CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I haven’t been in a library in…thirty years, maybe,” Sheena’s mother muttered as Sheena led her down the row of cookbooks.
Mom pushed her sunglasses up her nose and tightened her grip on the strap of her purse.
Sheena peered over her shoulder at the Coyote leaning on the research librarian’s desk. He was playing with his phone. He’d stopped paying close attention to them after Sheena had sent him on a wild goose chase for an obscure Martha Stewart party book and then on another for the second edition of Your Californian English Garden, which probably would have been an interesting text had it actually existed.
“Yeah, libraries are great.” Sheena whisked her mother around a corner and toward the Spanish-language books.
“I don’t see why you had to bring me along, though.”
“You needed to get out of the house.”
“Why bother? I never get to see anyone.”
Sheena sighed and paused them in front of the new releases rack. “I’m going to try not to take that personally.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. Of course I didn’t. You’re the only person I ever see.”
“Now more than ever.”
“You had to expect that he would cloister you, darling. You came back and wouldn’t tell him a thing, and we still have no idea where you went. He never makes the same mistake twice.”
Sheena knew that. He’d been shouting that at her at least daily for the past week, amongst other nasty things. When she’d returned from Maria, he’d tried to deflate her will before they could even properly say hello. All she could remember was his rage, and his fingers digging mercilessly into her shoulder. After that, she hadn’t been able to leave bed for three days. She hadn’t cared if she ever got up again, but then she’d heard the laughter downstairs in the office. Bruno and his lieutenants were in high spirits, and she knew it had to come at someone else’s expense. She’d gotten up only because she was petty and angry and didn’t want him to think he’d won yet.
Sheena whispered, “Stay right here,” to her mother and went to check on the Coyote.
He’d taken up a perch on the edge of the librarian’s desk and was talking up a storm. She was smiling. Sheena couldn’t tell if she was really into the conversation or if she were simply extending professional courtesy to a patron, but either way, that guy would be yakking it up for a while. He loved hearing the sound of his own voice.
Returning to Mom, she hooked her arm around hers and pulled her toward the very back of the library, where all the academic books about zoology happened to be shelved.
She hoped her cryptic message to Austin had made sense, but she hadn’t had a lot of time to scribble on that tablet when he’d returned the second day with her earrings and a tablet for her to write a note on. She’d felt like she was acting of two minds. One was wary and the other one wild. The wild one was going to get her in trouble again. She just knew it.
Austin was sitting on a bench with his fingers twined, cowboy hat pushed to the back of his head, looking around anxiously, like he’d never been in a library before.
Yay! Cowboy! the wild thing in her woke up to say.
She gave her head a gentle shake. Excitement was only going to end in heartache later and probably another “intervention” from her father. Austin needed to leave. She’d made a mistake. She understood that now. Her place was in Sacramento. But the animal part of her suggested: “Take him and go. Just go. Things were easy in Maria.”
She couldn’t trust that wild voice to tell her what was right and hadn’t been able to since the day she’d been turned into a Coyote.
Austin sprang onto his feet when he saw her, and she was in his arms having every bit of air squeezed out of her, and she didn’t care if she was being suffocated. The relief he was draping around her compensated for any physical distress she might have experienced.
“Wait…” she rasped. She wasn’t supposed to get comfortable. She was supposed to be sending the outsider away.
“There you are,” he whispered.
She swallowed thickly. “Hi.”
He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, and finally, her lips. Those, he did twice. The first was just a quick peck. The second a long, soulful kiss that had her toes curling in her high heels and face burning hot when her mother cleared her throat.
“Sheena!” she hissed.
“Um.” Sheena squirmed out of his arms, much to her inner beast’s chagrin, and gave her pounding temples a rub.
Hi, Austin! the coyote part of her consciousness shouted, as though anyone else could hear. Tell him hi again. You didn’t do it right the first time.
Sheena gave her forearm a bracing pinch. That sometimes made the dog go away.
“What on Earth are you doing? You’re going to get us both in trouble.” Mom took a couple of steps forward and yanked her sunglasses off her nose. “Who is this?”
“Austin.”
“Who?”
“Austin.” Sheena grimaced. Instinct told her there was an appellation of some sort missing from his name, but she didn’t know what it was. Nothing was making a hell of a lot of sense anymore. She’d tried to put her shoes on three times that morning before realizing she was shoving her feet into the opposites.
She cleared her throat and gave her scalp a careful scratch. “I…guess he came here to check on me.”
“And to motivate you,” he said.
“Motivate her to what?”
“Leave,” Sheena realized, facing him. He wouldn’t have come all that way otherwise. She’d told him how ugly the circumstances were, so he couldn’t possibly have been there for a vacation. “Is that right?”
He leaned in close and whispered, “I want you to come back with me. Belle thinks I might be your mate. Do you think it’s possible?”
“Mate? I—” Sheena swallowed and drew in a breath so she could get out the rest of the words, but she didn’t know what they were.
Of course she knew Coyotes had mates, but she’d never been able to discern the difference between mates-by-choice and mates-by-nature—being mates because the wild beasts in them wanted it. The beasts calling the shots supposedly made for an entirely different sort of relationship.
Mates brought stability and permanence and possibly even love, but she couldn’t have that.
She wasn’t even meant to be a Coyote.
“Leave…me?” her mother asked, pulling Sheena back into the more critical issue at hand—the “now what?” issue. If they couldn’t leave, it didn’t matter what Austin was to Sheena, so Sheena focused on that and not the thing that soured her belly because it couldn’t possibly be true even if she wanted it to be.
“Austin lives in Maria, Mom,” she said.
“Maria is…” Mom’s brow somehow managed to crease deeply then, despite her recent Botox touch-up. “That’s where Blue Shapely’s pack is, isn’t it?”
“That’s where I was. When I was missing. I—”
At the sound of approaching footsteps, Sheena took a few steps from Austin and he did the same from her.
She was staring studiously at the spine of a book on American ursine habitats when an old man squeezed past with his cane, murmuring, “Read that one about the coyotes. So many damn coyotes around here. Folks need to know how to get them to back off.”
When he was out of earshot, she turned back to her mother. “I went to tell Blue about how Daddy and Randall were both plotting against him, and I meant to come back fast, but then Blue thought I should take my time and let him and the others there make a plan for us. I…was going to stay.” She looked to Austin, apologetically. “But…”
“But what?” Mom asked.
Remember? the beast asked. Don’t you remember? Tell her!
It seemed okay. She couldn’t remember why she hadn’t explained things to her mother since returning, except that she hadn’t had a chance to. “Mom, listen, you don’t have to stay here. You weren’t born into this any more than I was.”
“I have no idea what you’re referring to.” Mom’s expression was flat, but the red in her cheeks revealed her as a liar.
“Enough with all the fibbing. I’m too old to accept the lies, especially when they require me to accept bad science. I’m not stupid, Mom.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“Then tell me what’s keeping you here. I love you, so I came back to take care of you, but you’ve got to start being honest with me. You said you could have left. Why couldn’t you just take me and go?”
Austin gave her hand an encouraging squeeze, exactly what she needed in order to hold firm in the face of her mother’s mistrust. They were so close and always fed off each other’s emotions.
Mom was still slack jawed, looking from Austin to Sheena like she just didn’t get it, but then she closed her mouth and swallowed. “If…I left, I’d never see him again.”
“Why would that matter? He’s treated you like—” No. That’s not right. Sheena pinched off the rest of the words as her mother’s meaning boomed clear in her mind.
She was so much slower. Logic wasn’t linking pieces together in her brain the way it had before she’d left.
Her mother wasn’t talking about Bruno Esposito. She wouldn’t have cared about him. It would have been obvious to a person who’d spent five minutes in their company she’d never loved him.
“I’ll never see him if I leave,” Mom said, her voice clear and tight with suppressed pain. “That’s all I get now. Faraway glimpses every so often.” She raised her hands in front of her face and stared at them as though she’d only recently taken a corporeal form and she still didn’t quite understand how it worked. “He wouldn’t…want me like this. He wouldn’t—no one would. That’s why we don’t go home.” She looked pointedly to Sheena. “After we’re changed, we don’t go back. We’re freaks. They don’t want us anymore. At least not for long.”
No, no, don’t believe that, the coyote consciousness said. That’s not true.
But her father had said that too, and what did she know? She’d been raised thinking that what she wanted didn’t matter.
Unable to look at Austin, she cleared her throat and straightened her mother’s already crisp lapels. “So, my father lives here? In town?”
Mom nodded. “There’s an…account. He puts money into it for you. You’ll be okay if you go. I’ll…”
As her words trailed off, her eyes narrowed, and the small surge of energy she always put off during her rare moments of resolve whipped outward. Her stare focused, and she shook her head. “You left.”
“Yes, but I’m back. With you.”
“You’re…not a freak.”
See? Told you, Sheena’s inner coyote said.
Sheena pinched her forearm again, hoping to chase the voice away. “Mom, you’re talking gibberish. Let’s go home. Maybe you can lie down.”
“I’m not crazy.” Mom gave her head a hard shake and nudged Sheena away. She turned to Austin and repeated, “I’m not.”
He nodded. “No, ma’am. I think you’ve just got a bad alpha.”
Mom’s mouth fell open again, and then she spun on her heels toward Sheena and pointed at Austin. “See? He knows. How does he know?”
“Blue told me, ma’am.”
“Blue. Right. Blue.” She tapped her forehead. “He’s smart, isn’t he? Because of his mother, maybe. She was smart. She left. So did he, huh?”
“Mom?” Sheena had never heard her mother talking like that before. The energy bouncing off her had an unsettled quality about it, like she was going to snap soon, and that scared Sheena. If she snapped, there was no reason Sheena wouldn’t break right after her. Most of the time, she was only holding herself together for her mother in the first place.
“I’ll make it okay,” she said to Sheena. “You’re not a freak. Okay? I’ll fix things. I have to fix things. Only I can.”
“But—”
Mom walked away, absently grabbing that coyote book from the shelf on the way past and muttering, “Screw him.”
Sheena rubbed her sternum over her frantically thrashing heart and slowly met Austin’s concerned gaze. “I don’t know what just happened.”
“Wake-up call, maybe? Something you said? Come on. Leave with me. I’ll take you back to Maria.” He grabbed her hands and squeezed them both in his. Just as warm as she remembered. That crease of worry on his forehead was the same, too.
He was worried about a freak like her.
Let’s go, her inner coyote insisted.
Her father had just reminded her that morning that no one “out there” would ever want her.
Maybe he knew best.
No, no, no. Go with your mate, her coyote part said.
That didn’t make sense. Her mate wouldn’t want her to abandon her mother. The coyote must have been confused, too.
She shook her head and headed in the direction her mother had gone. “Austin, I… I can’t. I can’t go now. I’m sorry.”
Yep, the wild part of her consciousness thought. You are sorry.
Perhaps she was. She couldn’t even look back.