Chapter Six

Willa sometimes wished she could bring herself to commit violence. Peering up at Blue’s smug countenance certainly triggered a kind of revulsion in her that she’d never felt before. Alas, brute force simply wasn’t in her constitution.

Have to find some other way to make him go away.

“I think you’re forgetting you’re here at my sufferance,” she said.

“Be that as it may, I’m still doing you a hell of a favor.”

She sighed and rubbed her eyes. So tired. She’d given up on trying to sleep after two hours of anxious, horizontal fretting about things that had happened so long ago that the only people who cared were the ones writing history dissertations. She’d ended up walking King until dawn and then she’d gotten herself ready for the school day. It was a wonder she was upright.

“No, I wasn’t born like this,” she said, ready for the conversation to be over. “And I checked on Ralph yesterday, and as of right now, his wife hasn’t kicked him out of his house.”

“Wanna know where his brother is?”

Willa raised her brows and let them fall. “Hopefully, not in a shallow grave,” she said in an undertone.

Blue laughed. “Nope, though by the time I’m done with him, he might wish he was in one. I hear coming off the sauce isn’t a hell of a lot of fun.”

“You can’t make unilateral changes to people’s lifestyles. They have to want to do better.”

“You don’t understand shapeshifters very well, then.”

She grimaced. Maybe after so long, she still didn’t.

“In the absence of strong dominants, weaker pack members are more likely to act on more primitive urges,” he said.

“As our father would say,” Diana added, carrying what appeared to be the emptied supply box to the recycling bin at the rear of the room, “dominants keep the dogs on two legs. In a perfectly functional pack, the will of the alpha and his lieutenants is the will of the pack.” She cast Willa a sidelong look. “The body fails if the head is sick. You get me?”

Willa nodded gravely. That didn’t mean she had to like the idea of any of her Coyotes being locked in basements.

“We all need to get on the same page,” Blue said. “You having meetings behind my back isn’t helping things.”

“The pack doesn’t feel like you’re approachable. I worry they’ll defect, so I do what I can to make them feel like this is the home they’ve always known.”

“But it can’t be the home they’ve always known, and maybe it’s best if the ones who can’t straighten out find a pack elsewhere.”

She huffed with dismay. “That’s exceedingly reckless. The last thing the pack needs is more outside enemies.”

“I have to agree with her there,” Diana said. “If OG finds out you’re leaking dogs, he’s going to assume you don’t have a grip down here and he’ll snatch you back. Don’t give him an avenue for criticism.”

“As if he didn’t just lose four dogs of his own?” Blue pointed to himself.

“Temporarily, Blue Boy.” Diana was peering out the window, likely at the tumbleweed of a child who had just passed.

Willa groaned inwardly.

Sheesh, why today?

She scrambled off her stool and was halfway to the door when Quinn stepped in.

Shifting her trumpet case’s handle to her other hand, the little sparkplug of an eighth-grader scanned the room in the wildly tactless way pubescent Coyotes were so prone to.

Blue snapped his fingers. “Quill, is it?”

Quinn blanched. Swallowed. Shook her head hard as though fleas that had just discovered that people were tasty had picked her for a meal.

“Quinn,” Willa whispered to the alpha and then continued the rest of the way to the child. Quinn, who tended to have lunch alone, was habitually early. Normally, Willa didn’t mind. Quinn liked to help her make photocopies and trim down sheet music for folios, but generally Willa didn’t have “special guests” when she was there.

Willa took the trumpet case from the child, eager to distract both Quinn and the Shapelys. “I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear your trumpet came back from the shop. I didn’t test it, but Otis assured me he got the kink out of the tuning slide. Wanna go try it out? It’s back in the workroom.”

“Uh. Okay.” The child set her backpack onto her chair and swatted her hair out of her eyes. She’d probably made a valiant effort at taming it that morning, but there was something about Coyotes that made them tend toward unkemptness, even when they were trying to be respectable. The Shapelys were the obvious exception. Blue always managed to seem put together, even when he was semiclothed and slouching indulgently against the big boulder at the Coyote gathering ring in the desert.

“Must be alpha magic,” Willa muttered as she guided Quinn to the corridor door.

“What must be?” Quinn whispered.

Willa pinched the bridge of her nose and rolled her eyes at herself. Evidently, she’d never be able to have a private conversation with herself again. “Nothing. Wait here.” She hustled into the hall, swapped Quinn’s loaner trumpet with her personal one from the locked storage closet along with some new drumsticks she needed for class, and reengaged the lock.

When she returned to the door, Quinn—disobedient for a change—had given up her station and joined Diana by the cubby of muddy sneakers near the back of the room.

“Rained last week,” Quinn told her. “Just started pouring down when we were out doing marching drills. We figured we should bring in some old shoes to change into just in case it happens again.”

“Fascinating that the child isn’t terrified of her,” Blue murmured to Willa.

She’d been so distracted that she hadn’t sensed him edging into her periphery.

She couldn’t keep that up. Dangerous things happened when Willa couldn’t hold her focus and predict motives. So many of her scars were because she’d trusted people to behave predictably, and self-serving people rarely did.

Suddenly cold, she chafed her arms. “W-why would she be afraid of Diana?”

“All the kids in Sparks are. Could be reputation more than personality. Hard to say.”

“Are they afraid of you?”

“Yep.”

“Do they have a reason to be?”

He shrugged.

Weary to her bones, she sighed. “I want both of you to leave.”

Quinn wrapped her arm around Diana’s and tugged her across the room to the trumpet cubbies. “Ms. Matheson said I can help her paint the cubbies this summer.”

“Ooh, I love painting,” Diana said, following along. “It’s so relaxing.”

Blue snorted. “Nah. Not going anywhere.”

“Do my requests mean nothing to you?” Willa asked.

“Nah. Not the kneejerk ones. Try me with something you’ve actually thought about.” His lips curved up at one corner, and the creases at the outside corners of his eyes deepened.

He was teasing her. She hated being diminished. Apollo could make her feel small and unimportant with just a blink. She didn’t need any reminders of him.

“Maybe I’ll oblige.”

That statement from Blue snapped something wild loose in her. “And maybe I’ll—” As three more students strode into the room, her mouth snapped shut and her hands reflexively tugged at the bottom of her untucked shirt.

Oh no.

In that moment of tense uncertainty, Willa pondered oblivion. Oblivion seemed easier than what was probably going to escalate into a supernatural feud. Parents of middle schoolers had an even more robust grapevine than little old ladies in country churches. There were no secrets, and she was going to find out just how quickly news passed. Another Coyote, one Cougar, and one witch paused on the rubber entry mat. The supernatural kids all knew what Willa was, but she was a nobody in the scheme of things. Her special guests, on the other hand, were definitely worth mentioning.

Willa held her breath as the witch Sarah—a tell-it-like-it-is sort of witch—squinted at Blue for several seconds.

Then she tossed her hair with a “Hmm,” and took her seat at first flute’s position.

The Cougar boy backed slowly out of the room, cell phone to ear, eyes wide.

Oh no.

The other Coyote, another girl, looked from Willa, to Blue, to Diana. She set her backpack and clarinet case beneath her chair and shuffled meekly to Quinn and Diana.

“I believe what you’re currently witnessing,” Blue whispered with a laugh, “is the Coyote phenomenon of latching.”

“Never heard of it,” she said distractedly. If she were the betting type, she would have put her lunch money on a wager that Ben Dane was either calling his father or a Foye about there being a dominant Coyote in the classroom.

“Of course you wouldn’t with the pack being how it is. Latching is normal. Never expected to see it happening to Diana, though.”

Willa could see the top of Ben’s brown hair at the base of the far window. She let out a breath and smoothed the shirt she’d badly wrinkled.

Most people didn’t worry about problems until they actually materialized. Willa wasn’t most people. She was going to be anxious until the whole mess passed over, if it even did.

She dragged her tongue across her lips, took a breath, and turned to him. Most of the time, she did a decent job of being a functional adult in front of the children. “What is latching?”

“Natural tendency for kids to gravitate to strong females and bond with them in case there’s ever a disaster. She’d keep them all straight.”

“Huh.”

“It’s a pack feature,” he said, grinning again as if it wasn’t perfectly obvious Willa was overwhelmed. Her eyes certainly felt wide enough. “Not a bug. Probably wouldn’t be a good idea for you to shoo her out of here so quickly.”

Wringing her hands, Willa watched the two younger Coyotes at the counter show off their instruments to a Diana, who was doing a fantastic job of at least pretending she cared. “Of course I didn’t want to do that if Diana being there was good for the girls,” Willa said in a rushed whisper and then forced her gaze to his. Dark eyes with a savage glint, so fixed and steady.

Not like the other alphas she’d watched.

The others had all been scary because they drank or liked guns too much, or enjoyed terrorizing women. Blue was an intelligent predator who not only had the power to make weaker Coyotes submit, but also to lure the women in close with his charm and winsomeness.

Willa was close. Too close. She was standing in his trap and he was going to make her submit like all the rest. She couldn’t.

Not even if she wanted to. Apollo thought her world should revolve around him, and he took offense when it was apparent it didn’t.

Staying off his radar meant being alone. Loneliness was crippling at times, but at least she didn’t spread the misery around that way.

“Y-you can leave,” she whispered and edged away from him a foot. “You’re distracting, and I have other Cougar students who aren’t going to want to be around you. Ben’s probably calling Mason right now.”

“You know that’s ridiculous,” he said in an undertone. “What does he think I’m going to do to kids?”

“He doesn’t know you. He has to make assumptions based on past pack behavior, I guess.”

“Then I guess I’d better go find that dude and have a chat.”

“M-maybe you should.” Willa pointed to the door. “Good-bye, Alpha.”

Slipping his hands into the pockets of his slacks, he looked slowly to the door and watched a stream of students queue in.

Go. Please.

She tugged at her shirt hem again and concentrated on steady breathing, on quieting the warning klaxon screaming in her head.

They were all looking at him, the imposing stranger she was terrified of but whom she really couldn’t send away. Whether she liked to admit it or not, he was integral to shapeshifter order in Maria, and they were meant to cooperate.

He was supposed to be making her life easier, but since the day he’d arrived, all she’d known was chaos.

“I’d like for things to be easy now,” she whispered, more to herself than to him.

If he heard, he didn’t respond. He gave his sister a discreet nod of farewell and left.

Willa took a breath. And then another.

Wasn’t enough, but it’d have to do.

She put all the commotion in her brain into an imaginary pot and pushed it to the backburner. She’d deal with it later.

Busy. Busy. Just keep busy.

She cleared her throat and smiled as she waved Terry Kirk over. “Do you have a practice card to turn in?” she asked the perpetually disorganized tuba player. “I really don’t want to put a zero in my grade book for you.”

He gave his forehead a duh tap. “I forgot.”

“Use my computer and e-mail your mom. Help me out here. I’m just one lady trying to keep up with you all.”