Chapter 21 #2
The place is wrecked, glass all over the tiles, and Jessa is perched on a stool with her sleeve pushed to the elbow while Cole tapes gauze around her forearm.
Cole looks up. Then he looks down and rolls his eyes.
“Dude.” He gestures vaguely at all of me. “Clothes.”
Jessa looks down, then back up at my face. Her cheeks go scarlet.
“What happened here?” I demand.
“Why the hell are you naked?” she splutters. “And why are you bleeding?”
Cole turns his head, clearly having just registered my injury. “Marcus.”
I ignore the alarm in his voice. “Give me a minute.”
The emergency box has sat inside the back door for ten years. I drag out sweatpants, pull them on, then come back to the island. “What happened?”
“Marcus, you’re bleeding!” Jessa’s face is pale.
“It’s a flesh wound,” I reassure her, but it’s obvious to me she’s not buying it. “Now somebody tell me what happened here. Where are the girls?”
“They’re okay.” Jessa swallows, her eyes lingering on my wound. “Sloane came by. She had keys.”
“Keys? Where the fuck did she get keys from?”
My question seems to loosen some knot in her shoulders. “I don’t know. She attacked me. I fought back. The girls came down. It was a whole mess.”
I study the gauze on her arm. “What did she do to your arm?”
Those are not her only injuries. A swelling is coming up over her right eyebrow, split at the top, dark already. Jared’s bruise sits yellow-green on the other side. The rage that fills me is blinding.
“Marcus, you should go check on them,” Cole suddenly says, his voice strange.
“No, they’re fine.” Jessa’s response is instantaneous, making me a little suspicious.
“I’ll go take a look.”
I hear Jessa hiss, and the quick anxious look she shoots my way doesn’t escape me. Why doesn’t she want me going up there?
When I enter their room, Mia is sleeping on her side with one fist under her cheek. Bella lies stretched on her back beside her, staring at the ceiling.
“Bella?” I crouch by the bed.
Bella’s eyes widen, and she rushes toward me. “Uncle Marcus!”
Her arms fling around my neck, and I hold her close. “What happened? Are you two girls okay?”
Her chin trembles. “Something happened to Mia.”
My blood goes cold. “What?”
Bella looks shaken. “You always said not to tell Jessa and Mia about us, but Uncle Marc”—her voice lowers into a whisper—“I think she’s like us.”
I look toward Mia, and my niece continues, “She had claws, and she was close to shifting and then Jessa snapped her out of it.”
My heart is racing. “Did Jessa see everything?”
Bella hesitates. “I don’t know. But Mia fell asleep as soon as we came into the room here. Uncle Marc, does that mean Jessa is like us as well?”
I shake my head. “No. Jessa’s human.”
“Then can I talk to Mia about shifters?”
I shake my head again. “Not yet, kiddo. You need to be a little more patient. Neither of you are hurt, though?”
Bella shakes her head. I kiss the top of it before letting her go. “Okay. Stay upstairs. I have to go deal with the situation downstairs. Tell me when Mia wakes up, okay?”
She nods.
I grab a shirt from my room and check my injury. Another three hours and it will be gone. Cole’s not there when I come back down, and Jessa is standing where I left her, both hands braced on the island. I know he’ll be calling me later tonight.
“Are you really okay?” I ask Jessa.
“I think so.”
I look around the mess in the kitchen. “Tell me exactly what happened here, Jessa.”
Her head comes around. “I already told you. Sloane came in and went batshit crazy.”
“You said the girls were fine.”
“They are!” But her eyes don’t meet mine.
“Then why do I smell Mia’s blood in here?”
Jessa goes still. “What do you mean, you can smell her blood?”
“I mean exactly what I said. I can smell her blood.”
“You can’t.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Marcus. Nobody smells somebody’s blood and knows whose it is. Blood is blood. It all smells the same.”
“It doesn’t smell the same to me.”
Her hand comes down. She stares at me across the ruined island, and I watch a decade of fear crawl back into her eyes. It’s the same fear that met me on a rainy road with a dead car and a pepper spray she never had.
“Do you want to tell me what happened,” I ask, “or do you want to keep going?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Jessa.” I come around the island until there’s a foot of air between us. “You think you’re protecting her. You’re not protecting her from me.”
“Stop it.”
“I need to know what Mia did,” I say low. “More than that, I need to know what you saw.”
Her eyes go wide, and what floods them isn’t anger. It’s terror, and it’s aimed at me.
“My daughter didn’t do anything.” The words tumble over each other. “She got into the middle of it, so I pushed her out of the way. That’s all.”
“You still don’t trust me.”
“That isn’t—”
“After everything, you’d rather lie to my face.” I drag a hand down my jaw. “Whatever you’re keeping her safe from, I want the same thing you want. I need to know what you saw and what Sloane saw.”
Jessa’s mouth sets. “Sloane saw nothing. I don’t understand why you’re making this into something.”
Rage crashes through me, and it comes out of my chest before I can stop it. “Damn it, Jessa, Mia is my daughter too!” The sound tears out of me in a register no human throat makes, and the glass in the cabinets hums. “We’re a family. You, me, and her. You can’t keep locking me out of my own—”
Something small breaks across the kitchen behind me. Bella stands at the bottom of the stairs in her pajamas with one hand on the banister. Three steps above her, Mia blinks at us with her hair mashed against one cheek, hauled out of sleep by the sound of me shouting.
“Mia’s your daughter?” Bella whispers.
My daughter’s mouth hangs open. She looks at me, then at her mother, then back at me.
“Bell.” I put a hand out. “Come and sit down. I’ll explain everything.”
Bella takes a step back instead. “You said the three of you are a family. It was you, Mia, and her mom.”
“Bella—”
“What about me?”
“Of course you’re my family.” My throat closes. “You’ve always been—”
“You didn’t say that.” Her eyes have gone glassy. “You said their names, but you never said mine.”
Jessa is already moving toward her with both hands out. “Sweetheart, he didn’t mean it that way. He was angry with me, so he said the first thing that came into his head. Obviously you’re—”
“You’re lying.” Bella’s voice breaks over the word. “He doesn’t want me anymore. His real daughter came, so he doesn’t need me.”
She turns and bolts for the front door. Mia is off the stairs after her before I’ve straightened up, hobbling on a scraped knee, screaming her cousin’s name into the hall. The door bangs against the wall, then both of them are gone into the dark.
I put both hands over my face. “Fantastic,” I mutter. “That’s absolutely fantastic.”
“What do we do now?” Jessa sounds numb. “We have to fix this. Children are so sensitive. This could scar her for life.”
Even now, she’s more concerned about how this will impact my niece than the fact that we’ve revealed the truth to both the girls. Is it any wonder that I’m so madly in love with this frustrating woman?
“I know.” I push off the island. My side pulls where I clawed it open, the flesh still raw.
“We need to get that wound looked at once we bring them back.” Jessa looks worried.
“It’ll be fine.” We cross the lawn together, and she keeps pace with me, jaw set, murder in every step. Her boots are on the wrong feet, which she hasn’t noticed and I’m not going to mention.
“None of this was supposed to get complicated,” I mutter. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to convince Bella I didn’t mean it.”
“Let me talk to her.”
I glance sideways. “You’re enemy number one right now.”
“Trust me.” Jessa doesn’t slow. “There are some things I can explain better.”
“She needs to know she’s worth as much to me as Mia is. I won’t have her thinking she comes second.” I look down at her. “Tell me if that’s a problem for you.”
“Why would it be?” She sounds insulted. “You raised her. Bella’s your daughter.”
“So is Mia.” I stop walking. “There’s nothing I won’t do for her, and I don’t care what you saw her do tonight. I will always protect her.”
Jessa’s throat moves. “We’ll talk about it when we get back. Right now I want our children in the house.”
Our children, she said. At the tree line I stop, drag a breath in through my nose, then taste them both.
“Damn it.” I’m moving before I’ve finished the word. “She’s past the trees. That little brat knows she’s not allowed past the trees.”
Jessa breaks into a jog beside me. “How could you possibly know that?”
“I can smell her.”
“Okay.” Her voice climbs. “I don’t know what you’re taking for that nose of yours, but wherever drugs you’re doing—”
“It isn’t drugs, Jessa.” I look down at her. “I think you already know that.”
She just presses her lips together as we enter the forest. The scream comes forty yards in. The trees are packed too tight to shift, so I run on two legs with branches whipping my arms, and Jessa stays right behind me, breathing hard. Another scream splits the dark, then I burst into the clearing.
A black bear stands in the middle of the clearing, up on her hind legs. Bella is on the ground under her, and my ten-year-old daughter is planted over her cousin with both fists up, snarling at a thousand pounds of animal.
Jessa cries out in alarm, and I leap forward, hitting the bear in the chest with everything I have. She goes back three strides with my hands buried in her ruff and my shoulder under her jaw. Then she plants her feet and stops me.
Normally bears aren’t a problem in my human form. But today I’m injured and slowed down. She swings, the paw catches me across the wounded side, and I’m airborne. The ground comes up and takes what’s left of the air in me.
Jessa has both girls hauled against her hip, and the bear’s head swings toward the noise.
“Get out of here!” I roar at her, and Jessa backs away. The bear charges them, not wanting to let her prey go.