20. No One’s Victim #2
Tara walked behind them through the cypress and watched the massive wolf carry her friend like something handed back to him after he had given it up for lost, and she thought about the call to Grandmère all those months ago, the long silence on the line and then the words, your friend has stumbled into something good.
Tara had laughed at the time. She was not laughing now, but she understood it now in a way she had not then.
Good had not meant safe, and it had not meant easy.
It meant this. Three men, a packless wolf, two old witches and a coffee-shop woman who turned out to be more than coffee, all of them bent for days to the single work of bringing one woman home out of the dark.
Serena had spent her adult life with no one but Tara to call her own.
She had driven into Magnolia Creek with a duffel bag and walked into a family without having a clue what she was walking into.
Tara had known, and yet she hadn’t known.
Still she had been so happy she could not say it. She was even happier now.
A second truck was parked near theirs. Mel was standing next to it.
She did not say anything. She opened the back door.
She had laid a thick blanket across the seat and a hot water bottle on the floor mat and a wet cloth in a bowl on the dashboard.
She looked at Serena through the rain and her eyes did the little thing they had always done when Serena walked into the Daily Grind for her morning coffee.
Serena recognized her.
It was a little startling. The kind of recognition that travels from the back of a memory to the front of one.
The woman behind the counter at the Daily Grind.
The woman who had poured her coffee every morning since her first day in Magnolia Creek.
The woman she had thought was a coffee shop owner and nothing more.
Serena’s mouth opened.
“Mel.”
“I got you, girl.”
Tara did not know the whole story of the woman with the blanket and the hot water bottle and the wet cloth set out in a bowl like she had been getting a room ready for a sick child, but she knew enough to read what passed between the two of them.
The coffee-shop woman had been watching over Serena, from behind a counter, pouring her morning cup and saying nothing, keeping a quiet eye on a regular she was never going to be allowed to claim out loud.
There was love that worked like that, Tara was learning.
Done from a distance. Done in silence. Done without ever once getting to say it was being done.
Tara was not going to forget the woman with the blanket.
Serena let Callum help her into the back seat.
Tara got in beside her.
Mel closed the door.
Jasper sauntered into view when Mel closed the door.
Blood at the cuffs of his jeans where he had shifted back into the man. Blood across the line of his jaw where he had not bothered to clean it. The wolf was at the surface of his face, banked, satisfied in a way Tara had not seen on him before.
Tara had always thought of Jasper as the easy one.
The brother who grinned. The one who had made Serena laugh first, brought her pie.
The man who walked out of the cypress now, with another man’s blood drying along his jaw, was not that one, and he was not sorry about it.
She could read that much off him without any bond at all.
Across the mud, Callum watched his brother for a long beat, and whatever ran between the two of them on their private line did not reach her, but Callum’s jaw did.
The set of it said the oldest of them was taking note on how far Jasper had gone at that gate, and coming up a good way short of easy about the answer.
Jasper did not speak.
He saw Serena in the back seat. He placed a hand over his heart.
Serena made the motion back, desperately trying not to lose the tears that pricked at her eyelids.
Tara caught the gesture and the answer to it and looked away, out the streaming window, because it was not hers to watch.
She had spent three days learning the shorthand these people spoke in, the nods and the held looks and the things they said by not saying them, and she had come to understand that the quiet was not coldness.
It was the opposite. They loved out loud so rarely because they loved so much that saying it would have taken the roof off.
A hand over the heart, across a muddy field in a storm, with a dead man’s ash cooling behind them.
It said everything the howling would have and so much more.
Tara put her own hand briefly against her chest, where the thrum that was Dex sat low and steady, and tried not to look too hard at the fact that she was learning the language too.
Jasper climbed into the front of the lead truck beside Callum.
***
Callum pulled the lead truck out and back onto the parish road.
Mel followed in the second.
The rain filled the ditches on either side of them. The storm tracked north and the trucks tracked north under it, and the garconniere at the back of the Webb plantation got smaller and smaller behind them until it was gone.
In the back seat of the truck, Tara held her friend’s hand.
Serena leaned her head against Tara’s shoulder.
The shadows around her settled into the seat with her. They did not crowd Tara.
Serena closed her eyes.
She slept the rest of the way home.