Page 24 of A Wolf After My Own Heart
“Right. In other words, you’ve got no idea what she saw. And so the situation may well be salvageable.”
“How then?” From Mama Mac, who had gotten up to put the pie back in the fridge, ignoring Annette’s pained whimper. “It’s not like we can ask her if she knows Sally’s a werebear.”
Oz laughed. “Yeah, there’s no way to slip ‘did you see a werebear on your block, where you’re surrounded by Shifters, and also everyone in the neighborhood is keeping a wary eye on you, how ’bout some tea’ into a conversation.”
“The boy’s right.”
“Almost thirty, Ma.”
“And even if we did ask her, she could lie. Roy and I gave her every opportunity to tell us what really happened last night.” Mama dimpled as an unwilling grin crossed her face. “She was bland as bread, telling us to our faces that everything was normal. We didn’t know what to think.”
“And she wasn’t scared!” Oz put in.
Mama Mac shook her head. “Not a whit.”
“Maybe she’s a squib?”
“Or a sociopath,” Annette muttered.
“Or both,” she and Oz said in accidental unison, because Annette had the misfortune of meeting a sociopathic squib last year. It hadn’t been fun. For anyone. It was part of the reason poor Sally Smalls was in such a mess: the dead sociopath had partners.
Oz shifted in his seat.Now or never. Wait! What happened to NOT bringing it up?“Listen!” He lowered his voice. “Uh. While you’re both here.”
After a few seconds, Annette prompted, “Yes?”
That was as far as he’d gotten in his head. The absurdity of what he wanted to ask was almost overwhelming. It was like asking if Santa Claus was a thing. Because the answer was maddening: of course Santa wasn’t a thing. Except when he was. It depended how you defined “Santa.” And “thing.”
“So congratulations on getting engaged to David.”
Annette just blinked at him, probably because there had been an announcement months ago. And a party. And a clean-up party because things had gotten a smidge out of hand. (To this day, Oz had no idea how David got all that maple syrup out of his fur.) Since then, wedding plans had proceeded exactly as expected: with Annette protesting all of it and pushing for elopement, Annette’s partner Nadia insisting the bride wear a Dior original (and put her bridesmaids in same), Mama Mac insisting they ditch caterers so she could be the one to cook for two hundred people (then changing her mind, then changing it back again), Annette declaring she would kill or die to avoid dealing with two hundred people, and David adding still more Stables to the guest list.
Because that was the other thing. David had Stable friends. A lot of them. Not the kind you sometimes hung out with because they were reasonably cool or had the same taste in movies or playedHaloonline together. Given how outnumbered Shifters were, it was pretty weird if you didn’t have at least one Stable pal.
No, Davey-boy grew up with Stables who knew—and kept—the secret of his other self. His default was to trust them. And his argument was compelling: his friends had had years to burn him and hadn’t. So they were true, safe friends. As “safe” as any member ofhomo sapienscould be, at least. Annette had already met a few of them, and they’d guessed her secret pretty much instantly. Give the woman credit, she’d handled it better than he would have. Just thinking about random Stables figuring out his true nature made him sweat…
(implications! change! danger? probably!)
…but it was still less aggravating than talking aboutKama-Rupa.
“So when did you know David was the one? Probably took a while, right? Since you guys worked together for a couple of—”
“Five days” was the flat response.
“—years—what?”
“I thought you worked together for two years,” Mama said.
“Yes, but—not really. He’s an investigator, not an IPA employee. An independent contractor. IPA’s one of a few clients. So he was in and out all the time. We’d never worked a case together until Caro. We barely knew each other to say hi to.”
“Oh.”
“So to answer your question, five days. Well. Two years and five days,” Annette admitted.
“So it wasn’t until he was in your face all the time that you fell for him?” Sweet relief! Maybe lots of Shifters fell for strangers based on nothing but their compatible scent. Maybe he wasn’t tumbling into clinical insanity. Or living in the thirteenth century, whenKama-Rupawas taken as seriously as ferreting out witches to burn and wondering where the sun went at night. “Oh, man, thank God.”
“What?”
“Oz, what are you on about?” Mama asked, puzzled.
