Outside on the lawn, the day had already come to life. Construction was pretty much finished on the arena now, so most people were back to the day-to-day business of waiting for the counsel to decide the time had come for Charlie and me to compete. Which meant a lot of standing around, whispering, and staring at me as I passed.
“Hey, Carter,” I said as he passed by on his way up to the house, a stack of rolled papers clutched in one hand. Probably on an errand for his dad to nag mine again.
Carter stopped at the sight of me. His jaw dropped open. “What happened to you, Vuk?”
“Nothing,” I said, feeling suddenly self-conscious about my wardrobe decisions. I forced my hands to my side to keep myself from folding them over my chest. I had nothing to hide, and I wasn’t going to show any submissive postures around my pack. There was no reason that the alpha couldn’t look pretty every once in a while—or whatever version of that I’d managed. “I’m going into town with Charlie today. I want you to keep an eye out on things while I’m gone.”
It seemed to take him a moment to realize I was talking.
“What kind of things?” he asked, expression immediately turning a mixture of covert and suspicious.
I shrugged. “Just … things. Anything off.”
“Gotcha,” Carter said, even though he obviously didn’t.
I could feel him watching me as I walked off, and I permitted myself a small smile. I felt good. I felt like … Charlie.
As if summoned by my thoughts, my sister walked out of the woods. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair was tied back, and she was in sweats.
She looked startled to see me.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked, glancing around as though she expected someone to be watching. There were actually a lot of someones watching. The pack always seemed to materialize when Charlie and I stopped to talk these days. I could see Leonard, master carpenter and expert tobacco chewer, leaning around a tree to spy on us.
“We were going into town today. Remember?” I asked.
“Oh! Oh, yeah, I remember. I guess I got caught up in my morning jog.” She gave a sheepish smile. “Sorry. You don’t mind if I run and change first, do you? I’m sure I stink.”
She backed away and disappeared inside before I could argue. I frowned and rubbed my toe into the dirt, with no choice but to wait. A few minutes later, Charlie re-emerged with hair still dripping from the shower dressed in jeans and a soft yellow blouse.
“Much better,” she said with a smile shadowed by an apology. “Thanks for waiting.”
“Sure. Let’s go,” I said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the shower wouldn’t have helped much if she’d picked up anything strange from her run. Even on two legs, our sense of smell was naturally heightened. I could have picked up all kinds of interesting information about her jog if I wanted to, like where she went and what kind of animals she ran into, but that would have been rude. I politely kept my nose to myself this time. Today, I wasn’t a werewolf. I was a sister.
“So where are we going? Did you find an antique shop?” she asked, falling into step beside me.
I smiled. “It’s a surprise.”
The drive into Paradise was pretty scenic, if you considered miles of pine trees to be scenic. The back roads were narrow and dark. Douglas fir and Aspens hugged the dirt lane tightly, shadowing the road with a thick canopy of brittle branches and fanned-out pine needles. Charlie stared out the window at the trees as they flashed past, wrapping her ponytail around her finger again and again.
“Something bothering you?” I asked, forcing myself to keep my eyes on the road. It was too twisty to let myself lose concentration for even a few seconds, lest we end up in a ditch somewhere. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
She almost jumped out of her skin at my voice. “What? Oh, no. It’s nothing.”
“You worried about the competition?” I asked, hating to bring it up today. I remembered the fierce determination when she’d vowed to her mother to compete—and to win—and my heart panged. Both from the hurt in her voice and the fact that I only knew about it because I’d eavesdropped on the call.
She smiled sheepishly. “I thought that was kind of a given.”
Charlie was right. I hadn’t thought about anything else since Dad had dropped that bomb on us—other than my impending responsibilities as alpha. But I suspected Charlie didn’t have a single clue about any of that.
“Guess so. You know…” I picked at the steering wheel cover with my fingernails, giving myself a moment to think. “You can talk to me. About anything.” Even the competition that’s pitting us against each other, I added silently. Or our lying moms. We apparently had that in common too.
“I do have a question, actually,” she said. “Why do the vampires and werewolves hate each other so much?”
This time, I did glance over, searching her expression in a quick glance. But all I saw was curiosity. “Well. That’s a long story,” I said.
“We have all day,” she said.
My shoulders slumped. I’d wanted today to be free of anything supernatural—but if this was what Charlie wanted to know, she had a right. “The legend has always been that werewolves were created to keep the balance. Vampires were made in the darkness and given an evil nature. Werewolves were made from the light. To protect,” I explained, trying to give her the shortened version. She’d learn the full story in school, whether she wanted to or not, as Dad was fond of this story.
“Is that why we have this built-in … dislike for them?” she asked, her nose wrinkling.
I snorted. “Dislike. That’s a polite way to put it,” I said. “But yes. We’re the balance between them and humans. We keep them confined to the darkness.”
“But what about our specific pack and the Rossi coven? Did something happen or is it just because we were born to hate them or whatever?”
My stomach tightened as a thousand memories ran through me. Of course something had happened, lots of things, but I forced myself to keep to the original story. “Our pack wasn’t always here in Paradise,” I said. “In fact, most packs stick to the colder, more rural areas. Pacific Northwest, Canada, northern Europe. It helps us remain undetected and vampires tend to gravitate to those areas, probably for the same reason. Our pack migrated here from Montana because Thill—”
“One of the elders?” she asked.
“Right.” I shot her a wry smile. “He was a little younger then. Anyway, the story is that he and his parents were passing through here on business and ran into a settlement about thirty miles west of here. It was more than just a mansion. It was an estate. A small community or colony—of vampires.”
“The Rossis?” she asked.
I nodded, my jaw tight as I recalled the story. I’d heard it so many times, it almost felt like I’d been there. “They stumbled on Mr. Rossi while the vampire was having his dinner. It didn’t go well.”
“What happened?” Charlie’s voice was tight and I wondered if it was the suspense of the story or something else.
“They fought. Thill’s parents were killed putting Blaine Rossi down. Thill was the only one who walked away.”
“But … I met Mr. Rossi. He was at the party,” Charlie said, shaking her head.
“Right. But as far as Thill knew, Mr. Rossi was dead. When he saw that Blaine killed his parents … Thill ripped the vamp’s throat out before bolting from the scene, but apparently that wasn’t enough.” My hands gripped the wheel until my knuckles went white. I forced myself to relax and focus on the winding drive as I talked. “A few weeks later, a friend passed through and told a story about a vampire coven down here run by a man named Rossi. Thill flipped out. As interim alpha, he packed everyone up and moved them here. Said as long as this place was settled by vamps, it was also settled by us.”
“To keep the balance,” Charlie said.
I nodded.
“But how did Thill have the authority to move everyone to Paradise? I thought Vuk women were the alphas.”
“We are. Thill’s mom was our great-grandmother.”
Charlie’s brow wrinkled as she tried to work it out. “So your mom became the Rossi’s focus after that,” Charlie murmured.
I nodded. “They hated Thill for the years he was alpha, and then, because she didn’t take the pack north again once the authority became hers, they hated her. Said we were encroaching on their territory. They took it as an act of war and we’ve been fighting against them ever since.”
“I’m so sorry about what happened to her,” Charlie said quietly.
Tears burned at the edges of my eyes, but I steeled my jaw and swallowed them back. Today would not become a pity party, dammit. “It’s fine,” I said, wiping a tear before it could leak out.
“We’ll find who did it,” she said, conviction in her tone.
Maybe it was the story or maybe I was losing my edge, but when I glanced over and found friendship rather than pity in her expression, I softened. This was what it was supposed to be like to have a sister, I realized. Something inside me gave way and before I knew it, Charlie wedged herself in the recesses of my heart. For better or worse, I couldn’t lose her now.