Chapter Three

Blue didn’t think Willa was going to speak up. She never did when he needed her to. But then she made a jerky gesture with a shaking hand toward a chair and turned her back to him.

Initially, her refusal to look him in the eye grated at him. Eye contact avoidance was something untrustworthy Coyotes did, and his job was to put them in their place. He’d had to keep reminding himself that she wasn’t a Coyote.

He also had to keep reminding himself that there were a number of reasons a woman wouldn’t look him in the eyes, many of which had nothing to do with him. Coyotes weren’t well known for empathy, but Blue tried to be better. He failed a lot, but he’d promised his mother before she’d gotten expelled from his father’s pack that he’d try.

“I thought about leaving them,” she said softly.

“Yeah?” He turned a chair around and sat backward, draping his forearms across the back. “Go on.”

She didn’t immediately speak. She paced in front of the stove, mug of tea between her hands, body practically swimming in her blousy pajamas. Her body was covered from jaw to ankles, hands excluded, and her house was warmer than it needed to be, even for a human. He would have been burning up in the same clothes, but being a shifter, he ran hotter than average. Willa was a mystery in almost every respect.

He’d been in the company of innumerable supernatural beings since arriving in Maria—angels and various shifter types and gods and demigods, and even a few fae—and almost all of them had a certain forthrightness Willa was lacking. He didn’t know what that meant about her. Actually, he didn’t know much about her at all. No one he knew did. It hadn’t mattered at first. Six months ago, he’d seen the gig in Maria as an opportunity to put his unwanted marriage on hold, and it hadn’t mattered if he and the patron didn’t see completely eye to eye. But that way of thinking wasn’t working anymore. What had started as an escape had turned into an honest obligation, and he planned on getting it right.

Blue had an opportunity to shape a pack into something better than what he had back in Sparks, where fathers regularly bartered their sons away to pay off old debts like his father did to him.

He watched the mystery fidget her buttons and shift her weight. She was stressed. He could smell her sweat, her adrenaline. He knew he was the cause, but he couldn’t change that. Leaving wasn’t an option when there was so much chaos to detangle.

“My father . . . has a tendency to give his children odd gifts,” she said haltingly, “though usually they’re a bit better suited to the recipient.”

“How so?”

“That’s . . . complicated.” She took a long sip of her tea and looked over the mug. Not at him, but just past him. It was a thinking stare, and not an avoidance one. He couldn’t recall ever seeing her so still. She was always talking, always coordinating, always producing something. She was a nonstop blur, and it was hard to get a look at her from any one angle for long.

He rubbed his beard, pondering as he watched her.

Maybe that works out in her favor.

People probably made the mistake of judging her as plain because they didn’t look long enough. He had, at first.

He had for months.

She’d pulled one over on him, whether she’d tried to or not, and he’d been pissed at himself for not paying closer attention—not only because she was so pretty, but because he’d been distracted, and distractedness meant he wasn’t doing his job.

She wore her brown hair shorn boyishly close to her head and her ears were free of jewelry, but she was unmistakably female. There was beauty in the slopes of her full lips and a certain elegance in the tapering of her face. What stood out the most, though, was the unusual clarity in her eyes. There was no good name for the color that was more yellow than amber. It wasn’t a human color, but he doubted that most humans had keen enough visual acuity to see the color the way he did. The color had been worth him making a mental note over. She might have claimed that she wasn’t especially dangerous, but he still wanted to know her parentage. Risk avoidance was what made him a smarter alpha than most.

He didn’t sense magic in her energy, but something was off about her in a way he couldn’t put a finger on.

Her gaze focused on him, finally, and lips parted.

He was on the edge of his seat, eager for those words. Desperate for information about the woman who’d been turning his damn beard grayer by the day for six months. Maria was supposed to have been an easy escape.

“I’d been in the country for about—”

The mournful howl of a nearby coyote interrupted whatever Willa had been about to say, and he slapped his hands on the tabletop.

Dammit.

Blue felt the call deep in his bones as though he were little more than a tuning rod that vibrated at the slightest provocation. Putting up a hand to ask for her silence, he listened.

He couldn’t guess if the coyote was shifter or wild, but then it howled again. The bass in the pitch marked the beast as one of his, and he or she was just a few blocks away if Blue’s desert reckoning was any good.

The beast howled again, and there was distress in the canine song. A plea for help that Blue couldn’t ignore.

“Shit.” He stood in a hurry, put the chair beneath the table, and jogged to Willa’s front door. “What the hell are they still doing out after curfew?”

“Well, um . . . ” Willa crowded behind him in the foyer where he was trying to put his boots back on. “I-I think,” she stammered breathily, “that most thought the curfew was sort of optional.”

“And what would have given them that idea?” he snapped, nearly ripping off the upper of his shoe as he tugged it on. He suspected he already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear her tell him. She was sabotaging him, and he wanted her to know that he knew.

Wringing her hands, she cringed. “You’re talking about adults, Blue. You can’t tell a bunch of grown men that they’re not allowed out after ten and expect them to not need an adjustment period. That’s unreasonable.”

“No.” He yanked the door open. “What’s unreasonable is cutting me off at the knees at every turn when I’m trying to straighten out the pack. Gods, woman. Do you seriously hate me that much?”

If she had a response to that, he didn’t hear it. He took off at a sprint, listening for more Coyote howls, and adjusting his direction as a chorus of them echoed from near what sounded like Lamarr’s Garage.

Two-and-a-half blocks, and Blue was too damned unsettled to be dealing with any of Lamarr’s boys. They needed patient, sympathetic handling, and he wasn’t feeling it. He was feeling like bashing some heads together and squatting down to heckle the blockheads about their lifestyle choices as they slipped into unconsciousness.

“Damn.” He threw his hands up as he ran into the lot spying Billy Lamarr atop the garage roof, crooning pitifully at the moon as though it were a lover scorned, and his brother Ralph was on the ground providing off-key accompaniment.

They weren’t distressed. They were deranged.

Their clothes were scattered haphazardly across the asphalt along with a couple of empty bottles of MD 20/20 and a half-dozen crushed Tecate cans.

Shit.

Blue shoved his hands through his hair and watched Billy dancing on the edge of the rooftop, his moon serenade vacillating between major and minor keys in such an unpredictable order that Blue found himself shuddering with each modulation.

That idiot was going to screw around and get the sheriff’s department sent out to the property, or a pissed enough neighbor with a shotgun would scare them straight first. If the neighbor was of the human sort, they might not think twice about firing off a few warning shots, and if one of those pellets happened to hit a coyote—no harm done. After all, wild coyotes in Maria had become something of a nuisance in recent years. “Overpopulation,” the folks at animal control said.

More like oversaturation of a certain shapeshifter population’s blood alcohol levels.

Billy paused his crooning to take a breath, which meant Ralph—on the ground staring up at his big brother with wide doggy eyes—went quiet, too.

He was so busy watching Billy with his tongue lolling and trying to stay upright on his four legs that he didn’t sense Blue stalking up behind him.

Ralph took a breath, ready to join Billy in his aural assault again, but Blue made damned sure the beast couldn’t get a sound out. Blue forced him to the ground with one hand clenched into the fur of Ralph’s neck and immediately put his knee on Ralph’s belly.

As the dog blinked at him through his one visible eye, quiet with apparent surprise, Blue pushed his alpha will through him—a magical reminder of who was in charge. A reteaching of pack order, and that Lamarrs were followers, not leaders.

Get in line, dog. Don’t fight it. Get in line.

Ralph’s eyelid drifted downward and his panting tongue retreated into his mouth.

Get back into your skin. Now.

Blue didn’t wait to see if Ralph would follow the order because Billy had turned his attention down to the ground and was watching Blue with intensity, suggesting that the Coyote was about to bolt.

“Not today, pup,” Blue said, wagging a finger at him. “Not chasing your pale ass through the desert tonight. Shift back and climb down here. Disobey, and I swear I’m gonna put a hell of a hurting on you when I catch up to you.”

Billy backed away from the roof’s edge so that only the tip of his snout was visible, and barked. Whether it was a “Screw you” bark or an “Understood” bark, Blue couldn’t tell. Billy was rarely coherent in either of his forms.

“I’m giving you to the count of three,” Blue said, folding his arms over his chest. “One.”

He observed a ladder propped against the side of the garage. That was likely how Billy had gotten up on the roof. Blue didn’t particularly want to test the steadiness of the rickety-looking thing given that he outweighed Billy by at least forty pounds. He’d do what he had to do, though, to make the exploits of the Coyote population fade into the memories of the locals. In his father’s pack in Sparks, nobody—save for the few witches in town—knew the shifters were there. They were a long-established pack that Shapelys had been competently shepherding for a hundred years. No one could dispute that his father kept his pack in order. Blue hadn’t wanted to be like him—hadn’t wanted to resort to the old man’s strong-arm tactics—but he was starting to see the appeal of them.

“Two,” Blue said, impatiently clearing his throat.

Ralph’s body gave a final twitch into its human form and the lush expelled a wet-sounding, twenty-five-proof belch.

Gravel crunched beneath tires rolling into the lot, and Blue caught the familiar ticking of the engine just before the driver killed it.

“Stay out of my way,” he shouted without turning to look at Willa. To Billy, he said, “And three.”

Billy emitted another of those impertinent barks, and his nose disappeared from the ledge.

His canine feet padded across the roof to the backside.

The dunce was going to jump and try to escape into the desert.

Growling, Blue took off for the backside of the property and was about to scale the chain-link fence between front and back when approximately 120 pounds of reckless demigoddess slammed into his back.

He stumbled, but quickly righted himself. Spinning around on his heel, he spat, “What the hell are you doing?”

Billy was getting away.

The dumbass had hit the ground with a plop, let out a little howl of the whoopsie sort, and started running with a shuffle. Blue could track him, no problem, but he didn’t see why he should have to.

Grimacing, Willa fidgeted with the bottom of her pajama top. “Have some mercy,” she whispered.

“Mercy? Are you kidding me? You must be kidding me. This is all an elaborate joke, and any moment now, the folks with cameras are going to leap out and say, ‘Surprise! It’s all a prank for YouTube views, man!’ So, where they at?” He spun around, scanning the area for the interlopers he knew weren’t there. He would have smelled them if anyone else was there.

He gave her shoulder a poke because she wouldn’t look at him, and she owed him at least that much. “What exactly do you think I was going to do to him?”

She shrugged. “You were mad.”

“And?”

“And anger usually comes with a certain amount of violence, so . . . ”

“You’ve got to be fu—” At her preemptive grimace, Blue shut his mouth, pinched the bridge of his nose, and closed his eyes.

She hated him. She hated him so much that she wanted to kill him in increments—to draw out his suffering by punishing him for daring to step foot into her town. He was starting to wonder if he’d made a grave miscalculation in going there.

Nah.

He could have been married to a too-damn-young stranger and miserable for six months. Maria was still the better option, even if he was just buying himself time. He’d have to go back to Sparks eventually. His would-be father-in-law would demand it. After all, Blue was the payment due for his father’s old debt to another alpha.

When he could stop grinding his teeth, he risked opening his eyes.

Willa had backed away from him and was peering in Ralph’s direction with the sort of pity that unhardened mothers of preschoolers had for their children when they fell and scraped their knees.

Ralph was twenty-seven years old and had a preschooler of his own whom he should have been at home setting a good example for. He didn’t need her to baby him. He needed a swift kick to the ass.

Yelling at Willa was pointless when he could put it off until the next day. Getting the lush home was the issue of more critical importance.

“Grab the bottles and cans and toss them into the recycling bin,” he said to her. “Then get their clothes off the ground.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to put him into the back of your Jeep, and we’re going to take him home to his wife.”

“If we take him home like this, she’s probably going to divorce him. I think she’s about at wit’s end.”

“Oh well. Not my problem.” Blue hauled Ralph up and onto his shoulder, going rigid when the limp man convulsed and expelled another belch. Blue didn’t have sentimental attachment to the shirt he was wearing, but he didn’t particularly want to be riding around Maria with some other jackass’s vomit on his clothes.

When it didn’t seem that Ralph was going to let off anything other than flammable air, Blue carried him to the Jeep.

“Do you have any mercy at all?” she asked.

The glass wine bottles shattered against the bottom of the empty recycling bin.

Blue tugged the Jeep’s back door open and plopped Ralph onto the seat. “This is what mercy looks like. Sometimes, mercy is about not letting people destroy themselves, even though they’re trying so hard to.” He closed the door and turned to her. She was actually looking at him, eyes like flickering torches in the dark.

“Can’t mercy be kind?” she asked.

“Kindness would have been not allowing them to get like this in the first place.”

“This is my fault, then?”

He didn’t answer. There was no good answer.