Chapter 7
Pax got home and found his twin on the back porch with two beers, which meant Ari had been watching for him and had planned ahead for this conversation. Pax sat down and accepted the beer from his twin. They looked out at the desert together while the last of the light left the sky.
“Well,” Ari said.
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You’re about to.”
Ari took a long pull from his beer. “I was just going to say that you look like a man who finally did something he should’ve done a long time ago.”
Pax said nothing, which was a kind of answer in itself, and Ari just nodded.
The desert went purple and then dark. A great horned owl called somewhere in the distance. Pax thought about Bree standing in the afternoon light with her hand in his and their long overdue kiss.
“She’s good for you,” Ari said. It wasn’t a question, and for once, he wasn’t teasing. Ari was just giving Pax his honest assessment.
“Yeah,” Pax agreed, unable to say more.
“She always was. Even when she was just a kid following us around her dad’s store.” Ari went on, turning his beer bottle around in his hands. “I always thought…I don’t know. That she saw us more clearly than anyone else. Most people see what they expect to see. She saw what was really there.”
Pax had thought the same thing.
“She told me she talked herself out of her infatuation,” he said.
Ari snorted. “That’s pure, practical Bree. She knew we were leaving long before we joined the Navy. The writing was on the wall. But I guess the question really is, what you’re going to do about it now.”
“It’s complicated,” Pax said, sipping his beer.
“Not really. We have a lot of choices. We can always go back to Seth in Germany. Or we could take a job with the Wraiths, or Kinkaid, or hell, even Pepard. Or we could do something else entirely. We could even stay here and put down roots. Bree isn’t going to want to leave her dad or his store.”
Pax sighed. Ari was right and he knew it down to his bones.
“The Wraiths kind of screwed us on that last mission. I almost lost my leg, though I don’t think they did it on purpose.
Everyone gets bad intel once in a while.
The question we still have to answer is whether they didn’t know, or just didn’t care.
Regardless of what we choose to do next, we need to know that. ”
“I don’t think Moore is the kind of commander to let any of his men, even provisional ones like us, hang out to dry.
I have to think it was a mistake, or maybe a deliberate attempt by the enemy to sour the relationship before it could really begin, but we’re going to have to hear it from him and assess.
Want me to get started on that? I’ve been putting off the debrief until you were healed up.
Better to make everyone think we’re invincible than let them see we’re mere flesh and blood after all, right?
” Ari grinned at his twin, and they clinked their beer bottles in a silent toast.
“Yeah, we should nail that down before we make a final decision on the Wraiths’ offer, but I have to tell you, I’m not leaning toward signing on with them.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind doing the occasional job for them on a freelance basis, as long as their intel is better than last time, but I’m tired of always being on the road.
I want to settle and be home more. Don’t you? ”
Ari tilted his head and looked a bit pained. “I’m not sure. I don’t have a potential mate on the horizon here.”
Pax let that thought sink in. Was it really true that little Breelee was his destined mate?
His inner jaguar seemed to shake its head at his human half’s stupidity, making Pax want to smile.
Of course it was. He’d just been so determined to leave and not think about her in that way when she’d been too young to do anything about it.
His thinking had been adjusting since he’d come back and seen the truly luscious woman she’d grown into.
There were no barriers between them now. Not anything of any substance, anyway. She was old enough. He’d seen the world and wanted to come home. They were the only things standing in their own way right now. At least, he hoped that was all there was.
She knew his deepest secret. She’d known he and his brother were shifters for a long time and had never betrayed them.
She’d earned their trust. That was a rare privilege given just to her, though he thought a few of the townspeople suspected there was something a little different about his extended family, but nobody seemed to really care one way or the other.
The town was cool. Everybody coexisted reasonably well and the Clan had stepped in to help the town more than once, and vice versa. They were good neighbors.
“Do me a favor and don’t overcomplicate things too much,” Ari cautioned Pax.
“I’m not going to overcomplicate things,” Pax replied testily.
“You say that now, but then the threat assessment part of your brain wakes up and starts running scenarios and suddenly everything that could go wrong is more interesting to you than everything that could go right.” Ari pointed his beer at him in accusation.
Pax considered arguing but gave up in favor of discussing his real worries. “She’s human,” he said instead, because that was the thing that concerned him the most.
“Being human is not a liability.” Ari set his beer down on the porch rail.
“Her mother was human. Her father is human. Mr. Leeland is one of the finest men I’ve ever had the privilege of being lectured by about the correct use of a spirit level.
Being human has not limited that man.” He paused, grinning.
“Bree’s known what we are for a long time and she’s never flinched from it once.
Not once. If that’s not someone who can exist alongside and within our Clan, I don’t know who is. ”
Pax let that settle. It wasn’t that he’d never thought about it. It was that thinking about it, and letting himself act on it, were two very different things.
“And,” Ari added, “for what it’s worth, your jaguar’s been making his opinion extremely clear for weeks. You can’t tell me he doesn’t sit up in your soul and purr every time she walks into a room.”
“I haven’t been purring,” Pax said stubbornly.
“Pax, bro. You have definitely been purring.” Ari rolled his eyes at his twin’s denial and finished his beer in silence.
The week after the kiss was both easier and harder than the week before it.
It was easier because they weren’t pretending anymore.
Pax went to the store in the mornings and Bree had coffee ready for him.
Neither of them made a big thing of the shift in their friendship that had happened with that soul stirring kiss.
It was just there, gently acknowledged in the way she met his eyes when he came in, and the way he found reasons to stay close to her while they worked.
It was a little harder because something was bothering him in his awareness of the town.
It started small. There was a car he didn’t recognize, parked on Main Street two days running in a different spot each time.
That wasn’t really suspicious on its own, but Pax’s instincts had been built in places where you noticed what didn’t fit.
Then there’d been a man in the diner when he and Ari went in for lunch on Wednesday, eating alone, not looking at his phone the way most people did, but looking around at the room.
Not aggressively. Just observing. The way trained people observed.
Pax didn’t say anything to Bree about it. Not yet. But he did mention it to Ari, keeping his voice neutral, and Ari’s response was the same stillness Pax felt in himself. Not alarm. Just focused attention.
“Could be nothing,” Ari said.
“Could be.”
“How long has it been since Salt Lake City?”
“A month, more or less.”
They both understood what that meant. If someone had been tracking them, a month was plenty of time to follow a trail. And Pax had driven himself home in a stolen truck, which had not been his most careful exit strategy.
“We should probably talk to Pedro,” Pax said.
“Yeah,” Ari agreed.
Pedro Ortiz was the oldest man Pax had ever met, and Pax had met men who were genuinely old in the shifter sense of the word. Pedro was something else. He was a shaman and had been living on this land since before Arizona was a state, possibly since before the U.S. itself existed.
Pedro had attached himself to the jaguar Clan after they’d migrated north and had been keeping their secrets and managing their concealment with quiet, unshakeable competence for so long that the Clan simply thought of him as one of the Clan elders.
His wards were old, dense, and layered over generations.
They weren’t flashy, or powerful like those of a battle mage, but they were so thoroughly embedded in the landscape that most magical entities passed right over this corner of the desert without registering anything worth investigating.
But no ward was perfect. And the utter fuck-up in Salt Lake City had involved at least one mage, possibly more.
“I’ll visit Pedro tomorrow,” Pax said decisively.
“I’ll go with you.” Ari finished his coffee and they both stood to leave.
As he followed his brother to the counter to pay for their meals, Pax thought about how he’d been pulling back from Bree slightly. He owed her an explanation before she drew the wrong conclusion. She had noticed something that morning, in fact.
He’d gone into the store, and she’d looked at him across the counter with those pretty blue eyes and said nothing, but her gaze had been questioning and a bit sad. He hated that, but he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t known what to say that wouldn’t scare her.