The Coyote's Chance (Masters of Maria Book 4) Read online

  “That sounds like a threat.” And Mason was making one right back, if that growl in his chest was to be taken seriously.

  “I’m fine with you thinking that,” Blue said. “Truly, I am. I’m not looking for friendship from you. All I expect is a modicum of cooperation so I can do my job in the way everyone needs me to.”

  “If your definition of everyone is the whole of the Coyote pack and excludes the rest of the people in Maria who have to deal with the fallout of your bullshit, then you’ve already failed.”

  “How about asking me questions instead of making assumptions?”

  “Why bother asking? Huh? You’re a Coyote. You’re going to lie.” Mason shoved past him, rounded the aisle, and called up to the front, “Neil, did you get those clamps in I ordered? I’ve got a huge cabinetry system that needs to be assembled tomorrow.”

  Apparently, Blue had been dismissed.

  For a minute, Blue held still against the pole, staring at the spot where Mason had been standing and grinding his teeth. The confrontation hadn’t been productive, and he didn’t feel any better at having gotten the introductions out of the way. Perhaps some small part of him had been hoping they’d come to some accord and that he could find support and cooperation from one of the town’s respected leaders. He needed someone to be on his side if Willa wasn’t going to be.

  He hadn’t gotten that, but he wasn’t going to crawl away dejected. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. The pack wasn’t a challenge he planned to back down from.

  “I’ll figure something out. I always do,” he said to himself as he tapped the heels of his palms against the support column.

  Mason had backtracked to the opening of the aisle.

  Blue straightened up, ready to fight if he needed to, but Mason didn’t come closer.

  “By the way,” the Cougar said in a flat, disquieting tone. “I’ve got a new baby and more work than I know what to do with right now. I haven’t had time to deal with my newest problem in the manner in which I normally would, but when I find out which of your Coyotes has been terrorizing the cattle on my mother’s ranch, you better hope they can run faster than I can.” He tossed his bag from one hand to the other. “I seriously doubt they can. You’d better be ready with a shovel to scoop them up.”

  Mason left.

  Blue muttered, “Fuck,” and launched a text message to Lance.

  Blue: Hey. Coyotes have been stirring up trouble at Mason Foye’s mother’s ranch. Need to figure out who ASAP.

  Lance: What happened?

  Blue: Met Mason. No warm fuzzies. If he finds the Coyote, there’ll be blood.

  Lance: And we’d have to respond in kind if there is.

  Lance always understood.

  Blue: Yeah, so . . . Let’s not get there.

  Lance: I’ll get to work.

  Blue: Update me later. And do me a favor—don’t say anything to the patron lady. She’s gonna bind our hands.

  Lance: Understood.

  Blue let out a ragged breath and made his way to the door. He not only needed to find the cattle-harassers before Mason did, but before Willa found out and tried to protect them. She’d be shooting the pack in its figurative foot if she didn’t let him mete out punishments as necessary.

  “What is wrong with that woman?” He took off toward Coyote HQ, mind spinning like a whirling dervish.

  He needed to figure her out, and fast, or the USS Coyote was going to sink, and Blue would have to go down with it. It wasn’t like he had a choice.

  Chapter Eight

  After school and the most scatterbrained planning time she’d endured for at least five years, Willa trudged from her Jeep to her front door, so weary she could hardly pick her feet up over the cracks in her cement walkway.

  The day hadn’t been physically exhausting. It would have been easier if that had been the case instead of her being all peopled out. She didn’t mind the kids so much. After working with them for so much of her adult life, she had become more or less immune to their energy. It was all the nosy teachers who kept stopping by to borrow this or that all through third and fourth periods, and then after school when she’d been trying to update grades in the system.

  They were all so obvious. They wanted to know who that man was who’d been in her classroom. They’d seen him around town, but wanted to know how she knew him. He obviously wasn’t an MMS parent, so what did he want? Was he single? Was he coming back?

  She couldn’t answer the first question. The second, she could only provide a partial answer to: “He’s not married.” Yet. As for the third question, Willa vehemently hoped not.

  Diana hadn’t commented on the visitors, but her cheeky smile was easy enough to translate. She had a predator’s sense of hearing. Of course she heard every whispered, “Welllll? Who was that?” And fortunately, Diana wasn’t much of a chatterer. She’d kept herself busy cleaning out the storage room and had even escorted Finn Graham to the nurse’s office when he somehow managed to slice his finger while adjusting his music stand.

  Sixth grade band was far too often a blood sport.

  “You can go . . . to wherever you’re staying,” Willa murmured to Diana, whose booted feet padded along behind her.

  “I think you and I both know why I’m here, so no.”

  “You’re gonna stick to me like glue, huh?”

  Diana bounded up the steps beside her and slouched elegantly beside the doorbell before smirking. “I wouldn’t say like glue. After all, I’m technically supposed to be here keeping an eye on my brother, not you.”

  “Don’t let me hold you up.” Willa turned her key in the lock, pulled it, and searched the ring for her deadbolt key. King gave a plaintive “woof” inside the house.

  “Coming!” she shouted at him. To Diana, she asked, “And why are you monitoring your brother, anyway?”

  “Long story short, my father has trust issues.”

  “You’re adults.”

  Diana grimaced, and the creases at the corners of her mouth deepened. “Thanks for the reminder, though I didn’t need one. OG has been reminding me daily for the past twelve years.”

  “OG?”

  “That’s what Blue and I call our father. Stands for ‘old and grizzled.’”

  “Fun.” Willa snorted and shouldered the door open.

  King’s nails clicked in cringe-inducing staccato atop the hardwood floor she’d probably need to refinish soon as he danced his usual “Yay! You’re home!” jig. “You’re such a dork,” she murmured to him as she scratched behind his ears.

  “OG will recall Blue at the slightest provocation. He can’t afford to be embarrassed when he’s got a big territory merger on the line.”

  “A merger?”

  “Yep. I guess he wants that to be his legacy. Expanding the Shapely perimeter.”

  “And how does your brother feel about that? I pegged him as opportunistic, but . . . ” Willa gave her head an incredulous shake. “Not like that.”

  “I think Blue cares about the merger about as much as he cares about MAC’s new lipstick collection.” She added in an aside, “Which is amazing, by the way.”

  Willa quirked a brow. She’d have to take Diana’s word for it.

  Diana knelt in front of King and gave the underside of his chin an assertive tickle. “Well, hello, handsome.”

  He turned his big head in her hands and gave her a “Walk me” whine.

  Willa sighed and dropped her keys onto the console table and tucked her bag onto its low shelf. “Some guard dog.”

  “Oh, I don’t bother most dogs, for whatever reason. They can’t stand Blue.”

  “I noticed.”

  Diana grabbed King’s leash from the coatrack and clasped the hook onto his collar.

  If it were possible for a dog to swoon, King certainly did then.

  “So . . . ” Willa said as King pulled Diana to the door. “If Blue fails spectacularly here, you’ll tell your father?”

  Diana shrugged. “Haven’t decided yet. De
pends on what’s good for Blue.”

  Interesting.

  King took off at a run the moment his paws hit the walkway, and Diana jerked into a sprint after him, shouting, “Whew!” as she cleared the gate to the sidewalk.

  Shaking her head and laughing in spite of herself, Willa grabbed her mail off the floor and then scanned through it as she made her way to the kitchen.

  She was sliding her finger beneath her musician’s union dues reminder envelope flap when she suddenly realized that she hadn’t turned on the kitchen light.

  Her routine in late afternoons was always the same. Walk into the kitchen. Turn on the light. That part of the house was situated next to the neighborhood’s largest shade tree, and it got dark fast in the afternoon.

  “Did I leave the light on?” she murmured, squinting up at the fluorescent panel. The room was exceedingly bright for natural illumination.

  It was off. So were the stove light and the nearby hallway light. The window was dark.

  Cold sweat beaded down the sides of her temples as the hair trigger in her brain activated her fight-or-flight response.

  Run, it said, but she was in her own house. That was supposed to be her safe place. That was supposed to be where all her best hiding places were.

  “Oh no.” She set the mail down and gave her head a hard shake. “No no no.”

  She’d thought she’d been free of him. She’d told him to leave her alone, and she’d believed he’d taken the command to heart, but she should have known better.

  Apollo indulged his whims as he saw fit, and when he saw fit. He was the only entity that she knew who could illuminate a room just by standing in it, and that light would linger long after he’d left.

  He’d been in her house.

  Her father had been in her house while she was away and had touched her things.

  She may have been seeing red, but as she struggled to control her breathing, she could see the bright spots of golden heat on everything his warm fingertips had glided over. The impressions would fade in time, but her horror that he’d molested her space when she wasn’t there wouldn’t.

  Paralyzed with indecision, she curled her toes into her shoes and clenched her fingers into fists.

  Please be gone.

  She needed him gone. He always left her in worse straits than she’d started in. His gifts to her always turned out to be curses or punishments she suffered vicariously for the woman who’d rejected him and then died before he was done being cruel.

  Her nails bit deeper into her palms as she moved slowly to the back of the little house. It was quiet. The hall dimly lit. Illuminated lines on the chair rail as though he’d glided his fingers along them as he’d casually strolled. They stopped halfway down the hall in front of the guest room.

  He’d touched that door, too. His marks were on the knob, his golden handprint atop the door’s white paint.

  Quiet inside.

  Wringing her hands, she looked down the hall into the living room, hoping to see a glimpse of King coming back into the house dragging his leash and Diana chasing after him. At least King would bark. At least he could annoy Apollo into leaving. Apollo abhorred pandemonium that wasn’t of his own making.

  But they weren’t there.

  No one was there, except her, and whatever was in that room, if anything.

  All other sounds beside her uneven, shuddering breaths and tentative footsteps faded into the background, spotlighting her perennial, necessary solitariness.

  The weight of her secrets was as heavy as Mount Olympus on her shoulders, and there wasn’t a soul she could let help her carry them. He would drive away her friends, her lovers if she ever had any—anyone who she loved in some way—to ensure her misery, and theirs as well for daring to stand with her.

  She knew his ways. Had witnessed his cruelty firsthand. He hadn’t cared enough to rescue her when Spain’s Inquisition ruled that she should be burned alive for heresy, and he could have. Her hell had lasted for a week before they’d lit that pyre, but sometimes she wondered if she were in a different kind of hell—the one that had all the memories. Especially the memory of her father looking at her with such disgust when he finally bothered to check in.

  “So, you survived, then,” he’d said solemnly as though it were a pity that she had.

  For a long time, she’d wondered if it was.

  “You should have called for me,” he’d said. “Perhaps I would have intervened.”

  He wouldn’t have. She’d called him before, when her friends and cousins had been arrested. She’d pleaded for his help. His way of helping had been to make them disappear for good.

  She hadn’t let anyone get close since.

  Please don’t be in there.

  She raised a shaking hand to the knob, and then jerked it back.

  She didn’t know how she’d react if he was in there, and that seemed like something she should figure out quickly. If she confronted him with bold words and her chin held high, he might even believe the things that came out of her mouth.

  She raised her head. Took a breath.

  She turned the knob and pushed the door open before she could send a message to her brain to disregard that order. But her eyes closed as the door slammed against the stopper and the sounds of her frantic breaths hammered in her ears.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been standing there, sweating and gasping and petrified.

  She only knew that some time later, Blue’s voice was in her ears, murmuring, “Hey. Willa.”

  He had his hands pressed to her shoulders, his fingertips notching into the blades. Touching her and too close, but that didn’t matter when Olympus was already crushing her. “Willa.”

  “He’s . . . He’s going to . . . ”

  “Who?” He bent, ostensibly to meet her gaze, but she wasn’t seeing straight. Her gaze kept getting pulled toward that unnatural light, and Blue didn’t seem to notice it. “I called your name five or six times, and you’re acting like you can’t hear me. What’s wrong?”

  “Destroying everything. That’s what he does. Everyone thinks he’s so benevolent, but he just does what he wants.”

  “Who?” There was insistence laced through his voice. Not the annoyed kind he was susceptible to when he was dealing with the likes of the Lamarrs, but a concerned kind of insistence. She hadn’t heard that from him before—hadn’t thought he was capable of it and didn’t know what it meant that he was. “What happened to you? You’re shaking like a leaf.”

  “That’s . . . why I’m so tired?” She nodded with resolution. “Yes. Can’t keep up. Always so nervous.”

  Blue didn’t say anything. He smoothed his hands down her shoulders and then back up. If not for him, she might not have been upright. Her legs were noodles. Her back tight with tension.

  “Is . . . he in there?” She swiped her forearm across her wet forehead.

  “Who?” Blue asked softly, forehead creasing with concern.

  “No names.” She swallowed and shook her head again. “Never say names.” On the rare occasion she communicated with her half-siblings, they didn’t say “Apollo.” They all knew who the being in question was without being direct. Her hands found the bottom of her shirt and wrung it as her gaze tracked to the open door. “Is . . . anyone in there?”

  Letting his hands drop from her shoulders, Blue poked his head into the room and looked left and then right.

  She was suddenly cold. Shaking again, so hard she had to put her back against the wall and brace her trembling hands against it.

  “There’s no one in here. What happened? Did someone break in? The door was unlocked, but I figured you’d let the dog out or something.”

  “D-Diana has the dog.” Apparently, they were still out on their walk. Willa glanced at her watch, but couldn’t read the face because either her wrist was moving too fast or the rest of her was. She couldn’t have been standing there for more than five minutes, but even a minute lost to catatonia was too long. When it had happene
d to her mother, the other nuns had thought she was possessed. She wasn’t. She simply hadn’t been built to persevere, and Willa had inherited that trait from her.

  “Can you see the light?” Willa whispered, canting her head toward the room.

  “What light?” Blue was still in the bedroom. “The nightlight plugged in beside the bed?”

  “No, the . . . on the dresser. And the walls.” Apollo had touched the corner of a picture, perhaps straightening it on the wall before moving on to fondle the knickknacks on the dresser.

  “No,” Blue said, stepping back into the hallway. “I don’t see anything. Are you—Shit. Hold on. Doubt this’ll work.” He grasped her by the shoulders, and suddenly she was warm inside and the shaking tapered off.

  “All right?” she finished for him, staring at his Adam’s apple. “No.”

  Never all right.

  She hadn’t been all right since birth.

  Just like before, he squeezed her shoulders, pulled her out from under the mountain a bit. She shouldn’t have let him, but she was too tired to stop him.

  “Come sit down.” He said soothingly, but then he touched her back in the place that always triggered a reflexive throwing of her elbows and momentary blindness as she fought her attacker.

  Blue wasn’t an attacker.

  She couldn’t stop flailing though, because if she stopped fighting, she would die. She’d made the mistake of not fighting hard enough once and had ended up having her feet roasted and body stretched on a rack—all because she couldn’t tell lies the way the inquisitors had wanted. She couldn’t say what they needed to hear. She was too much like her mother that way. Too honest. Afraid of where lies might get them, because certainly they were worse than the truth.

  Vaguely, she registered her flying hand striking against warm, firm flesh, and Blue’s hiss of pain.

  Then constriction.

  Blue wrapped his arms tightly around her body, and then firmer until she couldn’t thrash anymore. She could hardly breathe, and that was probably her fault because hyperventilation was so close.