holley Trent
“Let . . . go of me,” she said breathily and tried to squirm out from his grip.
“Not until I’m sure you’re not going to hurt yourself.”
“I can’t breathe.”
They’d done that to her. They’d placed linen into her mouth and poured water down her throat to tease her with suffocation so she’d confess her sins, but she hadn’t had any besides being born to a mother whose people were Moors and who apparently hadn’t assimilated in Granada well enough to avoid the attention of the Inquisition.
Willa had never learned which neighbor had reported her for heresy. She never found out who thought she was worthy of investigation for choosing not to eat pork. No one in her family ever had. She never learned who thought that in spite of the fact that her mother had been a nun, Willa was a bit superstitious, and why wouldn’t she be? Her father was a Greek god. She knew more of the divine than any of them ever would.
“Please . . . let go of me,” she whimpered and then slumped in his embrace as he loosened his arms.
He didn’t let go of her, though. He simply propped her against him. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he said in a near whisper. Somehow, he managed to straighten her up without reverting back to his punishing grip. “Are you scared someone’s here? I don’t hear or smell anyone, but if you want me to look around more and see if there’s someone here, I will.”
She shook her head hard. “I . . . don’t want to know.”
“There’s no need to be reckless. Let me look around so you’ll have peace of mind.”
He didn’t understand. No matter what he did, she’d never have peace of mind.
She already knew Apollo had been there. He’d popped into her house unbidden as though he owned everything, probably looking to “clean up” her life again and erase everyone important from it. But if Blue investigating meant that he’d let go of her and go away so she could fall apart in peace, she’d agree to anything.
“Go. Do what you have to,” she said.
“All right. Stay put.” He leaned her against the wall as though she were a mannequin lacking the ability to remain upright on her own, and he must have been right.
As he walked to the bedroom, she was afraid to move even her fingers or to pull in the deep breath she desperately needed. Instead, she stared vaguely toward a golden smudge on the wall and begged her body not to jerk at every footstep Blue made in the room.
“Cool coin,” he said after a couple of minutes. “Looks like real gold.”
The words hardly registered. Willa closed her eyes and let her body sag down the wall. She pulled her knees against her chest and put her head atop them. That made her feel smaller, and less visible—like she could hide from anything as long as she didn’t move.
“Willa?”
The floorboards creaked. Bedroom to hallway.
She didn’t need magic to know Blue was looming over her or that he’d knelt. When his breath touched the side of her arm, she flinched, because that’s what she did. Her reflexes didn’t work the way they were supposed to and hadn’t for a long time. Maybe they’d never been quite right, and her torturers had only magnified what was already wrong with her.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s all right. There’s no one in there. I’ll check the other rooms to be sure, but I’ll be surprised if I find anyone. I don’t smell any unaccounted for visitors and can’t hear anyone moving but you, me, and the squirrels on the roof.” One of those sonorous cello chuckles resonated in his chest. “You need to trim back that damned tree, by the way.”
She rocked, back and forth. Back and forth.
“Willa.”
What does Apollo want now?
“Willa.”
He can’t just . . . show up here. This is my place. My home.
Why didn’t he bother one of her brothers instead? He’d always liked them more. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the god’s rear end wasn’t shining from all the kissing up they did.
“Okay, then.” Blue shifted his weight. Swallowed loudly. “I guess I’ll just finish looking in these back rooms and then get you something to drink. Stay put.”
She didn’t give him a response one way or another, but he left anyway.
That was what she’d wanted, but it didn’t make her feel any better. If anything, standing alone again made everything seem suddenly worse.
She only ever knew peace when she was on the oblivious cusp between wakefulness and dreaming, or when she was too busy to think.
She needed to get up and do something so she didn’t think.
She just had to talk herself into it first.
Chapter Nine
As he bumped the refrigerator door closed with his hip, Blue turned the half-dollar-sized coin over in his hand. Heavy thing. He’d never seen anything like it, at least not in person. When he’d spotted it on the dresser, he’d thought it was one of those arcade tokens kids used at certain game centers, but he’d picked it up and found that it was metal, not plastic. The embossing on the back was of a pastoral scene—a shepherd and his flock.
On the front was the classic profile of a man with a thick mass of wavy hair, on top of which was a crown of laurel leaves. A sun made a halo, of sorts, behind his head.
The print at the bottom must have worn away, but what little Blue could see looked like Greek.
He slid it into his pocket to research later. He was pretty sure he’d seen that shepherd scene before in one of the research books he’d kept after completing his master’s thesis, but the book was in his house back in Vegas. He’d have to guess which one it was and see if he could find a scan of the page online.
He grabbed the orange juice he’d poured from the counter and carried it to the hall.
Willa was still hunched and rocking. The scent of her sweat was acrid in his nose. That was fear. He knew the scent well enough because it was the same smell he whiffed whenever he faced down one of his weaker opponents.
He didn’t know what had set her off, but he did know that if he didn’t get her to slow down her breathing soon, she was probably going to pass out. That wasn’t the way he liked to see a woman swoon. He would have preferred having a little something to do with their faint state.
“I’ve got some orange juice for you,” he said. “I thought about pouring a splash of gin into it, but I couldn’t find any. You must keep the good stuff hidden.”
No response.
“Take a little sip for me?”
No response. More rocking.
He was pretty sure she’d heard him. Every time he talked, her shoulders would jerk upward a bit as though the sound of his voice was grating to her ears.
The volume, maybe?
Again, he knew fuck all about the woman, but he’d made the rookie mistake of trying to treat her like she was normal. She wasn’t normal, and neither was he. He’d never met a supernatural being who didn’t have some neuroses, but Willa probably had heaps more than a person with a standard life expectancy.
He didn’t know what she’d been through. It seemed finding out would be a good start if he were ever going to make sense of her—if they were ever going to be able to cooperate.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, making his voice as quiet as he could. “If you take one good sip of this juice, I’ll go away.”
Kind of a lie.
The thought of leaving her like that twisted a violent knot into his gut. She made his life way harder than it needed to be, but he didn’t want her to hurt. He didn’t get off on seeing people like that.
He knelt beside her.
Her eyes were red and wet. The hair at the sides of her head was slick with sweat. He wondered then why she cut it so short. He’d known plenty of women with pixie cuts, but their styles had been professionally shorn and capably trimmed as needed. He knew next to nothing about women’s hairstyles, but to him, Willa’s hair seemed like it’d been ruthlessly shorn without an end goal in mind, besides the hair just being gone. As though she’d put a guard on a pair of clipp
ers and hacked it all off to the same length whenever she got a mind to.
Why do you do that, woman?
Even if she didn’t care about fashion or primping, most people at least tried not to present themselves in ways that made people stare with the wrong kind of curiosity. Maybe she didn’t notice.
“I swear,” he whispered. “This juice is a hundred percent pure. I didn’t even lick the rim of the glass.”
At that, Willa stopped rocking.
Stupid shit’s what you need? Okay, then.
He shrugged.
“You know, I think the raccoons under your Jeep are hungry. When I walked by on the way to the front door, they were thrusting those little black hands out at me from the running boards. It was like something out of a horror movie. I don’t know. I just feel a certain kind of way about critters that have such dexterous fingers. Can you imagine the trouble shapeshifters would get into if we had paws like that when we’re in our animal forms? Hell, the Lamarrs alone could keep us on the chase, cleaning up their messes for the rest of our natural lives. By the way, when I tossed Billy into the basement, he whimpered for his mommy. Who is his mother, anyway?”
Willa pulled in a shuddering breath and said, almost too quiet to hear, “Mary Lamarr. She . . . left ages ago.”
Ah!
His tactic had some potential. He inched forward a bit, still trying to give her space, but needing to acclimate her to his presence. He might have insinuated that he’d leave her alone, but he wasn’t going anywhere. There were too many mysteries in her for him to unravel, and he liked a good mystery.
“Why’d she leave?” he asked.
“Same reason the women always do. They were afraid of losing their minds.”
“How often does that happen?” He nudged her naked wrist with the bottom of the juice glass.
Her fingers relaxed from the straining fist she’d been making.
“We’ve . . . lost . . . one or two each year for the past ten years, maybe.”
“Pack seems pretty balanced, though, male to female.”
She closed her eyes and dragged her arm across them. “A lot of the women currently in the pack came in from other groups, one in Oklahoma particularly. Also one in South Dakota.”
“Why there?”
“The old alpha had installed a sort of motorcycle culture into the pack. He used to organize road trips. They’d all go and raise hell for a week and come back with swapped mates.”
“That’s not normal.” In fact, Blue had never heard of any shit like that. For the most part, Coyotes found mates in the same way other predator shapeshifters did. Trial and error, or else “arrangements.”
Given his personal circumstances, Blue wasn’t fond of “arrangements.”
“Kept them from getting bored, I guess,” Willa said.
“That’s not how relationships are supposed to work.”
She let out a resounding sigh. “You’re the expert?”
“Touché.” He tapped her wrist with the bottom of the glass again. “Just because I’m stalling a bit with a relationship in my life doesn’t mean I don’t understand people. My situation isn’t a gold star example of what a relationship is supposed to be. Hell, I’ve never even heard the woman talk, and trust me, I’m not afraid to make phone calls. You can’t judge me by what you see. I know what relationships are supposed to look like and what folks can potentially get out of them.”
“Why are you marrying her if you really don’t want to?”
“Because I don’t have a choice. What I have here is just an illusion of freedom.”
“But you’re an alpha. Your father shouldn’t be able to tell you what to do.”
“I’m an alpha with an asterisk. I’m still attached to Sparks.” He chuckled, but he didn’t really feel like laughing. “I could get recalled at any time. As soon as my would-be father-in-law gets tired of waiting, probably. You may be getting rid of me sooner than you think.”
Willa picked up her head and laid her left cheek atop her knee. Her eyes were still wet and bloodshot. Puffy bags hung beneath them.
What triggered her?
He was going to be endlessly pondering that. Unanswered questions gave him heartburn. He gave her another tap with the juice.
She took it. Didn’t take a sip, though. Just knit her eyebrows and stared at the glass. “I don’t know if you were aware of this, but . . . Mason Foye’s older son is half-Coyote.”
“You serious? I had no idea.”
She nodded. “His name’s Nick. I think he’s three or four now. His mother, Jill, was from a pack in New York State. She came out here as a teen to visit cousins and ended up staying. She finally went back because her mind broke, and I guess she didn’t want Nick to see her like that.”
“Oh hell.” Cringing, Blue passed a hand through his hair. “Where’s the kid now? New York?”
“No. He lives in Maria. Or, rather, out in the unincorporated area nearby. He lives with Mason. Mason has full custody.”
“That’s not normal.”
Willa’s eyebrows inched up. In the low light, they had a bronze glint to them when they moved. Another thing that seemed out of place in a way he couldn’t quite conceptualize. “Define normal.”
“Good point.” He drummed his fingers against his thighs and rolled his gaze up to the ceiling, thinking.
Technically, it was his right as the Coyote pack’s alpha to demand that Nick be returned to the pack. Blue’s father would have made such a demand, but Blue didn’t know if he wanted to open that can of worms. He didn’t want to bleed out any more pack members, but at the same time, he didn’t want to gain any that would bring a war with them.
“Leave him be,” Willa said, as though she were dwelling in his head and could hear every thought. “Except in rare instances, Cougar genetics prevail. Because Nick’s father is a Cougar and Jill wasn’t Mason’s true mate, Nick’s never going to be a shapeshifter, neither cat nor canine. There’s no good reason to drag him back into this pack. He’d just get picked on.”
Knowing the pack as he did, Blue didn’t doubt that. “Are Mason and Jill cordial?”
Bringing the juice closer to her lips, Willa nodded. “More so now than when she was here. I rely on gossip mostly, but I care about Nick so I make sure to ask folks who can find out for me.”
“Like kids in the band?”
She gave a bashful shrug. “They see right through me, but they’re pretty mature kids. They don’t tattle.”
He flicked the bottom of the juice glass with his nails. “Drink that.”
In spite of the scolding look she gave him, she did at least take a sip.
Good.
For some reason, that little bit of trust made him happier than when his Apple stock surged.
“I think it’s interesting that you work with such a diverse cross-section of kids,” he said. “None of the parents are bothered?”
Another sip followed by a thoughtful scowl. “I think they may have been at first, but not anymore. I think everyone’s figured out that I’m harmless, in spite of my affiliations. Although I’ve been in Maria a long time, I only took the school job five years ago. I was mostly in the shadows before then. That’s what long-lived people like me have to do so that folks in town don’t get too suspicious about the fact we don’t age like everyone else. When the school system coughed up enough money to split the band director job into two positions, I sort of put an ear to the ground to find out what it entailed. Before then, there was one teacher who worked at both the high school and the middle school. It was grueling for him, to say the least.”
“Shit. I’d imagine so.” She’d started to set the glass down, so he nudged it back upward.
She sighed.
“That guy still at the high school?”
She raised her brows over the rim of the glass and, after swallowing a sip, said, “No. Retired two years ago. I’d just started getting good and settled into a routine at the middle school, and I didn’t think about
applying. I don’t think I have the right constitution for high schoolers. They’re too much like adults in ways that aren’t always so good. So, I’m holding down the fort at MMS. I get the kids musically literate and able to figuratively walk and chew gum at the same time, and then I send them up to ninth grade where they apparently get hazed for a year before they’re even allowed to put the silly plume in their marching band caps.”
“Sounds like there’s no love lost between you and the high school director.”
She drained what was left in the juice glass, grimaced, and relaxed lower against the wall. She wasn’t shaking anymore, a fact that his inner animal appreciated immensely. He wasn’t generally so affected by other people’s nervousness. In fact, Blue didn’t do nervous. He was sure as shit feeling hers, though.
Curious, he massaged at the knot forming at the back of his neck.
Doesn’t make sense.
“I don’t agree with his teaching methods, is all,” she said, pouting. “He treats band like a varsity sport, and that’s unfortunate because there are a handful of kids who graduate from high school not understanding just how talented they are. They’re so caught up in the drills and the formations, and then they get burned out and take the orchestra semester off in spring. Or maybe they’ll only do pep band, playing the same ten songs again and again instead of learning what they’re really capable of.”
“You sure you don’t want to teach high school? Because it sounds to me like you care a little bit.”
Laughing, she closed her eyes. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard her laugh, or if he ever had. “I want to teach high school in the same way I want to be patron of a Coyote pack.”
“Hmm.” Seemed like a good place to redirect the conversation. There were so many burning questions he had, and they kept getting pushed to the back burner in his mind. Willa would have probably been an investigator’s nightmare. They’d never be able to keep track of what they’d asked and what she’d actually answered.
“You said your siblings have packs, too?” he asked.
Her eyelids raised slightly, though didn’t fully open. She appeared to be staring down at her hands. She was tapping out a sequence on her left palm with the opposite four fingers.
