Page 57 of Wolf Bane
“I don’t think I should.”
Justin laughed, a startling sound coming from someone who’d been like the living dead for so long.“You probably shouldn’t,” he agreed.“Shit, okay, I need to get myself together.Tyler, can we go back home?I need to dig through some of my books.”
There was a flurry of gathering up shit and planning, mostly Justin in high spirits and Tyler goading him on, then they left in a clatter of Tyler’s old transmission and too-loud punk pop music.
“He’s too loud,” Mariska complained from the sofa, sitting up in a pile of blankets.“Can I have pizza?My tummy wants pizza.”
“How about some soup?”Ethan suggested.“That always helped my tummy when I felt bad.”
Mariska wrinkled her nose at that suggestion.“Soup’s for old people.Pizza’s for me.”
Ethan made an affronted noise and Mariska giggled.I left them to their unserious argument and slipped out onto the front porch to talk to Mal.
“Hey,” he muttered, tapping his phone against his palm and avoiding my gaze.“Talked to four of the parents from her little shifter play group.None of them have been to any sort of mobile clinic in recent memory.and no one wanted to talk about ancestry except Lucy Hamilton—her kid’s one of Mariska’s best friends in the scout troop.Her great-grandmother was fully human.”
“How’d you even bring that up in conversation?”I mused.“Hey, has your kid been deathly ill, and by the way are you part human?”
“Basically,” he muttered.“I just said I was worried this was because Mariska’s got human blood and isn’t fully shifter or were.Lucy said I was full of shit.”A flicker of a smile danced across his lips.“They don’t care about what happened, you know?Not like I was worried they might.They don’t know much about our lives in Colorado, just that there was a bad custody fight, and some of it had to do with her mom being a full shifter and me being… well.Part were, is the story we gave.”
I nodded, pretending to find the autumn-browning grass in my front yard fascinating so Mal wouldn’t feel so exposed under my scrutiny.“That’s good, that none of the other kids have been sick.And that they’re not going to punish y’all for things you can’t control.”
He was quiet for a long time, the sound of Mariska’s laughter and Ethan’s fake-gruff complaints about pizza filtering out to us.Finally, he said, “But that leaves the kids at her school.She swears they’re were, the two sick ones.”
“And the Clemens family.”I sighed.“And the Robards.”
“Do you think he was were and lying?”
“I don’t know what to think.He had zero signs of being were.And trust me when I say the weres in this area will let you know if they think you might not recognize them for what they are.”
Mal grunted, leaning against my porch railing to join me in observing my grass.“Sometimes I think maybe… Maybe I should just pack up Mariska and move so far away from any clans or packs or what the hell evers, just let her live life as a normal little girl.you know?”
“Do you think she’d let you?”I asked gently.“Do you think she’d be okay denying that part of herself?Hiding it away just to fit in?”
Mal rested his forehead on the railing, heaving a deep and long sigh.“No.And I know it.I just don’t want her to grow up constantly on alert.”
“Speaking as an adult constantly on alert who was once a kid then a teenager constantly on alert, I won’t lie and say it gets easier,” I allowed.“But I promise you, at least for me, it was worth it.”
Mal tilted his face sideways to look up at me.“Are we talking about the whole forced werewolf thing or the queer thing?”
That startled a chuckle out of me.“Both I guess.Mostly the queer thing though.I didn’t find out I was even remotely were until pretty recently.”
He nodded, returning his attention to the grass.Inside, pizza had won out (as we all knew it would) and Ethan rattled around the kitchen, heating up one of the frozen pies from the deep freeze in the in the carport.I wanted to promise Mal it would be okay, that this would be it and once we sorted this out, there’d be no more overt danger for Mariska, for any of us.But I didn’t want to be a liar.
* * *
If Sunday was a dumpster fire,Monday was a dumpster fire with raisins in it, to bastardize Dorothy Parker.
Gina Perrin, Reba, and I met at the vandalized clinic.Reba had been able to reach out to all of our scheduled appointments for Monday and put them on the schedule for the rest of the week and into next week, but we still needed to take an inventory of the place, determine what was missing, and meet with therepresentativefrom the council and the insurance rep to have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.I’d tried to get hold of Tyler to come out with us—figured it might help to have some clan representative on hand—but neither he nor Justin were answering their phones.So it was just me, Reba, and Gina Perrin facing down the Mondayest Monday to ever Monday.
“I’ve only been here one day,” Gina Perrin pointed out.“I have no idea what’s gone or not, but I can help take notes and run interference with the owner’s rep.”She darted me a significant look.One that saidwe need to tell her.
Reba, still fretful and uneasy as she peered into the heavily damaged clinic, made a sad, annoyed whimpering sound and shook her head.
No, we don’t, I mouthed back.Not yet.
Gina Perrin rolled her eyes, marching over to join Reba.“Come on.Let’s start in the waiting area.Probably easiest.Tell me what’s missing and I’ll put it in the notes app on my phone.”
I followed, kicking carefully at some fallen papers and a destroyed computer monitor.My office door hung from the hinges.On the wall, someone had spray-paintedmongrelin the same angry red slashes as they had out front.Deep gouges—claw marks—destroyed my desktop, some so deep they nearly broke entirely through the wood.
