“I heard. Frank told me.” She dabbed the sides of my mug until no trace of the overflow remained. “I have never hated anyone like I hate this man. He is a cancer. Do you know how many times I have dreamed of ending his life?” Her breathing increased in tempo, and her cheeks flooded with color.
I caught her hand, the one clutching the towel with which she kept wiping down the countertop even though it was clean. “Promise me you won’t get involved.”
She lifted her gaze to my face.
The resolve in her expression quickened my pulse. “Promise me.”
After a long moment, she exhaled a slow breath. “He should not be allowed to live.”
“I agree. Now agree that you will stay away from him. Because if anything happens to you… ” My voice broke then, and in turn, it broke her doggedness.
The same way her features had hardened, they softened. And then she was pulling me against her. “I promise you, querida, that I will not put myself in harm’s way, but you promise me the same thing.”
I swallowed. I didn’t want to make Evelyn a promise I had no desire to keep.
“Ness… ”
“Fine. I’ll stay away from him.”
For now.
The following morning, after a brief night of sleep in one of the two twin beds set up in Frank’s guest room-I suspected it was the room his grandson used when he visited because it smelled like boy and was plastered with superhero movie posters-I dressed in yesterday’s clothes and went out into the kitchen for coffee.
Frank and Evelyn were already up, sitting on the couch, talking in hushed tones. The deep circles beneath Frank’s eyes told me his night had been longer than mine.
“There is coffee in the kitchen, querida,” Evelyn said.
I went to serve myself, watching as they resumed their quiet conversation.
“How’s Jeb?” I ventured after a bit.
Frank rubbed his jaw that was coated in white stubble. “Not too good. Eric took your uncle back to his place last night so he and Lucy could talk. There was a lot of yelling apparently. And a lot of crying.”
I took a careful sip of coffee. “What’s going to happen now?”
“We’ll bury Everest on pack Headquarters tonight.”
I stared into the murky depths of my coffee feeling a familiar burn beneath my lids. No tears fell, though.
“They found yellow paint on one of the Jeep’s side mirrors.”
My gaze bounded onto the elder.
“Probably transferred from the car that pushed his off the road. It’s a solid lead, because it’s not a common color.” He studied the vase full of wildflowers on his wooden coffee table.
“Does Aidan own a yellow car?” I asked, wending my way around the kitchen countertop toward the open living room with its peaked timber ceiling and swooping antler chandelier. I wondered if Frank had crafted the light fixture himself from collected stag horns.
“Aidan Michaels is in the hospital.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t pay someone to do it.”
“Perhaps, but Lucas picked up on a foreign smell out there.” Frank raised his wary eyes to mine. “I think we might be dealing with Creeks.”
His admission hit my ears like shattered ceramic. I actually looked down to check I hadn’t dropped the mug. It was still clutched in my white-knuckled fingers. “Lucas scented foreign wolves on Liam’s property yesterday. Were they Creeks too?”
“Creeks?” Evelyn asked.
Frank scraped both his hands down the length of his face and sighed, setting his gaze on the bow window across from me. For a long moment, he looked at the rolling hill dappled in long blades of sun-burnished grass and wildflowers that matched the ones in the vase.
“The Creek Pack,” Frank explained, “was once the smallest pack, and then in one bloody night, they brought the largest pack to their knees.”
Evelyn tightened her grip on the couch’s armrest. “Dios mío,” she murmured.
My body had turned so cold that I was afraid to move, afraid my limbs might just chip away like icicles. “Did you warn Julian?”
Frank looked back at me. “Liam’s meeting with him later today. He’ll try to negotiate a firm alliance.”
Considering how much both packs antagonized each other, I sensed this outcome was momentous. Had the Pines and Boulders ever worked together?
“Why would the Creeks murder Everest?” I asked after a long moment.
“Liam believes it has to do with the Sillin,” Frank said. “We did another sweep of your bedroom. We didn’t find anything, and we’re hoping no one-no Creek-got to it before us.”
While Evelyn asked what Sillin was, and Frank explained it to her, I tried to puzzle out under what my cousin could’ve hidden the pills. If it was the pills we were talking about.
Later in the morning, Evelyn and I stopped by the new apartment I was supposed to call home from now on. We cleaned the place, made up the beds, and unpacked my clothes. All the while she repeated that she wasn’t happy about the arrangement, that my uncle was unfit to care for me, that I should stay with Frank and her. Her unhappiness increased when my uncle dropped by the apartment with a mammoth suitcase and several cardboard boxes close to bursting.
While he unpacked, he talked almost manically, never once mentioning Everest’s name. It was as though he hadn’t processed his son’s death. I asked how Lucy was doing, which won me a pointed look followed by a sour retort.
“She killed our son by covering up for him. I don’t give a rat’s ass how she’s doing.”
When Frank drove Evelyn and me to Headquarters that evening, there were so many parked cars that they spilled onto the road. Every Boulder and their family had come. As we approached the body wrapped in a white sheet, my heart tripped. I felt like I was seeing my father’s body all over again. He, also, had been enveloped in white. Werewolves weren’t buried in caskets; they were placed in the ground with nothing but a sheet around them, so the earth could reclaim them.
For a moment, I wondered if the sheet that cocooned my cousin came from the inn, and then I drove that inane thought out of my mind.
A raucous whimper pierced the still air-Lucy.
I hadn’t seen her since the day she’d held Evelyn hostage.
My senses sharpened at the sight of my aunt’s kneeling figure. I could hear the tears tracking down her milky-white cheeks, the beats of her heart pumping blood through her organs, the sweat dripping into the waistband of her black slacks.
Evelyn squeezed my arm, which drove back my sudden urge to sink my fangs into my aunt’s throat. And then Isobel and Nelson were suddenly in front of me. Where he simply nodded, face tight with grief, Isobel palmed my cheek and caught the fingers I’d balled into a fist at my side.
On the other side of the shallow hole stood Liam, flanked by Lucas and Matt. All three had their hands linked solemnly in front of them and their heads bent. I watched Liam although he didn’t watch me. He stared at the hole.
Did it remind him of his father’s burial?
Would he have afforded Everest a funeral had my cousin died at the Alpha’s hands?