Home. Home is where the heart is. It’s where you can hang your hat. It’s where you can sit like a king in a castle.
Or, it’s where you can desperately try to get some paperwork done while your adopted teenage daughter blares her music and TV shows louder than any girl has any need to.
Peter sat at the kitchen table, a shifter adrift in a sea of paperwork, sipping on his drink. The wheat beer had been sitting out for so long it had already warmed up to room temperature, but he didn’t care. Drinking the lager was as much about physical memory and habit as anything else. Just another little ritual to help him relax at the end of the night while he delved into Frost Security’s account currents, prospective clients, and pending cases.
This was the majority of Peter’s work. Papers. Administration. It hadn’t been like this. Not always.
On the stove, a little covered saucepan full of enough stew for two sat reheating on the burner. It was a good stew, his favorite, even if it was just leftovers from the weekend. He preferred things that way, to have a dependable meal at the end of the day. It took an additional worry out of his life, one more thing he didn’t need to fully concern himself with as he dealt with trying to run the office and maintain the health and well-being of his pack or his adopted daughter.
He gritted his teeth suddenly.
He wasn’t sure if it was just his imagination, but the music somehow seemed to get louder as he took another sip of his beer.
He didn’t understand how she could she listen to her music turned up that fucking loud. She had damn shifter hearing, for crying out loud! He could hear it just fine from inside the living room, and his hearing had been damaged from more gunfire, car bombs, and ordinance delivery than any man should have to be exposed to.
Peter closed his eyes and almost got up to go say something to her, to bark through the door about shutting her damn music off. Then he remembered how much he probably seemed like his father right now. Boyce Frost. How many times had his father burst in like that, yelling at him to turn his damn music down? Hell, looking back, it seemed like half their arguments started around the subject. Peter ran a hand down his face, his callused hands scratching over his five o’clock shadow.
“Jesus,” he murmured as he managed to calmly push back from the table. “Maybe I need to buy her some headphones or something. That way she can wreck her ears in peace and quiet.” He got up and headed to her room and knocked on her door. He might have begun to sound and act like his father sometimes, but he still hadn’t broken the sacred rule of her boundaries. Her room was her room, even if it was his house. He only entered when he was invited. Like Dracula.
The music’s volume lowered almost immediately. “Shit!” she said with an almost audible wince. “Sorry, Peter! I’ll keep it down.”
“Uh-huh,” Peter grudgingly said, trying to sound like he had at least a little confidence in her promise. “Dinner will be ready soon.”
“What’re we having?” she asked through the door.
“How about you open the door so I don’t have to talk to a wooden door?”
He heard her light footfalls as she crossed the room and pulled open the door, those dark eyes of her looking up at him. “Please don’t say leftover stew again.”
“You’re in luck then,” he said with a small smile. “Your favorite. Leftover stew.”
She groaned and rolled her eyes. “Ugh, why do we always eat the same thing?”
“Because I barely know how to cook, and I work all day, that’s why. If you don’t like what we eat, you’re welcome to make something yourself.”
She took a step back into her room and shook her head. “But I have schoolwork!”
He folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe. “Well, how about this then? Why don’t we work on some recipes over the weekend, things that we can freeze and stick in the oven. Like casseroles and things like that?”
She made another face. “Casseroles? That’s almost worse!” She gave an exasperated sigh. “Why can’t we get McDonald’s, or even Dixie’s, every now and then? Just something else!”
“Because you need to have a well-balanced meal at night, that’s why. And stew gives you three vegetables and a meat. Do you not like my stew? Is that it?”
“No!” She paused as she sat down on her bed, Peter still exactly where he was when she’d first opened the door. “Okay, a little bit. I mean, it’s okay. But you need something else in there besides salt and pepper.”
“So you don’t like it? That’s what you’re saying.”
“I’m just saying it could, you know, use improvement. How about this? There are all these apps now, and videos online and stuff. Fast recipes we could try together? Maybe I could use it to learn how to cook on my own or something.”
He straightened up a little and raised an eyebrow. Was she actually asking him to do something with her that didn’t involved running around in wolf form? “Sure, I guess. Why don’t you pick out some of the recipes you want to try and run them past me, and we can go into town on Saturday and pick up all the ingredients.”
“Really?” she asked, brightening up. “Are you sure?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? It’ll give me a chance to brush up on my cooking skills, too. Someday you’re going to be out of the house, and I’ll need to learn to cook something besides stew, won’t I?”
She returned his grin. “Maybe you’ll find a nice girl, too, like the guys in the pack?” She didn’t notice the slight drop in Peter’s smile. “And you’ll have to cook for her?”
He tried to continue smiling at the mention of a nice girl, but his head and heart were already drifting back into the past, to the mate he’d lost all those years ago. He’d never replace her, would never be able to find another woman who measured up or made his soul sing the way she had.
“Yeah,” he said quietly, “maybe. Well, anyway, stew’s ready when you are. Just grab a bowl.”
She must have seen the change on his face finally, because her smile faded. “You okay, Peter?”
He shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked as he went to close her door with a quiet little thud. He headed back into the kitchen, trying to cram his dark thoughts back into the attic of his mind. That was where those thoughts and emotions needed to stay, bundled up and packed away in that dusty, cobweb-riddled space. He’d shoved all those memories up there for a reason, if only to be able to function from day to day.
But now Vanessa’s blue eyes and dark red hair seemed to be dancing in front of his mind’s eye. Her barrel curls bouncing around her face, her little grin teasing him in death, just like she’d teased him in life as they were growing up together. His best friend, his soulmate, his pack mate. He put a hand on the hallway wall to steady himself. Vanessa Springer. His first and only love.
Peter paused and shook his head, sighed. It had been so long since he’d really thought of her with more than just a passing interest. But she’d been dead for years already, burned beyond recognition with Peter’s family and the rest of their pack. Now he could almost smell her memory. The musk of her after a long run, the lilac and lavender of the perfume she seemed to put on everything.
He swallowed hard, trying to collect himself. “It’s just a memory,” he reminded himself aloud. “Just a memory, Peter. Nothing you can do about it but find the bastard’s who did her in.”
He managed to pick up the pieces of his momentarily shattered psyche and collect them into one roughly Peter Frost-shaped bundle, before dragging his feet into the kitchen and pulling a bowl down from the cabinet and a loaf of bread from the pantry. He grabbed a spoon from the drawer and ladled out a bowl of stew, tossed a couple pieces of bread on top, and went back to the kitchen table.
Mary came out a moment later and began to get her own meal together as Peter shuffled and jogged his papers into some semblance of a stack, and pushed them off to the side. She sat down at the kitchen table, right across from him, her lips tightly pressed together.
Peter blew lightly on a spoonful of stew gravy. He wanted to ask her what was wrong, but one of the first things he’d finally learned when Mary had come to live with him was that Mary would let him know when she was ready to talk. Before that moment, trying to pull information from her would be harder than interrogating an enemy detainee. He swirled his spoon around in the broth, looking for a nice chunk of beef.
“Hey Peter,” Mary said after a while of silently eating, just the sound of her spoon scraping the ceramic bowl filling the room, “I’ve been wondering.”
“About what?” Peter asked after swallowing down a mouthful of stew. “College?”
She gave him a look like he was crazy, realized he was being at least half-serious, and shook her head. “College? Why would I want to do that?”
“Can’t be layabout teenager forever. Unless you want to join the service like I did.”
She made another face. “Not happening.”
“What’s up, then?”
“I’ve been thinking about that night,” she replied, trailing off, a frown creasing her lips. “About the fire at my house, with my family.”
This was new. In the whole time he’d known her, from the moment he’d picked her up from his old war buddy’s house where he’d been fostering her, to when she’d moved in, to when she’d joined the pack as a junior member, Mary had never mentioned anything about that night. All he knew was that she’d come home to find the house burning, that she’d called 911.
“What about it?”
She furrowed her brow, lines forming on her forehead. The face gave her the appearance of a woman three times her age. “If I tell you, you have to believe me. Okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I believe you? If you saw something, you saw something.”
“I just don’t want you to think I’m crazy or something, alright?”
He smiled a little, despite the gravity of the situation. “You do realize we’re shifters, right? How much crazier than that can things get?”
She took a deep breath. “Believe me. They can get crazier.”