Page 16 of Strawberry Moon

It definitely wasn’t that he liked me. He edged around me, glared my way more than not, and kept every word between us short and terse.

But I had the sense that I’d just done something good. Something purposeful. And all that satisfaction had my wolf prancing around in my head, happy as anything to be of use.

It didn’t make sense, and it was all too tempting to retreat into my shell and wait until everything was clearer.

I still needed that damn string though.

When I hopped off the truck, the only scent lingering in the air was Archer’s. It hit me hard, peaches on a farm stand in the summer heat, soft and juicy.

I stood there, mindless, in the middle of it for a full minute before I remembered to shake it off. I was on errands.

The bell above the hardware store’s door rang when I went in again, and Cliff was sending me a tight-lipped, thoroughly unimpressed stare.

“Feel good about that?” he asked, leaning in against the countertop.

“I do. Not gonna risk you for some crazy experiments for a company that killed a quarter of our kind.”

Cliff’s breath rushed out. His shoulders slumped. He wouldn’t argue with somebody caring about him.

“You got any of that weed-eating string we use?” I asked, happy to change the subject.

Without any more information than that, he went through the cluttered, messy shelves full of cardboard boxes and screws and all kinds of tools. He plucked up the exact right one and I followed him right back to the checkout counter, the whole trip easy and wordless.

He rang me up while I pulled the cash out of my wallet, and he put the string in a bag for me.

But when I reached for it, he snatched it back.

“Give Archer a break, Ford. I know he’s got his granddaddy’s name, but he’s not that man. He’s good, and he wants to make things right.”

Ice rushed through my marrow. “Ain’t no making things right, Cliff.”

I snatched the bag and walked out.

12

Archer

Ford’s reactions to the scents had been interesting, to say the least.

It seemed relatively universal that flowers were out. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. What super manly-man ever wanted flowers, short of Linden’s brother and his greenhouse? And apparently, he specifically grew flowers that didn’t smell like flowers, so...

Werewolves and flowers were a no.

It was too bad, because flowers did a good job covering the sharp pheromone scent I’d managed to synthesize so far. Ford’s worst reaction had been to the pheromone without a scent cover, albeit heavily diluted. Either I was going to have to find a better scent cover option, or I was going to have to get a freaking lot better at my job and make those fake pheromones more subtle.

It didn’t matter if it did its job and calmed alphas down if they avoided the smell of it at all costs.

As it was, a whiff of the stuff sent me into a sneezing fit. It wasn’t going to be able to soothe anyone like that. I needed to soften it. A lot. Preferably with something that didn’t make Ford look like I needed to check my shoes and see if I’d stepped in something nasty.

So instead of going back to the big empty house in Alexandria, I went to the lab. It was an independent one I’d set up myself, with my own money, inherited from my parents when I’d turned eighteen. Nothing to do with Sterling, not owned by them or connected to them in any way, just in case they decided they wanted to take credit for my desperate reaching attempt to make right what my grandfather had shredded so completely.

Not that I thought I deserved credit if I managed to find something that helped.

But I knew myself, and knew that I wouldn’t be inclined to grab for unearned glory.

The Sterling board of directors? Well, the more I learned about them, the more I was sure the majority of them would be thrilled to snatch credit for something that helped werewolfkind. Something that they believed exonerated the company in the willful murders of so many innocents.

No, maybe the company itself hadn’t known, but they’d been adding literal poison to everything they made for decades. Someone, at some point along the production line, had to have asked why. Didn’t they?

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