Chapter 12 Kendra
KENDRA
She’s weaving through traffic like the other vehicles are just suggestions, switching lanes without signaling, threading gaps I wouldn’t have risked at all, let alone with ice under every tire.
The snow is coming down sideways now, the road ahead nothing but two faint trails of red taillights bleeding through the white, and every time she swings left I’m doing the math on what happens when you overcorrect something this size at freeway speed.
“Calm down.” She doesn’t look at me. “I’m not going to flip the truck.”
I ignore her and glance back into the cab, needing something to focus on that isn’t the speedometer.
Aiden is still locked rigid against Andrew’s shoulder, his fingers starting to twitch now, small unsteady movements against his own thigh like sensation is slowly finding its way back.
Andrew has him arranged carefully against his side.
His palm rests on Aiden’s chest, his other hand smoothing the collar of his jacket in slow strokes, and he is not even pretending to look out the window.
Andrew’s entire focus is on that face, watching for every small sign of returning movement.
Andrew digs behind the seat with his free hand and pulls out a crumpled gym bag, tossing it into Kojo’s lap without looking. “There’s a towel and a clean shirt in there. You look like you crawled out of a slaughterhouse.”
Kojo unzips the bag and pulls out a white bar towel first. He works it over his forearms in short, rough strokes, scrubbing dried blood from the lines of his tattoos, flipping the towel when one side darkens and starting again on his knuckles, the spaces between his fingers where it caked and cracked.
He pulls what’s left of his shredded shirt over his head and the movement is awkward, his elbows hitting the window and the headrest, his shoulders too wide for the space.
The ruined fabric peels off stiff and he balls it up and shoves it into the bag.
He sits bare-chested for a few seconds, tattoos and muscle and that ridge running up his spine pressing flat against the seatback, before he wrestles Andrew’s shirt over his head.
It’s too tight across the chest and too short in the torso, and he tugs at the hem once before giving up.
Then there’s a soft tearing sound from the back of the shirt and I see the ridge poking through the fabric between his shoulder blades, the fur strip pushing through a rip it made for itself.
His old shirts had slits cut in the back for it. This one didn’t.
Andrew glances over at the sound and sighs. “That was my favorite shirt.”
Kojo doesn’t respond. He shifts against the seat and the ridge settles through the tear, the tips of the fur visible above the collar, and he looks uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with the fit.
I look away before he catches me watching.
Kojo takes up most of what’s left of the backseat and then some.
He is not built for truck cabs or any other enclosed vehicle I can think of.
His knees are pressed into the seat back in front of him, his shoulders bracket the window on one side and Andrew on the other, and he is perfectly stil.
He’s not looking at Aiden. He’s not tracking the road or the dark press of trees beginning to appear on either side of the freeway as the city falls behind us.
He’s watching me, and every time my eyes move, his move with them.
I glance at the side mirror and he’s already there.
I look at the road and I feel it return a second later.
It’s not uncomfortable like it probably should be. It’s just steady.
I meet Andrew’s eyes and say hi, and he says pleasantly, “Hi, Kojo’s mate.”
“It’s Kendra.” Kade cuts in.
“It’s majesty,” Kojo snaps from the backseat.
I turn in my seat and look at him. That same level amber gaze meets mine. Nothing moves in his face. I exhale through my nose and face front. No version of this exchange I’m going to win.
“How’s he doing?” I ask Andrew instead.
“He’ll be back to himself soon.” Andrew adjusts his hold, tucking Aiden’s arm a little more securely against his side. “Paralysis wears off clean. No lasting effects.”
Outside, Detroit is letting go of us one block at a time. The wall of lights breaks up into longer, darker stretches and the skyline shrinks in the passenger mirror, and I watch it go with something I don’t have a clean word for.
“I guess this means Wintermoon is my forever home now,” I tell her.
“It’s not as bad as you think,” Kade says.
“I haven’t said anything about what I think.”
“You didn’t have to.” She changes lanes without signaling — apparently traffic laws are advisory to her. “When you get there, my wife Leah will help you get settled. She’s better at it than I am, which is a low bar, but it’s the truth.”
Something about how she says wife makes me look at her. She’s got a small, closed look I haven’t seen from her before, not the sharp impatience or the fangs-out authority she’s worn since that motel room.
“It’s a long drive,” I say. “Tell me about her.”
Her features soften. Just briefly, just around the corners of her eyes, but it’s there.
“She’s amazing. You may be Kojo’s queen, but Leah is mine.
” She smiles at me briefly then continues, “She’s like me, a vampire hybrid witch, but she’s retained more of her power than I have.
You’ll see her pop in and out of town the same way I do.
She’s patient, which I am not. She’ll actually sit with you while you figure things out.
She glances in the rearview mirror at the backseat, and whatever she clocks back there makes her press her lips together for a second before she looks back at the road.
“Wintermoon isn’t a cage, Kendra. I know it feels that way, not what you planned for tonight. ”
“Tonight started with a Shut-off notice for my electric bill, and a pizza delivery,” I say. “So no. This is not what I planned.”
I let that sit and watch the snow for a moment. The question I’ve been carrying since the parking lot works its way out before I can decide whether I actually want to ask it.
“Who was that woman?” I ask. “The shifter who fought the poachers. Is she like Kojo?”
Andrew glances up from Aiden’s face, just for a second. Kade’s mouth pulls at one corner and she keeps her eyes on the road.
“Wait.” I turn in my seat. “If Zaki is the natural successor, then why do you keep calling me your queen? Why did she bow to me?”
“Because you are the first mate of the clan,” Kade says, cutting in before Kojo can open his mouth.
She doesn’t look away from the road. “Which by default makes you their leader. The Bouda go by the laws of their hierarchy and they don’t sway from it.
” She changes lanes with the same casual aggression she applies to everything.
“You are, in fact, the new queen of their clan.”
I huff and face front.
I think about Zaki walking toward twelve armed men without hurrying. Her body moving through that fight like she’d already seen the end of it before it started. The look she’d given Kojo across that parking lot, saying everything she needed to in the time it took to tilt her chin.
“Do you want to go find her?” I ask.
Kojo looks out the window, at the dark and the snow and the road disappearing into white, and when he looks back his face has shifted just enough that I catch it.
“No,” he says. “I will not leave your side.”
I face forward and sit with the fact that I’m relieved, and I don’t examine why.
The truck goes quiet for a stretch. Just the engine and the wind buffeting the cab and the soft sound of Andrew murmuring something against the top of Aiden’s head, and then Kojo breaks the silence. “You are jealous for nothing, majesty,” and I open my mouth and he keeps going.
“You own me,” he says, even and unhurried. “You own my Bouda. We are loyal to you, always.”
I close my mouth and face the windshield.
My cheeks are warm and I am grateful for the dark cab and the blowing snow and the fact that Kade is watching the road.
I don’t know the first thing about being a queen.
I don’t know what to do with a man who says you own me like it’s already settled, just a fact he’s lived with long enough that it stopped needing explanation.
“Give Wintermoon a chance, Kendra,” Kade says.
“I know this is moving fast, and I understand the apprehension. But I can’t in good conscience let you wander the streets alone after tonight.
Kojo threw a car at a human. He’s made noise with the radicals, and being fated to a supernatural male already makes you a target with them, regardless of anything else you’ve done.
” She says it plain, no softening and no edge.
“And if you get hurt, Kojo will do everything in his power to defend you. Even if it ends him.”
I watch the road and the snow and the faint ghost of lane markers buried under the accumulation, and I say I know, because it is the only honest thing I have and it’s enough for right now.
Kade glances in the rearview mirror, takes in the backseat with one long look, exhales through her nose, and just pushes the gas harder.
“We’re going to have to stop for fuel,” she says. “All this snow is putting extra drag on the engine and I’d rather not coast into Wintermoon on fumes.”
“Good,” I say, “because I have to pee.”
“At least we agree on something.”
Andrew’s voice changes behind me before I can say anything else. All the quiet murmuring drops away, his whole posture shifting upright in the mirror.
“He’s coming back, he’s finally snapping out of it,” Andrew says.
I look back. Aiden’s fingers are moving now, his feet shifting, his face working past the rigid blankness Zaki’s cackle locked it into. He makes a sound, low and uncomfortable, and then starts taking inventory of where all his limbs went. His elbow catches the door. His knee comes up.