Chapter 7 #2
It makes no sense to me. A woman with something truly dangerous in her head wouldn’t have driven her child out to a stranger’s estate in the woods. So it isn’t fear of me. She’s guarding Mia from me for a reason she won’t say, and the not-knowing sets my teeth on edge.
When the plates are clear, Jessa sends the girls to wash and dry, and a question comes back at her instead.
“Can we have a sleepover?” Mia asks. “Please?”
“No,” Jessa answers.
“Please, please, please.” Mia drags the word out three ways. “Mom, please.”
“No sleepovers.”
“You’re so mean.”
“I know.” Jessa hands her a dish towel. “But we have to go home, and we’ve got a mountain of things to get done.”
Mia regroups. “Then can Bella come to our house?”
Jessa’s eyes cut to me, braced for my refusal, certain of it. I read it on her and smile instead.
“Not tonight,” I offer. “Next week.”
Jessa’s mouth tightens. “The girls can see each other in the daytime. Sleepovers are harder. Bella’s probably never had one, and neither has Mia. What if Bella misses home? It’s a long drive back out here from town.”
Both girls open their mouths to swear they’re big enough, that they can absolutely manage, and I cut across the noise.
“I can deal with it. It’s no problem.” I shrug.
“You just can’t make things easy for me,” Jessa mutters under her breath, too low for a human ear. My hearing pulls it out of the air, and I keep the smile to myself.
Then the wolfsbane surfaces in my mind, the worry I’ve held at the back of my skull over the past few days. I have an investigation to run tonight, and I don’t want Bella alone in this house while I do it. Better she’s in town, watched, with another child for company.
“You know what,” I announce, “if you girls want Bella over tonight, she can go.”
Jessa’s head whips around, her eyes going wide.
“It’s fine,” I tell her. “There’s no school in the morning. I’ll come get her tomorrow afternoon, or you can run her back, and we’ll all go to lunch afterward.”
“What are you doing?” Jessa breathes low.
“It’s the first real friend Bella’s ever made.” I hold her gaze. “I want her to have it before you pack Mia up and leave.”
The girls catch that I’ve come down on their side, and they swarm Jessa, hanging off her arms, pleading in stereo.
“Fine. Fine.” She throws up a hand. “Go pack your bag.”
The girls tear off down the hall, and Jessa rounds on me. “You can’t just decide that without me.”
“Do you have a problem with my child under your roof?”
“No.” The word comes out clipped and frustrated. She tries again. “You don’t know me. You’re going to let your kid sleep at my place? What if I’m someone dangerous?”
I let a smile spread slowly. “You couldn’t be more dangerous than I am.”
I lean in for the rest of it, letting it go low and warm. “Next to me, you’re a harmless little bunny.”
She bristles on cue. “I can be dangerous.”
“Yeah?” I tip my head. “Show me.”
Her eyes narrow, and I drop my gaze to her mouth and leave it there. “I’ve got a real taste for bunnies.”
“Try anything,” she warns, “and I’ll break your nose.”
“That a promise?” I laugh and ease back a step. “Although I have to say I’m fond of my nose right where it is.”
I straighten and let her have some room. “Let the girls enjoy themselves. I’ve got work to handle tonight anyway.” I level a look at her. “Keep them inside the apartment. Don’t let them wander out. I’ll pick Bella up tomorrow afternoon.”
Jessa lets out a long breath and gives up the argument she never wanted.
The girls thunder back with a packed bag and a stuffed rabbit under Bella’s arm, and the goodbyes take ten minutes before Jessa loads them into the rental and pulls out.
I stand in the drive until the taillights wash out of sight past the tree line.
Then I take out my phone and call Adrian.
The woods hold the cold close to the ground, and the wet hasn’t fully left the air from the storm two nights back. Adrian meets me at the edge of the old swing, his shaved head beaded with damp, the scar through his eyebrow catching what little light comes off my phone.
“I combed every foot of it.” He keeps his voice down out of habit, though there’s no one for a mile.
“The vial was all there was. Nothing else dropped, no tracks I could lift, no second container. And wolfsbane burns off fast once it’s open, so whoever set it down was here minutes before Bella stumbled on it. It wasn’t hours.”
“She inhaled the fumes off an open vial and went down for two days.” I drag a hand over my jaw. “If she’d touched the liquid, or if she’d had her first shift already, we’d be having a different conversation. A grown wolf in her place would be worse off than she is.”
“You think she’s lucky.”
“I think she’s alive.” The word comes out rough.
“I can’t pull a single scent off this ground.
It rained that same night, the whole drive while I carried her to the healer, and the rain stripped everything clean off the trees and the dirt both.
Whoever stood here walked away without leaving me a thread to follow. ”
Adrian is quiet a moment. “Somebody got within twenty yards of your main house, Marc.”
“I’m aware.” That part sits heavy and cold in my gut.
“You think Bella’s the target?”
“No.” I say it fast, then stop because I owe him better than reflex.
“I don’t know what I think. I don’t have enough to think anything yet.
A vial doesn’t tell me who carried it or who it was meant for.
What I know is that it turned up a stone’s throw from where my niece plays, and I won’t have her anywhere near it again. ”
“Could be somebody cut through your land taking a shortcut.” Adrian doesn’t sound like he believes it either.
“Dropped it by accident, didn’t double back for it.
” He shifts his weight. “It happens. People cross the territory who shouldn’t, and they don’t always know whose ground they’re on. Have you told the alpha?”
“Not yet. I’ll have to.” I look out at the dark seam of trees.
“Wolfsbane was wiped out generations ago. We salted the ground where it grew. For a vial of it to turn up on my land, somebody is growing it again, and we have to know who. If hunters have a supply of this, we have a problem bigger than one sick kid.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Pull every suspicious death you can reach. Inside the pack, outside it, the city, two or three towns out in every direction.” I tick it off. “I want missing shifters too. Any pack that’s filed a wolf gone missing or found one dead, I want it.”
“Why missing?” His brow creases. “Dead I follow. Why missing?”
I look at him, and I remember he never sat through a day of alpha training, that this was always meant to be my burden and not his.
“Because hunters don’t kill the old way anymore, Adrian.
The open culls draw too much notice now.
We’re registered as humans, taxed as humans, buried as humans, and a human corpse gets an autopsy, a file, a detective asking why a healthy young man’s heart stopped.
A person who simply vanishes gets a few weeks of looking and a closed folder.
No body, no questions that lead anywhere.
They’ve stopped making us bleed. Now they just make us disappear. ”
He takes that in without a word for a long moment. I watch the cold understanding reach him, the same one that came over me when I first worked it out, that we’ve been counting our dead and never thought to count the ones who simply stopped coming home.
“You think the hunters are using wolfsbane to put shifters down,” he says at last.
“What else would anyone want it for?” I hold his eyes. “Look into it. I’ll tell my uncle tonight.”
He nods once and melts back into the trees, sure-footed in the dark, and I’m left alone with the cold, the wet, the dark hulk of a vial-shaped problem.
I stay where I am a while longer, thinking of the conversation I have to have.
Ten years ago I handed my uncle the seat and swore to myself I’d stay out of the running of his pack.
He’s a good alpha. The pack is steady under him, and an alpha-born meddling in another alpha’s territory is the surest way to crack a pack in two.
Even with Bella’s life in it, he won’t like me stepping in.
He loves me, that much I’ve never doubted.
After our parents died, he raised what was left of me and asked for nothing back.
But love and the seat are two different things.
When a blood-born starts asking questions on his land, a sitting alpha’s first instinct is to close ranks and guard his hold on the pack.
I’ll have to bring this to him gently, as a worry I need his help with, or he’ll hear a challenge in it whether I mean one or not.
I tip my head back to the wet black canopy and breathe in the cold.
The grief that lives in these particular woods tries to surface: Daniel and Hannah, the house I won’t enter, and for once, I’m grateful to have a fresh problem to crowd it out.
None of it fits together yet, and every piece of it points back toward someone close enough to reach my land.
His instincts will go territorial before they go soft, blood or no blood. I’ll have to walk into it slowly, hands open, and pray the love wins out over the alpha.
I doubt it will be that simple. Nothing about this is.