Chapter Thirteen

Blue slinked from the driver’s seat of his SUV and let out a sigh of exhaustion. He’d shifted to his animal form and back three times in less than five hours. The pace wasn’t sustainable, even for an alpha, but he’d been afraid to lose the opportunities when the bags of fur had tracked across his path.

He had four pack members sitting in their houses recovering from being alpha-rolled. They weren’t the pack’s worst offenders by any stretch of the imagination, but every member mattered. It was probably best if he started at the bottom of the pack, anyway. Those people cast their allegiances to whomever they thought was taking care of them. The rough and grizzled guys at the top—they’d probably be a problem for him. Blue needed to get the core of the pack settled in before he dealt with the worst offenders.

He tugged open the back door of the truck, grabbed the bags of Chinese food from the floor, and then jogged across the street to Willa’s house.

Three glowing pairs of eyes blinked in the shadows under her Jeep.

Doubling back, he gave the ever-present raccoons a sarcastic salute, tossed them a handful of fortune cookies, and made a mental note to root the plastic wrappers out later.

Moving stealthily up the steps to the stoop, he tuned in to the sounds from inside. She had the inner door open, and only the flimsy screen door stood between her and the world beyond.

King was somewhere in there, making pitiful whimpering noises and quietly indignant woofs. Asleep and dreaming, probably.

Farther back was Willa’s breathless voice and the pauses indicative of a one-sided conversation.

She was on the phone, probably.

“You’ve done me so many favors already,” she said, “but I don’t know what else to do but ask.”

What now?

He shifted the hot bag to his other arm and held his breath so as not to miss a word. She had a tendency to mumble.

“I thought about asking the community work coordinator at the high school if she could try to send back a couple of former students to help out, but I figured any kids in that program are probably looking for jobs that pay a little, and I can’t pay.”

Ah, school stuff.

The inner paper bag crinkled a little as he shifted.

Oh shit.

Blue held his breath and waited for discovery. Fortunately, King didn’t run to the door barking, and Willa didn’t give any indication that she’d heard, so Blue let down his guard.

He hated having to eavesdrop the way he was. It was cowardly and shameful, but if there was another way to get information out of the woman, he would have already tried it. They couldn’t cooperate if she didn’t tell him what she needed. Not everything they discussed had to be about the pack.

“I can’t teach traditional grip for snare,” Willa said. “And Paul won’t let kids march with match grip. I know that probably makes no sense to you, but I figured you could pass that along and explain what I need. I can’t turn my left wrist over far enough anymore. It’s getting worse as years go on, and I, so . . . Uh-huh.”

“What the hell did she do to her wrist?” he murmured, rubbing his chin.

Chronic injuries just weren’t something people like him had, and obviously Willa wasn’t normal—not human normal, and not demigoddess normal, either. She was a mystery he was still trying to figure out.

Remembering another mystery, he snapped his fingers and swore under his breath.

He’d forgotten about that coin. He’d emptied out his pockets at home and left it on his dresser without thinking to look up the image, but he’d do it before bed. If he could unravel that one clue, he could move on to others. It’d niggle at the back of his mind until he figured that thing out.

“You’ll ask him?” Willa asked whomever she was talking to. “Tell him I know he’s busy, but even just a couple of times per week through the end of the school year would mean so much to those kids. And it’s just the eighth-graders. First thing in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays. After lunch on the other days, if that makes a difference. Okay. If you can catch up with him, call me back and let me know. Thanks. Oh! Thank your aunt for the cupcakes for me. I don’t know how she knew I needed them, but they made my day. Bye.”

He heard the snick, probably of the phone hitting the base, and then a long breath.

Then quiet, padded footsteps, and a mumble of, “Please, Hank, say yes.”

Hank. Shit.

Grimacing, Blue rapped the edge of the screen door and called out, “Willa? I’ve got dinner,” as though he hadn’t been standing there for three minutes eavesdropping like a depraved asshole.

King was at the door in two seconds flat, paws up on the screen as though he were going to cut it down and leap through the mesh for the bag.

“For goodness’ sake, dog,” Willa said with a sigh, and Blue wasn’t quite sure which of them she was talking about.

She gave King a scoot by the bottom toward the inner recesses of the house and tugged the door handle. “What are you doing here?”

Blue pointed demonstrably to the bag as he squeezed past her. “Let’s eat it while it’s hot. Can’t stand cold lo mein.”

The door clicked shut behind him as he marched to the kitchen uninvited.

Despite the way he’d been behaving since arriving in Maria, he did have some manners. Normally, he would have called ahead before showing up at a lady’s house, but he had a sneaking suspicion that if he relied on decent behavior when dealing with Willa, she’d do everything she could to avoid seeing him face-to-face again.

That wouldn’t do. After all, they were finally starting to make nice.

He set the bag atop the kitchen table, which was covered with her open laptop, lined music composition sheets, and a few pencils that had been chewed nearly to the lead.

He picked one up and raised an eyebrow at her.

She snatched it away and crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s a tic. I sometimes gnaw when I’m thinking.”

“Maybe you should switch to beef jerky or something. It’d be better for your health.”

“I’ll bear that in consideration.”

“Good. I like cooperation. We should do more of it.”

She sighed. “What are you doing here?”

He pointed to the bag. “I brought dinner.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because people have to eat?”

Her eyebrows darted up and she pointed to herself. “And you want to eat . . . with me?”

“I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone, you know? Put food in my belly and continue our chat at the same time.”

“You’re not even going to beat around the bush about it, huh?”

“Why bother?” He removed packets of food from the bag and gently lifted the container flaps to let some of the condensation settle.

Shaking her head, she walked to the cupboard and fetched plates. “Diana had been gone for fifteen minutes before you showed up.”

“Ah, thought you were free of Shapelys for the day, huh?”

“It’s not that I . . . mind Diana at all,” Willa said hesitantly. “I don’t, really. I like her as a person, but it’s hard to get comfortable when I know precisely why she’s here.”

“I can’t say I’m entirely thrilled at why she’s in town, but I figured that if she was going to be here, I’d at least put her to work in a way that’s useful.”

And he was. While he’d been fetching glorious little fried chicken bits in sauce with a name he couldn’t pronounce, and carbohydrates of all sorts, he’d sent his sister a text message dispatching her to continue what he was calling the Maria Massacre. No one was dying—he wasn’t that kind of brute. They were simply tempering the wills of a few wild Coyotes. He figured it was kinder sending Diana out after some of the ladies than him doing it. She wouldn’t mentally steamroll them the way he did. She’d just confuse them until the dogs came to the conclusion on their own that Diana’s way was better. And as long as Blue kept Willa occupied, Willa wouldn’t go poking around town to see what her Coyotes were up to.

She’d find out soon enough, probably. Hopefully, after the majority of the pack had started Shapely rehab.

“What kind of meat is in there?” Willa pointed to a tall container of fried rice.

“None. Just egg.”

Nodding, she grabbed the container and scooped a healthy portion onto her plate.

He wondered if she were going to say anything about the phone call she’d just made—wondered if she’d tell him she was ingratiating herself with a Foye.

She didn’t say anything. She lifted another container and sniffed it.

“Moo shu pork.”

She set it down and picked up another.

“Orange chicken.”

She scooped some out. “That Chinese food place has only been in Maria for the past year. I’ve only been there once.”

“Didn’t like it enough to go back?” He thought it was pretty good, but being a dog at heart, his food sensibilities were probably somewhat on the gauche side.

“Not an issue of liking it,” she murmured. “It was spendy for what it was.”

“Ah.” She was probably right, but he didn’t pay a lot of attention to price tags on most things. Whether his fried rice was a couple of bucks more expensive at one place versus another didn’t arouse his attention. Two dollars wouldn’t hurt him, but it would hurt her. He hadn’t considered that before.

Hadn’t considered what a few bucks of difference might have meant to the people in the pack who were, by far, so much less wealthy than the Coyotes in Sparks.

That merited further thinking.

Empathy, came the echo of his mother’s voice in his head. You’re capable of it. You just need to pay attention, Blue.

Willa grabbed some forks from a drawer, handed him one, and then sat with the others. She left the spares at the center of the table atop a sheet of music she’d marked up and dug into her food.

King plopped his big head on her lap, eyes fixed on the fork in her hand and the chunk of chicken on the tines.

Laughing, Blue settled into the chair across from her and dug into his pork. “How long have you had him?”

“About forty years.”

Blue had chosen the wrong moment to swallow. He nearly choked on his food. After pounding his chest to get his swallowing mechanism working properly again, he got out, “Did I hear that right?”

Smiling gently—and at his expense, likely—she shrugged. “He was a gift from a friend I had back when I was living in Germany. I wasn’t there for very long, but I guess he remembered me fondly.”

“Boyfriend, huh?”

“No,” she said tartly. She ripped the corner off a packet of soy sauce and poured some onto her food.

He put up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Why do you assume that a generous gift would have to come from a lover?”

“Believe it or not, that’s the first place any reasonable person’s mind would go.”

“If you say so,” she murmured. “I don’t owe you any explanations, but I’ll tell you anyway. I was a governess throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I taught a lot of children how to read music. Being female, I wasn’t welcome in most public ensembles, but private employers didn’t mind so much if I was teaching their children music competence. Anyhow.” She shrugged and raked the tines of her fork through her food. “When I was in Germany, there was another demigod doing tutoring work as well. We’d often cross paths, and we’d share war stories about our pupils.” Her lips curled up slightly at the corners, and her gaze suddenly went soft. “I think he tried to look out for me the best he could, but we were both always looking for the next thing. We had to keep moving around so no one could get suspicious about how old we were or where we’d originated. I went to England and then the US, and I don’t know where he went.”

“You ran into him again, though.”

She nodded and took a bite of food. “As luck would have it, he saw me in a concert. Ran up to me after a show and scared the heck out of me. I nearly dropped my viola. That was in Texas. He convinced me to spend the night at his farm and let his wife feed me. We spent all evening chatting and catching up, and then they wouldn’t let me leave without King. He was just a puppy then. I had no idea what he was.”

“Is he immortal? Like, a familiar or something?”

“Hmm.” Her nose scrunched as she stirred her food around on her plate, mixing meat with rice. “That’s a good context. My peer’s wife is a witch, and she has a way of weaving magic that connects pets to their owners. I guess they were uncomfortable with me still being out on my own. I suppose they figured I should have found a partner by then. After all, most people like me look for one. Being paired off is safer.”

“So why haven’t you found someone?” he asked.

“And why haven’t you called off your unwanted engagement yet?” she returned without missing a beat. She scooped up more food with one hand and, with the other, pulled a page of sheet music closer. “Malagueña” for snare drum.

“You’re deflecting,” he said,” but I think that’s a fair question.”

“It becomes decidedly less fair when everyone who’s known me for any stretch of time asks it, and I have to come up with a pretty excuse for them. I tell them that I’m too busy with my career, or that I’m probably going to move soon and it doesn’t make sense to start anything serious with someone, or how I’m still rebounding from the last one.” Grunting softly, she picked up a pencil and circled a series of notes on top of the music sheet. She was a right-hander, but her writing with her left was almost legible. It said something about drilling.

“If those aren’t what’s holding you back,” he said, curious, “what is?”

She lifted her gaze slowly to him and chewed. Watched quietly as though she had all the time in the world, and maybe she did.

When she was still and silent like that, he remembered that she wasn’t like him. Her life span was open-ended and she’d been around a hell of a long time. She probably thought he was a baby the same way he thought the woman his father expected him to marry was. That was likely what was crossing her mind every time he argued with her. Every time he made demands or tried to get her to see things from his perspective.

He wasn’t a fucking child, though, and wondered if she needed a reminder of that.

“What’s the truth, Willa?” He reached across the table and grasped her by the chin before she could lean away from him. “You think you’re too good for people?”

She swallowed and her eyelids narrowed, making the golden irises behind them seem to glow even more. She raised a hand as if to push his away, but she let it fall without touching him.

An unexpected sense of relief coursed through him that she didn’t follow through with the small refusal. He wasn’t going to hurt her. He wanted her to know that. There wasn’t a single person he craved the trust of more. She was practically a litmus test of morality, and never before had he cared if he met anyone’s standard of decency, except his mother’s.

“Is that it?” he nudged. “Easier for you not to let anyone get close enough to have you because that way you won’t have to reject them?”

“You’re way off-base.” Her eyelids opened to their usual positions, and he saw more evidence of her strangeness then—the golden hue retreating from the whites, like sunlight being absorbed by the horizon.

What the hell?

He turned her face from one side to the other and watched her eyes track, waited for the colors to shift again, but they didn’t.

“What are you doing?” She grasped his wrist as if to pull his hand away, but instead furrowed her brow and murmured, “What are you looking at?”

“What kind of magic do you have inside you, Willa?” he asked softly.

Her brow burrowed. Nose crinkled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you’re lying. You’re telling me one of those pretty excuses you mentioned.”

“Think what you want. I know what I have and what I don’t. I have no reason to lie about that. Don’t you think my life would be a lot easier if I did have a bit of magic?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Her skin was like warm satin, he discovered as his grip of her chin shifted to a caress. He shouldn’t have been touching her like that, but he didn’t know how else to go about slaking his curiosity. His questions kept multiplying. He could probably spend forever unraveling her.

“You can sense magic,” she stated matter-of-factly as her gaze fell to his hand, still stroking.

“Yeah, I can,” he said quietly.

She didn’t feel real. Substantial, yes. Solid, yes, but not real. Her skin was too smooth—like metal made into flesh. Her coloring, upon longer inspection, was unusually sallow beneath the olive.

And she was so warm. Not warm like a shapeshifter, but like a lamp with a bulb too powerful for its base.

“Do you feel any magic?” she asked demurely, gaze averted from his face. “Call me a liar if you can.”

Grimacing, he trailed his fingers down the column of her elegant neck and stopped at the dip at the base of her throat, just above the top button of her polo shirt.

She was always so buttoned up, so conservatively dressed, even on days when spring in New Mexico meant temperatures approaching ninety. She’d be the one person in a group wearing jeans or khakis, or who’d zip her sweatshirt up to the throat and put up the hood when everyone else was in short sleeves.

He hadn’t given it much thought before, but for as long as he’d known her, the only flesh of hers he’d seen was the stretch between the bottom of her sleeves and fingertips, and what was above her collars. Always collared shirts, except for once, and that one time, she’d had a big bandage at the side of her neck.

The second after he hooked his finger into her collar to have a look, she smacked his hand away as if he were a bee about to sting.

“Don’t touch me,” she snapped.

“You didn’t have a problem with me touching you before then. I daresay you liked me touching you.” He grinned. “Common affliction with ladies.”

“Perhaps you should get some counseling with your fiancée regarding that. Get out of my house.”

Fiancée.

His smile waned. Forgetting his obligations was so easy when there was no script for him to follow. No puppet master tugging at his strings. Sitting back, he leaned his chair onto the hind legs and crossed his arms over his chest. “Nah.”

Felt good to say no.

“Then I’ll sic King on you and make you leave.”

King didn’t give a shit about him. The dog was snout-deep in moo shu pork, and Willa was paying him no mind.

“Normally, I don’t stick around where I’m not wanted,” Blue said, “but I think you owe me some answers.”

“I don’t owe you anything.” She tugged her collar up in what must have been a reflexive movement before crossing her own arms. “You don’t deserve answers simply because you’ve mustered up enough energy to push words into the air. You’re entitled to nothing.”

“Then who is, for God’s sake? Who knows the answers? Who do you tell things to?”

“That’s none of your business, either.”

“And why not? Hmm?” He raised his brows at her. “Why do you insist on keeping everything about you so tightly under wraps? What are you afraid of people finding out? Give me something, Willa. Anything.”

“Anything?” She pushed her seat back from the table, and he was certain she was going to try to march him to the door and push him out of it, but she didn’t.

She pressed her hands to the back of her neck and paced in front of the stove.

Back and forth. Back and forth. Jaws twitching. Fingers nervously, rapidly tapping against her nape. Breaths coming out in short, frantic bursts.

Blue set his chair down on all four legs and pressed his hands to the table edge. “Willa. Look at me.”

She didn’t. “You know, I think I’ve been out of sync since I was born. It’s hard to really . . . grow into yourself when everything you do feels like an act of fraud.”

Slowly, he stood.

They were getting somewhere, he thought, but he didn’t want her back in that disquieted state she’d been in the day before. He didn’t want to become associated in her mind with anxiety. He’d have to figure out some way to soothe her.

She kept pacing. “One lie after another. All my life, even my name has been a lie.”

“You told me that. You said Willa wasn’t your name.”

She gave her head a hard shake. “But the one before that was wrong, too. I had one name the day I was born and then another the day after because my mother didn’t want anyone else to know the first one. She said she’d made a mistake—said she hadn’t been thinking clearly, but who could blame her?”

Blue couldn’t tell if the question was meant to be rhetorical. She still wasn’t looking at him. She was pacing methodically, five steps forward before turning, and then back.

He took a step closer. She was right that he could usually sense magic. Shapeshifters tended to be more sensitive to paranormal energy than average people, and alpha-level beasts in particular. He didn’t feel any magic coming off her, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have any. It may have just meant that whatever she had was something he wasn’t equipped to understand.

“I think she thought that if she didn’t give me another name, the nuns would pitch us out and we wouldn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“The nuns?”

“They were so poor.” She paused pacing long enough to smooth down the corner of a lifting linoleum tile, and she got moving again.

He took another step toward her, not giving a single damn that King had obliterated their dinner. Food could be replaced. Watching Willa spiral down some kind of obsessive rabbit hole was making his hair raise in that ominous way that made a Coyote want to shift and howl.

“Who was poor, Willa?”

One more step.

He hoped if he kept saying her name, she’d remember that she wasn’t talking to herself—that she was talking to him and that she wasn’t alone.

“My grandparents, and their parents, too. Just couldn’t get ahead. Slept on dirt every night. Rarely had their bellies filled, no matter how hard they scrabbled. They sent my mother to the nuns so she’d at least be starving with some dignity.” She let out a dry laugh and slowed again to tamp down that tile corner. The adhesive was probably bad. The entire floor was likely overdue for replacement, but he doubted she could afford it.

“It was either that or she get married to someone who had a little money, but everyone thought she was crazy. Her head wasn’t right. Even worse than mine.” She grimaced and moved again. More harried pacing, but at least she’d let her arms fall relaxed at her sides.

“Your mother was a nun, Willa?” Another step forward for him.

A jerky nod from her. “It was . . . odd. The family had only been Christian for the past two generations. Moriscos. The cloistering should have been good for her. In theory, it should have been good, but no matter how hard women try to seclude themselves, men find ways of getting access.”

“Your father?”

No response to that. She picked up a large canister from the counter and set it atop the peeling tile. Then she paced some more.

“I suppose it wasn’t completely unheard of for a nun to turn up pregnant. They were all so naive about the body. That naivety was bound to get people in trouble sometimes. They didn’t throw her out then because she certainly wasn’t the only one there with child, but naming me what she did would have been . . . Terrible. I couldn’t have a name like that. Not if we were really what she claimed we were, so she told them my name was Beatriz.”

“But your name’s not Beatriz.” While her back was turned, he replaced the canister and stood atop the flapping tile.

When she paced back and found him in her way, she furrowed her brow. Suddenly, he’d become an obstacle. He’d gotten in the way of her orderly pacing and she needed to switch gears.

She didn’t seem to know how, except to turn the other way—a shorter march.

Smaller steps.

Not gonna work.

When she returned, and spun on her heel a foot from him, he took her hand and squeezed it.

“My name’s Barrett,” he said. “That’s the name that’s on all the junk mail I get from folks who trawl property tax databases. Barrett Shapely, because my mother didn’t want to name me Randall Junior.”

Her fingers inside his grip wriggled tentatively, kind of like a baby bird testing its wings for the first time.

He tightened his grip incrementally, pulling her closer without her immediate notice.

“She didn’t want to name me after him,” he said. He’d pulled her back so far that she had no choice but to turn toward him. Didn’t meet his gaze, though. Stared at his neck. His chin. Something down there.

“Why not?” came her muted query.

“Because she wanted me to have a chance. She knew what that name meant to other Coyotes and she didn’t want me to have it.” He put his hands on Willa’s biceps and chafed. Maybe she didn’t need the warmth, but right then, he did. “She hated him. Had to marry him anyway, just like I have to marry that—”

Doesn’t matter.

He took a breath. Recentered. “She . . . hung in there until the prenup expired, and then got the hell out with barely the shirt on her back. Most of my father’s money started as hers.”

He was always chasing a damn dollar. That was how Blue had ended up being more of a commodity than a son.

“And you and Diana?” She did look up then. There was concern mixed with curiosity in her gaze. She probably already knew what he’d say.

“Family court said that she had custody, but Coyotes don’t always pay courts any heed. She got expelled from the territory and was cut off from us completely until I was eighteen and left for college. He couldn’t really stop me from seeing her then. Reacquainting was harder for Diana. She was angry and resentful that Mom couldn’t stick it out. She was young and needed her mother.” He pulled in a breath and rolled his gaze to the ceiling. “Still needs her mother. Their relationship isn’t what it used to be.”

“I know what that’s like,” Willa whispered. “My father tried to take me away, too, because my mother wouldn’t have him. He punished her for that until the day she died, and now he’s taking out his anger out on me. I hope I never have to see him again.”

“Who is he, Willa?”

“No names.”

She started to pace once more, and the tense, tight set of her mouth told him that story time was over.

But then the pacing turned into what seemed to be an inward fixation. She stared at nothing, forehead wrinkled and eyes filled with worry she wouldn’t share with him, but whatever it was, it scared her. He could smell her terror in the way her adrenaline and sweat surged. He could see her rapid pulse throbbing at her temples.

She stayed like that for a minute. Maybe two.

Too long for a living thing to be so still and yet so scared.

He didn’t care how much she hated him. He didn’t want her to think she was alone, and he wouldn’t leave her alone. Not when she was like that.