Chapter Ten

An hour later, Willa rooted a fried chicken sandwich out of the greasy paper bag from the diner. The conquerors of her household may have thought she was completely out of the loop of their discussion, but in truth, she was multitasking as always. She was concentrating on keeping her dinner out of King’s mouth and also trying to follow along with the rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness conversation coming from Blue, Diana, and Lance. Apparently, Kenny was at Coyote HQ babysitting the lush in the basement, and the rest of the Sparks trio was discussing the pros and cons of throwing one more person down there with Billy.

Carl.

Of course, Willa wouldn’t let that happen. Carl was certainly a nuisance, but the only people he perturbed were the nonhumans he discovered. He had clueless kids at home and a mortgage to pay. The last place he needed to be was locked up with a Coyote who had a showering phobia.

Still, she appreciated the distraction. They were so entertaining that she’d actually stopped watching the golden tracks on her belongings fade. Her heart rate had gone down, and the knot in her stomach had loosened. Knowing that her father probably wouldn’t play the peekaboo game when other people were in her house was comforting as well. He’d always preferred to terrorize her in a one-on-one capacity.

She took a seat at the table and had King’s sad face on her lap and the sandwich halfway to her mouth when all three Coyotes turned to her in unison. Mouth hanging open, she paused the sandwich’s flight. “Huh?” Obviously, she’d missed a turn in conversation.

“I asked if there are any more folks like him in Maria,” Blue said. “And what about his kids? Do they notice anything unusual? You said one is in your class, right?”

“Oh.” Willa shrugged and took a bite of the sandwich. Experience had taught her that fried chicken sandwiches needed to be consumed before the buns disintegrated from contact with all that delicious grease. “I have his son, a seventh-grader. He also has a daughter in high school. I didn’t teach her. The best I can tell, neither of them is aware of anything usual about the supernatural citizens of Maria, but I probably wouldn’t be the best person to assess if they were. I don’t hit people’s radar the same way you do. Also, from what I’ve discovered, most kids with any sort of magic don’t get suspicious about the people around them until just after the first stage of puberty.” She took another bite and muttered around it, “I don’t think he’s started yet.”

Blue fished a couple of barbecue sandwiches out of the bag and settled into the chair across the table. At some point while waiting for Lance to show up with food and intel, Blue had rolled his shirt sleeves up his forearms and had freed the top button of his shirt.

There’d always been something peculiarly distracting for Willa about a man in a clean white shirt. She’d even liked the linen ones with blousy sleeves and lacy ruffles at the necks. Watching men fidget their collars and cuffs had been her most diverting amusement in eighteenth-century England.

Crisp white anything was wholly impractical for most of the rough-and-tumble citizenry of Maria, but Willa couldn’t imagine Blue in anything else. The image of him in a button-down had imprinted in her brain, and it wasn’t a bad one.

Just the opposite, actually.

Mouth suddenly dry, she looked away, turned the nearby bag over, and nabbed a napkin from the pile. He wasn’t her Coyote to be admiring, and she shouldn’t have been admiring him anyway. They weren’t even friends, and that was how she needed things to stay. “Um. So, what do you do for a living, anyway? Noelle never told me the specifics.”

Blue arched a brow and quirked his lips into a semismirk.

Willa wasn’t sure if that boded well, but she still wanted to know the answer.

“Did you ask her before or after she lost her voice?”

Willa cringed. The elf hadn’t lost her voice so much as relinquished it. She’d given it up to pay her lover back for the curse she’d inflicted on him. Her lover, Tamatsu, wasn’t thrilled with the turn of events, but she still had ways of communicating, even if other people couldn’t easily make sense of her.

“Maybe I didn’t ask in such clear terms, so much as dance around the subject,” Willa said.

“What do you think I do for a living?”

Taking another bite of sandwich, Willa shrugged one shoulder. “No clue. The best I can tell, the pack is your business. All I know for certain is that you’re not skimming dues.” That he hadn’t been surprised her. Dues collection was a common practice in shifter groups. The money was supposed to go into a pool that’d be meted out to pay for things the community at large could use, such as gathering spaces, or . . . bail. Usually, though, it went straight into the alpha’s pockets never to be seen again.

“Those folks need the money more than I do,” Blue said quietly.

“That’s decent of you.”

“Why do you assume I’m not?” he asked without humor.

Willa kept her mouth shut and her eyes on her sandwich. Accusations were stressful, and she was tired of arguing with him. Kinder conversation was calmer.

“I won’t tell OG you said that, Blue,” Diana said, rescuing the conversational direction.

Willa looked up to see her perched on the corner of the counter with a dripping barbecue sandwich in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other.

“At the rate you’re going with all the stuff you’re not doing, why are you even here?” Lance asked. He took a big bite of his sandwich.

Willa shuddered. Barbecue sauce splotched into his full, blond beard, and she wondered if hair stained the same way clothes did.

Diana crossed her long legs in the other direction and gave the pack lieutenant a provocative blink. “Probably for the same reason you are.”

Lance made a moue at that and pinned a questioning gaze on Blue, but Blue was looking at Willa.

Heat traveled up her neck, and she hastily put her attention back on her sandwich.

How long has he been staring at me?

“I’m actually not doing much work right now,” Blue said. “Been rejecting most meeting requests. I can afford to say no at least for a while.”

“You own the company, then?” Along with the private plane he kept parked and fueled up at the county airport.

“Company is a generous way of putting it. Am I incorporated? Yeah, kinda have to be once you clear a certain tax threshold. But do I have staff?”

When he didn’t immediately continue, she looked up in time to see him shrug.

“Technically,” Blue said, “Kenny’s my staff.”

“And what does he do for you?”

“Without getting too complicated, when people need money for business start-ups or to invest in the next big thing, they go through Kenny to get to me.”

“Ah!” She gave her hands a revelatory clap. “You’re a venture capitalist.”

“Yep.” He grinned.

She couldn’t help but to smile at that. That career wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d imagined for him. She’d assumed something much more illegal. Racketeering had come to mind. The last Coyote alpha had earned most of his income from blackmailing schemes, and all Willa could do was try to sabotage them whenever she learned of them. His lieutenants had gotten good at subverting her toward the end of his reign.

“I’m happy that Kenny has stuck with me this long,” Blue said. “Lance, too. I know I don’t make shit easy for them.”

“What do you mean?” Willa asked.

“Once a boy hits a certain age, it’s rarely good politics to align yourself with a pack alpha’s son,” Diana piped up. “Unless they’re from a family that’s historically been politically aligned with the alpha lineage.”

“Ugh. Sounds like an aristocratic mess. I’ve witnessed enough of that chaos to know how cutthroat it can be.”

“Oh yeah?” Blue asked, smirk deepening. “Who’d you witness it in first?”

“You think you’re slick. You’re trying to pinpoint my age.”

“Answer me anyway and surprise a guy for a change.”

“Fine.”

“Really?”

She shrugged. Then she set her sandwich down on the wrapper and, furrowing her brow, concentrated on the half-moon shapes of her bites. “The thing is, I can’t give a simple answer to that.”

“I knew there had to be a catch.”

She laughed. He was quick, and sometimes it was nice to talk to people who knew enough, and cared enough, to guess where a conversation was going. Most people got bored. Most were too stuck in their own heads to care.

Briefly, she glanced up at him.

He made a “Well?” gesture.

Okay. Just one clue for you, Alpha.

“When I was born, Spain had only been a unified state for a few decades. It had been a collection of small, competing kingdoms.” She paused, contemplating context and depth. Wondering how much to say. There was so much she could say about that period of her history, but she didn’t want the conversation to get too personal. If it got too personal, she’d spiral into anxiety again and wouldn’t stop fretting about everything and nothing for days. She knew herself too well. She knew to stay away from familiar triggers.

“They didn’t all come together until Isabella married her cousin Ferdinand,” she informed them after a minute. They were waiting so quietly and patiently.

Blue made a hmm sound. “Strategic marriage for political gains.”

“Kind of like OG arranged for you,” Diana said brightly.

“You’re going to marry your cousin?” Willa asked warily. She wasn’t going to pretend that didn’t happen anymore. She knew better.

He guffawed. “Nah. Not a cousin. Just the daughter of an alpha from the next closest pack.”

“What’s so wrong with her that you’re avoiding her?”

“Oh, Blue’s gonna chew her up and spit her out,” Diana said. A bit of her sandwich meat slid out of the bun and hit the floor. King was on it in half a second flat, licking the tile clean.

Willa grimaced.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Blue muttered.

“You know she’s right,” Lance said. He shoved a fistful of potato wedges into his mouth and waggled his eyebrows at his alpha. “I know exactly what the old man was thinking, but shit, she’s young.”

“How young?” Willa asked. “Age is a vague concept for me.”

She certainly didn’t feel her age, nor did any of the ladies she knew who were in the same range of semi-immortality. Noelle had her by several hundred years, but Noelle seemed like the typical—though far more jaded—thirtysomething. Her friend Jenny was the same, minus the cynicism. Willa knew how kids were supposed to behave because she worked with them almost every day, but adult ages were trickier.

“Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Somewhere in there,” Blue said in an undertone.

“I guess youth doesn’t appeal to you?”

“I am literally old enough to be her father, so no.”

“I see,” she murmured, giving King’s head a scratch as he paced nearby.

Conservatively, that put Blue in the realm of forty. She’d never been hung up on exact numbers, but now she was curious. He’d probably tell her if she pointedly asked him, but then they’d end up in another of those “tell me because I told you” scenarios she wanted to avoid. There was too much about herself she wouldn’t, couldn’t share. Too much baggage, and she wanted to be able to sleep after the Coyotes left.

“What if you were to pick your own mate?” Willa asked instead.

“Assuming he could find anyone who’d voluntarily put up with him for longer than a night,” Diana said to a background “Screw you,” from Blue, “I suspect OG would make her life a living hell.”

“Why?” Willa asked.

“Because that’s what he does. If he can’t control something, he tries to ruin it. That’s why I’m here, right?” The woman was a master of the sardonic smile. She did it better than certain Greek goddesses Willa knew, and they were the best at irony.

“Why do I get the feeling that Blue’s not the only person who stands to be ruined?” Willa asked.

Diana gave her soda a long slurp and stared eloquently at Willa over the top of the cup.

“Oh. I see.” Willa nudged a couple of potato wedges across her plate. “How’d you get on his bad side?”

“Don’t ask her for the truth if you don’t really want to know it,” Blue said. “Because she’ll tell you.”

“Sometimes the truth isn’t pretty, but . . . it’s also the best disinfectant there is.”

If you can stand it.

Diana seemed to be considering that. She rolled her bright gaze to the ceiling and had parted her lips to say something when King bolted toward the front door.

The doorbell came two seconds later.

“Who could that be?” Willa pushed back from the table and gave her hands a frantic wipe on a wad of napkins.

“Not expecting anyone?” Blue asked, standing.

“No. No one visits me at home.” Glancing at the congregation in her kitchen, she added in a mumble, “No one invited, anyway.”

She made her way to the door slowly, peeking around the hallway corner as she approached to screen whomever it was, but Blue walked at the door full bore.

There’d be no pretending she wasn’t home, obviously.

Sighing, she followed him.

“It’s Noelle.”

“Huh.” Willa nudged him aside. Sure enough, the black-haired elf was standing on her stoop with her arms folded over her chest looking as suspicious of her circumstances as ever. Tamatsu was crouched beside Willa’s Jeep, peering under it.

Willa remembered why when she saw a small paw swipe at the angel.

“Um.” She cringed. “They’re . . . harmless, I guess.” She unlocked the screen door. “I mean, they probably aren’t rabid. Just hungry.”

Tamatsu shook his head and strode to the door with his usual long-limbed ease. He was graceful for a seven-foot-something giant, but of course his angel DNA probably had a little something to do with that.

“Grapevine’s buzzing,” Tamatsu said. “Noelle wanted to see if you were okay.”

Noelle nodded.

Having heard her speak in the past, Willa could imagine exactly what the woman would have said if she’d still had a voice: “Let me know if I should give him a swift kick in the nuts for you.”

“I’m fine,” Willa said with a laugh. “Who’s been talking?”

“Tiny from the Cougar glaring,” Tamatsu said. “He drove past your house in his taco truck about half an hour ago.”

“He lives in the neighborhood,” Willa said for Blue’s benefit.

Blue growled softly in response.

“He called Tito,” Tamatsu said, “who called me.”

“Is a pack alpha really not allowed to confer with the pack patron?” Blue asked dourly.

Noelle looped her fingers around one of Tamatsu’s. His forehead creased and head tilted slightly toward Noelle. Willa had come to recognize that as evidence Noelle was communicating telepathically with him. They needed to touch to talk.

A few seconds later, he said, “Noelle says that given your contentious start, we have to assume there’s a problem. Is there one?”

“Not at the moment,” Willa said. “I’m fine. I promise.”

Noelle didn’t look like she believed her, but she took a breath, nodded, and backed away from the stoop, anyway.

“She said she’ll text you before school tomorrow,” Tamatsu said, following her. Then he stopped, turned back, and looked pointedly to Blue. “She also said to let her know if you want to sell your condo in Vegas. The market is about to surge.”

Blue sighed. “Sure thing.”

Tamatsu saluted, looked all around, caught up to Noelle on the path, looped his arm around her waist, and teleported both of them away.

Blue strode down the walkway and did a three-sixty turn, eyeing all directions.

“What are you doing?” Willa asked.

“Checking to see if anyone else in Maria Heights is ‘just looking out’ for you, because if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you have them on some sort of schedule.”

She laughed and pulled opened the screen door. “Nothing more than coincidence.”

If not for coincidence, she wouldn’t have any luck at all.