Chapter Nine
Alexis
I’m standing there in a near empty coffee shop, and the air is so thick with tension I can almost taste it.
There’s not a customer in sight. It looks like someone trashed the counter area, with coffee cups and plates and metal napkin holders flung everywhere.
An older woman in an apron, with her graying auburn hair pulled up in bun, is sweeping shards of glass from the floor.
Worse, the man whose bed I just left is standing there, with a calm, pleasant smile on his face – lying through his teeth.
I don’t like how easy lying seems to come to him.
My heart and my mind are at war. For some reason, though, I want to trust him. It’s a yearning I have, deep in my very core.
Last night he swore to be my protector, my lover, my everything. He said every word I ever needed to hear.
Today he’s serving up a healthy heaping of deception and expecting me to eat it with a smile on my face.
“What kind of vermin?” I ask him, narrowing my eyes.
“Rats,” Cole says.
“Raccoons,” the coldly handsome man standing next to him says at the exact same time. The man is blond and blue eyed, several inches taller than Cole, and has an intense take-no-prisoners stare.
He glances at Cole. “Sorry, Alpha Regent.”
Cole shoots him an exasperated look. “Dax, call me that again and I…” Then he looks at me and shrugs, grimacing. “We’re not sure yet, actually. We’ve just seen the droppings.”
“Rat droppings look like raccoon droppings?” I skewer him with a glare. “What is really going on here, Cole?”
There’s a silvery clinking sound. “Owww!” the woman shrieks, clutching her hand.
We all rush over to her. At first I think she must have cut herself on glass, but then I look down and see that her hand is covered with red blisters. I glance down at the counter and see a spoon lying there.
There are other spoons on the counter. They all look different than this one – they’re thinner and plain. This one is thicker and has a little moon insignia with a snowflake on the moon.
One of the three packs who live in Cedar Run is the Frostbane pack. This seems like it would be their insignia. Without thinking, I reach out and grab it. It’s heavy. It doesn’t hurt me, though.
The woman is gasping in pain. Her whole hand is red and swollen now. The blisters are enormous.
“Sorry, I just picked up the spoon…it must be coated in silver…” she moans. Her face is pale. Tears of pain run down her cheeks.
Of course. Silver is deadly to shifters. It’s why humans keep a stockpile of silver-coated bullets, in case the shifter-human conflicts ever flare up again. You can drop a shifter from a five story building and he’ll limp away and heal, but silver? It’s permanent night-night time.
The woman is gasping for breath.
“What can we do for her?” I cry out. I know basic first aid, but I don’t know shifter first aid.
“I’ll take her to the clinic,” Dax says. The woman sways. Dax scoops her up in his brawny arms, and rushes out the door.
Several other men that I recognize from the booths at the market hurry in.
“Is Giselle okay?” one of them calls out. “What happened to her?’
“One of the spoons here was coated in silver, and she picked it up. I need you to glove up and go through every single piece of silverware here,” Cole says, his tone turned grim.
“Look for the Frostbane insignia on the silverware,” I add. Cole gives me an appraising glance, then leads me out of the café.
“Thank God you got me out of there. I wouldn’t want to get attacked by a rabid rat-raccoon,” I say coldly.
“Yeah. About that. We need to talk.”
“You think?”
He puts his arm around me and my traitorous nerves sing with happiness and I fight the urge to lean into his warm, solid strength.
Instead, I shake him off and step away as we walk, scampering to keep up with his long-legged stride.
We reach a metal bench adorned with insignia of wolves sitting on it, and sit down.
“Why are you lying to me?” I demand.
Anguish shines from Cole’s beautiful brown eyes. “I don’t want to hide things from you. I’m in impossible situation here. You know how fragile the peace is between humans and wolves. And you know how humans look at us with suspicion and always assume the worst about us.”
“Not always,” I protest defensively, but his steady stare skewers me.
Okay, yes, I did jump to the conclusion that my friend had been kidnapped by shifters, on very flimsy evidence. Much flimsier than I would have believed if shifters weren’t involved.
“Fine. I did that.”
“Last week,” he reminds me.
“Yes.” I wince at the memory. “I feel differently now that I’ve been here and met people and seen that you’re a group of people who care deeply about your friends and families, and who live just like humans do.”
“And you know how bad it was when humans and shifters were at war. Shifters and their families living in hiding deep in the woods, or hiding the fact that they were shifters. Humans hunting us. Shifters staging revenge raids. Everyone living in fear.”
It was in the 1960s before the Shifter-Human Accord was signed, but still recent enough that I, and everyone else, still feel the echoes of those dark times.
“What does this have to do with what’s happening at the coffee shop?”
He leans back on the bench with a scowl, folding his broad arms across his chest. “I don’t know yet. I’m making headway, but I’m not fully sure.”
The childish sound of laughter rings from down the street, and I watch two little tow-headed boys scrambling up the side of the wooden play structure on the playground.
“Let me help you,” I urge him. “I’m good at investigating. It’s what I do.”
There’s a long, long pause. All of the teasing, adoring humor has vanished from his face, replaced by nothing but pain.
“Here’s the problem. I trust you with my life, Alexis, but this is much bigger than me. This is something that could cause panic in humans, and then humans might start attacking us again, and we would have to defend ourselves, and then the next thing you know, the whole peace treaty is shattered.”
“So basically, you don’t trust me, and I don’t trust you. Not much of a foundation to build a future on.”
The words hang between us, sharp as broken glass.
Cole’s jaw tightens, and the muscle there jumps once before he looks away. His eyes, usually warm and rich as melted chocolate, are shadowed now—haunted. The easy confidence is gone.
My own throat feels tight, my pulse pounding in my ears.
The breeze stirs a lock of hair across my face, and I blink hard, trying to hold it together. He sits beside me, broad shoulders bowed, staring at the ground.
For a moment, neither of us speaks. We just sit there, two people who were supposed to be bound by fate, undone by the simplest, ugliest word in the world—doubt.
I can’t stand this, sitting here in this suffocating fog of heartbreak, so I leap to my feet.
Most of my life, I was moved from one home to another.
When things get tough, you leave.
That’s what I’ve always learned.
I don’t want to start crying, because once the tears start, they will never stop.
This could have been my home. He could have been my person. I break into a sprint, running towards my car. “Alexis, wait!” Cole shouts after me, his voice ragged with emotion.
But he doesn’t chase me. He lets me go.
I slide into my car and drive away.