“Explain.”
“I can’t. My wolf wants you. He’s always wanted you. But it was wrong of me to do it. I should’ve had better control.”
“We don’t belong,” she says. “You’re a wolf, and I’m a fox.”
I start toward her, and she puts her hand out to keep space between us.
“Your dad called.”
I can’t keep up with the change of subject. I realize she’s holding out my cell phone.
“Garrett and the others are wondering where you are. Your pack has been in some trouble.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They need you, Tank.” She takes a deep breath. “I don’t need you. Not anymore.”
I search her face. Nothing of Foxfire in there, no light, no excitement. Stony and cold. I marked her without permission. She has a right to be upset.
As soon as I take my cell phone, she turns away. She’s right. My phone is blown up with texts and calls from the pack. My alpha. My dad.
“I took a call from your dad,” she says. “I shouldn’t have done it, but you left your phone, and I didn’t want them worrying. Anyway, he told me your pack needs you.”
Fuck. There’s a text from Garrett to the entire pack. A meeting, tonight. “I should go.”
“I think it’s for the best.” She doesn’t look back at me. “We can give you a ride-”
Dammit. Leaving her-especially now, when she’s pissed at me-goes against every cell in my body-shifter or human. But I can’t shirk my duties to the pack, and she clearly doesn’t want me here. Maybe she just needs some space. I’ll reconnect with her after the pack meeting and get her to talk to me.
“The car shop has a motorcycle I can buy and take back to Tucson. The repairs are all paid for, and the tires should be on before closing. I’ll call when I get to Tucson to make sure you and your mom are all set.”
“We’ll be fine,” she says tightly. “No need to check on us.”
Fuck a goddamn duck. I guess I’m getting a taste of my own goddamn medicine. She’s totally shut me out.
My instincts scream at me not to go, but staying doesn’t make sense. The long motorcycle ride will clear my head. So will reconnecting with my pack.
~.~
Foxfire
I wander through the market, stopping at my dad’s old booth. The scent of fox is fading. Something tells me Jordy won’t be back to run the booth. This is a dead end. This whole trip was.
I choke back a sob. The wind picks up. Old newspapers swirl in the flurries. A gust carries the scent of patchouli oil to me.
“Foxfire?” Sunny approaches. “I just saw Tank-he bought a used motorcycle from the repair shop and is heading back to Tucson. Is everything all right?”
I burst into tears.
~.~
Back in our hotel room, I tell her everything. Everything except about us being shifters, of course. She grimaces at my description of Johnny’s family but doesn’t seem surprised.
“He told me a little about them. Enough to make it clear I’d never want to meet them. Everyone worked in the family business, with no outside pursuits. The men were domineering, the women shut-ins. Very rigid society, very patriarchal. Your father wasn’t that way at all.”
I show her the wallet, and she smiles at the picture of Johnny.
“I found this.” I pull out the key. “I’m not sure what it opens, but he left it behind when he disappeared.” Or was taken. I don’t know much about shifter society, but if his clan thought he was abducted, I believed them. After all, he’d wandered off before, when he met my mother. This sounded different.
“This probably opens a safety deposit box,” Sunny muses. “Everything he sent me was from the post office here. I already went to visit-very nice people. They remember Johnny.”
“Have they seen him?”
“Not since early last year.”
As I take the key back, I can’t shake the feeling of dread. My father disappeared and left his wallet in a lockbox. Maybe he meant to return and put it there for safekeeping. Or maybe not.
“S-should we…” I stumble over the words because they feel like an acknowledgment Johnny is really gone. For good. “Should we go see what it opens?”
“I think your father left it for someone to find.”
~.~
Papers, papers, and more papers-everything from handwritten notes to photocopied newspaper clippings. My father wasn’t a fox, he was a packrat.
Hiding my disappointment from Sunny, I dump the contents into a box the nice post office people provide, and return to the hotel. We spread everything out on the bed, and I eat my leftovers from last night as Sunny sifts through it.
“Interesting,” she says. “This looks like… research. Some sort of project.”
A newspaper headline catches my eye. “Missing mother,” I read. “And here’s another. Missing local man.”
I open my father’s notebook and find a corresponding list. Name, date, and an animal name. I read a few before I realize what the animal means. Grizzly, lion, eagle, raven-they’re types of shifters.
“Johnny was looking into missing people,” Sunny says, and starts stacking the newspaper clippings to one side. In the end there are over thirty, with a few more marked on the list in the notebook.
Not just missing people. Missing shifters.
The foxes were right. Shifters are disappearing. And my father was compiling evidence to prove it.
“What’s this?” Sunny lifts a piece of paper, copied from some sort of map. Johnny sketched a few boxes on it, some large, some small, with labels in his neat handwriting.
“Main warehouse, cage area, lab one, lab two,” Sunny reads.
“A compound,” I say, matching the map to my father’s notes. “It’s near the Arizona border, just outside the Ute Mountain Reservation. Looks like total wilderness.” I get my phone out and look up the coordinates, but Google Earth doesn’t show any buildings. “It’s a secret facility.”