Chapter Fourteen

Willa didn’t realize what she’d said and what she was doing until she found herself breathing in a sweet, desert scent with sharp notes of male testosterone and the distinctive Coyote musk.

She’d lost her head for a moment, and had said too much—had given away too many pieces of her past to a man she couldn’t and shouldn’t trust. And she was standing there in her kitchen that he’d sauntered into as though he owned Maria and everything in it. His arms were around her so tightly that she couldn’t move backward or to either side. The only place she could go was closer to him, and that was the last thing she wanted.

So move.

She couldn’t. At the very thought, her toes curled traitorously into her sneakers as though they sought to grip the floor itself and keep her there for her own good.

It wasn’t good, though.

Blue set his chin atop her head and rubbed her back slowly, each circle conducting the tempo of her breathing. Deep breath in at the top of the loop, long breath out at the bottom.

Her heart had stopped beating so fast. It always pounded when the thoughts overwhelmed, adding another layer to her anxiety. As it slowed, the knot of anticipation in her gut unfurled, too. Her body was telling her that the danger had passed, but that was a lie. Danger was standing in her kitchen and had pulled her against its body.

“Why won’t you go away?” she whispered.

“What good would that do either of us?”

She didn’t have a good answer for him. As much as she worried about the upheaval his presence was causing the pack, now she had to also fret over the fact that if he left, Kenny, Lance, and Diana would leave with him. She hadn’t wanted to care about them. They were outsiders. But she did care, and the Sparks pack sounded like a dog-eat-dog disaster. At least in Maria, people mostly knew who they could trust.

Blue trailed his thumb across her nape, tickling the fine, short hair there, making her spine twitch involuntarily, but he stilled her motions with a tighter hug, planting his other hand against the small of her back, nearly crushing her against him.

She should have felt suffocated, but didn’t. Some people were good at hugging and knew instinctively how long to hold on and how tight to hold. Her grandmother had been one. Willa had only seen her a few times, but at each, she’d scooped Willa up and held her tight against her bosom until Willa’s spirit had quieted.

She’d whisper, and Willa had no idea then what those foreign words had meant, but the feeling behind the words had been curative.

“Everything is fine with you,” she’d been saying in Arabic.

“You’re all right,” Blue said. He let Willa go then, but not far. He took her hands and slouched to link her gaze to his dark, curious one.

She gave her head a small shake. Reflex. Small lies told to one’s self had a way of becoming delusions, and she couldn’t afford that.

“Sometimes you just have to pretend,” he said. “Trust me. You trust me?”

“Not as far as I can throw you.”

He let out a quiet guffaw. “That’s more than none. Come on.” He grabbed her keys off the hook along with King’s leash and pulled her along behind him.

King stopped licking the table and skittered ahead to the door.

She grimaced, already dreading what three pounds of spicy Chinese takeout was going to do to his canine digestive system.

Sleeping outside tonight, dog.

“Where are we going?” she asked Blue as he locked the door.

He latched the leash on to King’s collar and scratched the excited dog behind his ears. “Just getting some air. I always think better when I don’t have four walls around me.”

“What do you need to think about?”

He shrugged and started up the walkway. “Dunno. Maybe I’ll need to do some thinking in the next few minutes.”

“Sometimes, I’d prefer not to.”

“Problems seem smaller when you do.”

“Are you an expert on problem solving?”

His sly grin had probably been melting hearts since he was six weeks old, and she was just one more sucker with no resistance to his charms. She shouldn’t have looked him in the eyes. It was easier just not to see people, especially people who had more power than her.

“I’m an expert on Coyotes, capitalism, and folklore,” he said. “I don’t claim expertise on much else.”

As he hooked his arm around hers, she parsed that statement, tripping over the tiniest crack in the sidewalk as she did.

“Oof.”

He got her balanced and upright without missing a beat.

“Folklore?” she asked.

“Yep. As my father would put it, I’ve got a master’s degree in bullshit.”

“Why folklore, of all things?”

“Well, I’ve also got an MBA, but that was for practical purposes. Gotta be employable, right?”

“Naturally.”

“Truth be told, that was an afterthought,” he said. “Folklore was where my interests always were. You can blame my mother for that. She’s kind of a fable geek. Used to collect first editions of fairy-tale books when she could find them. Haunted all the auctions and estate sales she could get to looking for rare books and would take me and Diana with her. Hard not to get caught up in the excitement. Hers was so genuine, you know?”

“Does she still collect them?”

He grimaced and passed King’s leash to his other hand.

The dog had taken his first of what would probably end up being several pit stops right in front of Dirk Wiggims’s daylilies.

She hoped he wasn’t at home. He was sensitive about those invasive weeds.

“She stopped collecting a few years ago,” he said. “Money got tight for her, but I send her a volume whenever I find something interesting. Diana’s way better at locating stuff than I am, though.” His sly grin returned. “Also better at getting folks to hand their books over for cheap. She has a certain knack for bargaining.”

“In other words, people are afraid to tell her no?”

He raised one shoulder in a shrug. “Maybe that has a little something to do with it, but I also think she knows which battles are worth fighting and she doesn’t give up until she gets what she wants.” He gave the leash a slight tug and got King moving again. “Save some flowers for another dog to water, bud.”

“He’s the only one who’ll try,” Willa muttered. “The rest are afraid of Dirk’s sprinklers. They come on at random times.”

They rounded the corner heading out of the subdivision. They were only about a half mile from Maria proper, but that may as well have been ten. There was a noticeable divide between the haves and the have-nots in Maria, well established during the nineteenth century when the population was all cattle barons, cow hands, stagecoach bandits, gamblers, madams, and prostitutes. Within a block, the compact, older housing originally meant for blue-collar retirees gave way to grand adobe domiciles and modern architecture projects made of expensive, corrugated whatever and with perfectly manicured desert landscaping in their front yards.

Sighing as they passed Paul and his lawyer wife’s stately monument to manhood, she pondered her lot in life.

Do I really have to be broke?

She didn’t have time to dwell on the subject, because Blue started pulling her along at a brisk clip, eyes straight ahead.

“There’s a line,” he said, breaking out into a full-bore run. “When there’s a line, that means there’s good shit.”

“Huh?” She was struggling just to keep up. Blue was a well-honed running machine with a shapeshifter’s lung capacity, and she was a musician who only ran when she was being chased.

“Tiny’s got the truck out tonight,” he said.

She saw the taco truck then, parked across the street and down the block, right in front of the coffee shop.

“He’s not usually out this late,” she panted.

“Nope.”

They darted across the street and got in line before the scent of hot grease and cinnamon hit her nose.

There were five more people in line behind them by the time Tiny returned to the truck window. He handed down two huge churros to Tamatsu, who in turn handed one to Noelle in exchange for a paper cup of coffee.

“I like this guy’s hustle,” Blue said. “The damn coffee shop just went to summer hours this morning.”

“Tiny doesn’t even sell churros.”

Tamatsu chuckled as he and Noelle passed by them in line. “And maybe he won’t be in three weeks, but he’s selling them right now.”

“Next!” the Cougar called out from the window, and the line inched forward.

The next guy in line stepped forward and immediately thrust his pointer finger into Tiny’s placid face. “You’re full of shit, you know that? I had them first.”

Tiny twirled one end of his handlebar mustache and gave his competitor a slow blink. “So go to your cart and sell them. You’re holding up the line.”

The guy slapped five dollars onto the metal shelf in front of the window. “Give me a churro.”

“Why? So you can say I stole your recipe and spread more of that slander around?” Tiny made a flicking gesture at the bill as though it were an unwanted bug on the shelf. “Fuck out of here, man. Anybody with functioning taste buds can tell that you got yours out of the freezer at Costco and you’re just heating them up in your cart’s warmer.”

Blue rubbed his palms together and chuckled under his breath. “Ooh. Turf war.”

“It’s been going on for almost a year,” Willa whispered. “Used to be that Tiny just ignored him, but now I think he’s trolling him.”

Tiny called over his competitor’s head, “Next! What you kids want?”

Willa pushed up onto her tiptoes to see who the kids were and immediately regretted it. She looked around, pondering if she could make a stealthy escape before they spotted her. In a town as small as Maria, getting spotted by her students wasn’t especially rare, but she had no desire to get seen within a foot of Blue Shapely outside of pack gatherings. Rumors would fly, and she doubted Blue would be noble enough to douse them. She had a morality clause in her employment contract to worry about.

“You just gonna act like I’m not here?” Burrito Guy asked Tiny.

“Ma!” Tiny called into the truck. “Two more churros. You got enough batter to get through the night?”

Ms. Minnie uttered something in Spanish that was scandalous enough to make her son, a forty-something-year-old ex-trucker, blush and a demigoddess giggle.

“All you had to say was yes, Ma,” Tiny grumbled.

Blue gave Willa’s arm a nudge. “You’re fluent in Spanish, right? I only caught about a quarter of that.”

“Several dialects.”

“What’d she say?”

“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t translate it directly, but I think close enough would be ‘I told you so.’”

Two more churros handed off.

They inched forward, and Kenny made a lateral move into the line from out of nowhere.

“Hey!” the people behind them balked.

He waved them off, shouting, “I’m not ordering. Just conferring.”

Before the grumbles had even died down, Kenny said to Blue, “We’ve got a problem.”

Blue rolled his eyes. “I’d be surprised if we didn’t. What’s new?”

“Heard some rumbles from a few old heads. They’re making noise about splintering off.”

Willa stuck her head into the gaggle. “Are you talking about my old heads or the ones in Sparks?”

Kenny’s grimace was telling enough.

Oh no.

Splintering meant they had built-in enemies within the pack, and no matter what she or Blue did to quell them, there was going to be a wound to morale. They couldn’t afford to slip even deeper into the murk.

“But why?” she asked.

“That’s easy enough to guess,” Blue said. “They like chaos. I don’t.”

“But you’re supposed to get on them on board,” Willa said, and they inched up the line a bit more, putting them right next to Burrito Guy.

Blue pivoted her around him and to his right side in a half do-si-do, putting her between him and Kenny. “And I am,” he said.

“By making things worse first?”

“There’s always going to be some chaff that comes out of the threshing,” Kenny said. “That’s fine. That’s normal.”

“You want them to go away?”

“Of course not,” Blue said. To Tiny, he said, “You gonna spit in my food, man?”

Tiny cleared his throat and snapped his hair net down over his ponytail. “You feeding Willa?”

“Yes.”

“Then no. What do you want?”

“Tacos, actually. The dog ate my dinner. Lemme get a Six.”

“I want a churro,” Kenny said in a barely audible murmur.

“And a churro,” Blue said.

Burrito guy sucked his teeth. “Come on.”

“What you want, Willa?” Tiny asked.

“To rewind the last six months and do them over.” She massaged the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. “Also, a churro.”

She was having a difficult time formulating a proper response to what Kenny had said and Blue’s relative lack of reaction to it, but she knew having a near-empty stomach wouldn’t help matters. In fact, low blood sugar was probably only going to make her snarly and irrational. She’d deal with him after she’d dealt with the churro.

Blue paid for their food and then corralled them to the side, in easy view of the window, but far enough away from Burrito Guy to avoid any potential blowback. The competitor’s ears were turning redder by the minute, and Willa worried if he was nearing a stroke.

She found herself in the middle of a Coyote sandwich with a side order of King as the men conferred, talking over her head as though she was no more sentient than a lawn ornament.

“Who?” Blue asked. “And how’d you find out?”

“Exactly who you’d suspect. Most of the bikers. The road-burners.”

“You mean the ones everyone in town thinks are a gang.”

Kenny shrugged. “They might as well be for all the shit they stir up.”

Willa folded her arms over her chest and drummed her fingertips against her biceps. “Ahem.”

“That’s nearly half the pack,” Blue said.

“How hard do you want to work to keep them?”

Willa cleared her throat again. “You’re doing that thing where you forget to include me in decisions.”

Blue pulled in a deep breath and looked down at her.

At a bit over average height, she’d never felt so short around Coyotes until the Sparks crew came into town. “I don’t want to have this argument here.”

“If it were up to you, we wouldn’t have the argument at all.”

“Come get it!” Tiny shouted from the window.

Kenny went to get the food.

Blue pulled Willa more out of the way of the amassing crowd. In the time it’d taken them to order, the line had sprawled halfway down the block.

“Park, Kenny,” Blue called out.

“Yep.”

“That’s all you do,” Willa murmured. “Bark orders.”

“Sorry if you see it that way,” Blue said. “I’m just doing what’s efficient. Efficiency is the antidote to chaos.”

Blue led both Willa and King to the small park adjacent to the coffeehouse. Really, it was more of a courtyard built up by some residents who got sick of looking at the previous eyesore that had been there. The old general store had gotten burned out, and for years, there’d been nothing in the space but the remnants of the fire. The witches had made it a community project. They were good at organizing when they had incentive.

It was a cozy space about the size of the townhouse garden belonging to a London family she was governess for in 1812. Same approximate shape, but with more cacti and definitely more hipster graffiti.

Blue sat her on the one unoccupied bench, which they’d been approaching at the same exact time as a young couple.

He only had to blink at them and they scurried away.

Willa sighed.

King plopped gracelessly onto the brick path beside the bench and promptly unrolled his tongue from his mouth as though it were a red carpet and flies were his honored guests.

Blue sat oppressively close to her and said quietly through clenched teeth, “You’re not thinking rationally.”

“Don’t go there,” she said with a pound of her fist against her thigh. “Just . . . don’t. Don’t mistake me caring too much for being irrational.”

“I’m not trying to be an ass.”

She opted to hold her tongue on that one.

“You’re not thinking like a Coyote because you aren’t one. You don’t have that gut feeling about when you need to cut your losses and pare down some of the personnel in the pack.”

“We did that,” she spat back as Kenny approached with food bags in hand. “Before you came, we lost at least ten to that purge.”

Tito’s uncle, Shadow, an ancient who’d formerly been a Mexican god, had taken out his own garbage. His son and rogue shapeshifters had been infiltrating the Coyote pack for years by impersonating and replacing former pack members. Shadow had ignored them, until he couldn’t ignore them anymore. He’d cleaned up for Tito’s sake. Willa hadn’t even known the impersonators were there. If she’d had a little magic or some ability to sense disruptive energy, she might have figured out that something was amiss in the pack.

She grimaced.

Maybe Blue would have noticed.

“You can’t really count them.” Kenny perched on the edge of the bench beside Blue. He loosened his gingham-print bowtie, tugged his suspenders off his shoulders, pulled the collar of his shirt away from his neck a bit, and swallowed.

She’d seen a lot of Coyotes do that as the days inched closer to the full moon. Kenny was always in control of his faculties—he was dominant enough to know when to self-correct his behavior—but that didn’t mean that Mother Nature couldn’t make him uncomfortable. He was still at her mercy in a lot of ways.

She wondered if both he and Blue wouldn’t be a lot more comfortable if they dressed down a little. They always looked like they had a business meeting in five minutes. Lance, on the other hand, was more laidback. He wore whatever shirt matched his cleanest pants.

Kenny handed a churro to her, held his own, and handed the rest of the bag to Blue.

“I understand the compulsion to keep the number the same,” Blue said. “Trust me. What I’m doing here would look a hell of a lot better in a report to my father if the pack was a good size versus one that’s contracting. As things stand right now, he’s going to think I’m not on top of the situation here, and that’ll be a strike against me. He’s going to say ‘Come on home, boy,’ and me opting out of that edict will end up with him personally coming down here to fetch me and kick my ass down a chapel aisle.”

“I’m trying to care.” Willa broke off a pile of hot fried dough and popped it into her mouth. It practically melted against her tongue, and she slouched with pleasure against the bench back. “Ugh, the last time I had a churro was at the state fair when I was helping to chaperone the high school band a few years ago. It wasn’t as good as this.”

“You want me to get you another one?” Blue asked. He’d already made one taco disappear into his body and had the second locked and loaded in his big hand.

Yes.

But what came out of her mouth was, “Don’t do me any favors. You’re trying to distract me, and I’m not going to let you.”

“I’m not trying to distract you. I’m multitasking. That’s the only way to get things done with you.” He bit off half a taco in one go and somehow hadn’t gotten so much as a pinpoint of spillage on his crisp white shirt or even into the wrapper. If neat eating was a measurable skill, she would have never thought a Coyote would possess it.

Sourly, she dusted some cinnamon sugar off her polo shirt. “You’re not endearing yourself to me any when you behave like conferring with me is a chore. I’m so sorry that I haven’t just rolled over and become the doormat you require.”

“For God’s sake, I didn’t mean it like that.” He popped the remnant end of the taco into his mouth and his fingers along with it. A move that should have been classless and gauche somehow took on an erotic appeal when he did it. Perhaps there was something in the slow retrieval of his fingers from his mouth or the way he stared down at the slick digits before putting the side of his index finger against his lips and sucking.

As a strange heat uncurled in her belly, Willa closed her eyes and gritted her teeth in shame.

Inexperienced though she was, she knew what those flutters in her body meant—that breathless anxiousness in her core. The prickling heat creeping up her neck and cheeks.

Her body was aware of the fact that his body was male, and attractive.

White shirts aside, she tried not to pay attention to such things. Indifference kept her safe—refusing to get attached kept her and the people around her safe.

The moment she slipped up, Apollo would put whoever she’d connected to in his crosshairs. Willa had vowed after her mother’s death to never let down her guard too much for anyone. Apollo couldn’t stand the idea of anyone being loved more than him, and she didn’t buy that anyone would love her enough to endure him—not even when belonging to her meant immortality.

Having so many superficial friendships was dissatisfying, to say the least, and she avoided romance as though it were an outbreak of plague. Being related to who she was, she couldn’t afford to pick wrong. She’d had no choice but to decide not to pick at all.

To be touched at all.

Willa started at Blue’s grip around her wrist and, as always, tried to jerk away from the improper touch before she realized what he was doing.

“Easy,” he whispered, lifting her arm. “You’re going to drop it. Stay with me, okay? Lost you for a good couple of minutes there.”

She’d nearly let her churro fall when she’d been swimming around in the murk of her mind.

Dragging her tongue across her dry lips, she pried off a churro end, no longer hungry.

“You want to go home?” he whispered.

She shook her head hard. Her brain was louder at home. She didn’t want to be in a small place where her thoughts seemed to echo off the walls and always transformed into nightmares.

“Want to walk?” he murmured. “Or go into the library? It’s open for a bit longer.”

“W-walking is . . . okay.”

“All right. I know a place.”

At that moment, she couldn’t think of a better option, or better company, so she gave a consenting nod.

Dusting cinnamon sugar off his hand onto his pants, Kenny said, “If you give me your keys, I’ll walk King home.”

Keys?

For a few seconds, the vocabulary didn’t quite land, and she struggled to remember what those things were. Her brain was disordered, too many ideas ping-ponging off of each other and clamoring for equal attention. She couldn’t prioritize. She couldn’t tell what was important and what she needed to let go of.

“Here.” Blue unclipped her keychain carabiner from her belt loop—When did I put that there?—and handed them to Kenny.

He took the keys and the leash and stuffed what was left of his snack into his mouth.

“Debrief later,” Blue told him. “You know the deal.”

After a brisk nod, Kenny left and King bounded beside him, obviously recovering from his stranger aversion far faster than Willa would have preferred. Guard dogs weren’t supposed to be so social.

Blue tossed his food bag into the trashcan and pulled Willa up by the hand. “Come on. I’ll show you where I go when I don’t want to be bothered.”

“Being bothered isn’t my problem,” she said quietly. “Not being enough is.”