Tarnished Page 8

  “Honestly? Pick one or the other.” Andrew grabbed one of the mugs from the drainboard and helped himself to the coffee. He’d earned it with this conversation, invitation or no. “Either cut her off, or make up your mind and sell your pack on her.” He gave John a steady glance, centered to the side to avoid direct eye contact. “Sometimes people give up questioning your choices if you lock your teeth and wait long enough. As I have cause to know.” He didn’t plan to let John forget the grief he’d given him when he and Silver first got together, claiming Silver couldn’t give consent.

  “That’s different and you know it,” John snapped, scowling at the floor. Silence fell and stretched. John sounded to Andrew like he wasn’t sure about it.

  Andrew grimaced over his first sip of coffee and rummaged in the fridge until he found some creamer.

  “Pierce likes to make it strong,” John said, and started putting away clean dishes from the other side of the sink, maybe just to have something to do with his hands. “Getting rid of her isn’t an option at this point. She’d never leave Edmond, and if we make it into a custody battle, she has a lot to hurt us with.”

  “Whose fault is that?” Andrew let a snap into his tone. Enough. No one ever tripped and fell into someone’s bed, and no Were accidentally shifted—oops, sorry—in front of a human. Somewhere, buried however deep, they had to want to make a mistake like that.

  “All I could think was—” John’s shoulders drew in, and even his solidity seemed to collapse. “She needed to know what her own son was going to be.”

  Andrew growled. He couldn’t think of anything more stupid, but at the same time he understood the man’s motives. Almost. “Do you love her?”

  “Does it matter?” John shoved a stack of plates into the cupboard with an emphatic crash.

  “Yes.” Andrew gulped his coffee. Better at this point to toss it past the taste buds. “If you don’t, you’re the dumbest fucking Were I’ve had the misfortune to meet in a long time. If you do…” What could he say? Still stupid, but at least comprehensible? Andrew had a sudden memory of Silver’s laughing voice, soon after they’d first met. Dirty hypocrite, she’d said. He’d fought against a lot of resistance, for love of Silver. “Make it worth it,” he finished instead.

  “Ah, he learns. Slowly,” Death said.

  Andrew choked as some coffee went down the wrong way in his surprise. Death was using his dead wife’s voice this morning, Spanish accent smoky around the vowels. Andrew knew if he ignored the figment of his imagination, the feeling of being watched would get worse as Death hulked big and black at the edge of his vision. If he looked straight at Death, he’d disappear, but Andrew would look as crazy as Silver for glaring at nothing.

  Today, Andrew kept his eyes on John, and Death prowled around to stand behind John’s legs. The dark wolf flicked his tail once. “He can’t tell you if he’s in love, of course. He doesn’t know himself. But I’d keep asking the question until he decides.”

  Andrew continued to ignore Death. If you didn’t react to whatever he was saying long enough, Death wandered off to more interesting pastimes. Usually.

  John cast a look around the kitchen, then picked up his newspaper in a last tidying motion. “I can’t get out of going in to work today, at least for a few hours. Would you keep an eye on Susan? She called in sick and I suspect she’s still going to hang around Silver as much as possible.”

  Andrew wrestled down a growl. Who did John think he was, a member of his pack to be ordered around? It had been phrased as a request, but that didn’t matter. Andrew could hear John’s unthinking assumption that Andrew would agree. He clenched his hands around the head of his cane. “No, I think I’ll just protect Silver and ignore her.” He wrestled his sarcasm down. “Don’t be a purse dog. Of course I’ll watch out for her.”

  John dipped his head, grudgingly apologetic. “Even with…” He made a minimal gesture to the cane. “You’re the one I trust the most to keep her safe.”

  Andrew didn’t believe that for a minute—he was the most handy, and probably the one Susan would accept most easily—but he decided to accept the fact that John had bothered with the lie. John smelled sincere about something, anyway.

  9

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time for Susan to call in sick to give herself time to recover from the attack, but that left her hanging around the pack house. Sometimes she enjoyed the warm feeling of always having someone else around. It was easier to relax there, because the pack didn’t have any of the show rooms, decorated for company and not to be disturbed, that she had grown up with. It would be hard to have any when every hardwood floor had claw scratches and every fabric surface a film of hair. But now every werewolf reminded her of danger and things she was trying not to think about, like getting attacked by enemies, or killed by friends for what she knew.

  By midmorning, she gave up and suited Edmond up in his jacket and collected his diaper bag. She searched out Silver where she was dozing on the couch in the basement. Someone had folded the guest air mattress and bedding neatly at the side for the day. “Do you want to come over to my place? I have to go back there anyway to get my work laptop, and I figured we’d have privacy to talk again…?”

  Silver stretched and smoothed her hair back into order. “I’d be happy to.” She smiled, knowing but sympathetic. “A lot of ears swivel to follow one around here.” She came to pet Edmond’s hair and then led the way upstairs.

  Dare met them at the front door, hands light on his cane. Combined with the white streaks at his temples, it made him look even more distinguished, like some of the higher-ups at the bank Susan had met at receptions. He conveyed the same sense of distracted kindness, like he was willing to help, but he balanced always on the edge of anger about much weightier matters.

  “Mind if I join you both?” he said with a tight smile and a gesture toward the door. His voice lifted, but it was clearly not actually a question.

  Susan stopped, set the diaper bag down for the moment, and adjusted Edmond to a more stable position on her hip. “Why?” She was going to her place to get away from werewolves, not drag a bunch of them with her. Dare was intimidating enough that she didn’t want him around while she asked Silver questions, either.

  Edmond squirmed. “Woof,” he commented, eyes bright with interest at getting to go out.

  The baby seemed to short-circuit some annoyance in Dare’s expression. He stumped forward a step to touch Edmond’s cheek. “I’m protecting Silver. And John was worried about you.”

  Susan snorted and slipped on her shoes, juggling Edmond. “Won’t I be in more danger with you around? You’re the one he’s after, aren’t you?” The trouble was, the easiest solution would be to leave Silver here and go to her house alone. Susan didn’t really like the idea of being alone, either.

  “I am.” Dare sighed. “But I sincerely doubt either of you are in danger now. He’s made his point, and he’ll wait for me to come to him.”

  “And he won’t catch either of us off guard.” Silver patted the pocket that held her chain.

  Susan hesitated until Edmond, almost lunging out of her arms in impatience, decided her. Better Silver and Dare than staying here at the moment. “Fair enough.”

  Susan led the way outside to the car and buckled Edmond into his car seat. She dumped off the diaper bag next and left the door open for Silver. She moved up and opened the passenger door for Dare. He was the one with the cane, after all. “Do you all think I’m weak enough to need special protection even though I’m not the target of all of this?”

  Dare ignored the car door Susan had opened until he put his hand on it, as if pretending he’d opened it himself. Silver slid into the car without the pretense. “I don’t think you are. And John’s treating you like you’re one of the pack,” Dare said as he buckled up.

  Susan chewed over his phrasing as she started the engine. “Treating me like. Is there any way for me to be part of the pack?” Part of her shouted she was suicidal for ev
en considering wanting to be part of something so dangerous. But something else in her ached to belong, to be part of that large, close-knit family, and not have her son’s and John’s life fenced off from her.

  Dare looked over at her, and then past her out the window. “I honestly don’t know. You have my sympathy, of course. Silver and I are in the same situation at the moment, forced into close proximity with a pack but not part of it. At least you don’t have the genetic imperative to deal with.”

  Susan was grateful for the city traffic that forced her to keep her eyes on the road. She knew enough at least to suspect there would be pitfalls with eye contact, and this way she had an excuse to avoid it altogether. “Is it? Genetic, I mean? I can never tell what is and isn’t with you guys. For all I can tell, when you’re not—changed? Shifted…?”

  “In wolf form,” Dare supplied. “‘In wolf.’”

  Susan nodded. “In wolf—” She stumbled over the slang. Maybe she’d be better off thinking of it as a whole new language. “When you’re not in wolf, it could all be cultural, from what I’ve seen. Certainly not outside of human norms, except for the physical stuff.”

  Dare shook his head. “You can’t see the emotional underpinnings. You think we’re doing it for the same reasons humans do, but it’s stronger and deeper than that. Impossible to ignore.”

  He watched the road with focused attention the way her mother always did, like he had to be as aware of every hazard as the driver. It always annoyed Susan, like a vote of no confidence in her own observational skills.

  “Is it really like you have a wolf inside you? That, you know, wants things your human self wouldn’t?” Susan winced. She hadn’t meant to ask that. But that’s what it was like in a good portion of the books and movies she’d found. She imagined that side of Edmond, lurking in him even when he was a baby.

  Dare snorted. “You’ve been reading human fiction, haven’t you? Don’t. We don’t have some separate wolf mind any more than you have some autonomous self that’s the mother, and the rest of you isn’t. You are a mother. It shapes your whole self, even if it’s not everything you are.”

  Muscles relaxed in Susan’s shoulders. She hadn’t even realized they were tense. That seemed much more comprehensible. Just people, even if they were people with strange instincts and customs. “I asked John what it felt like a couple times, but he said it wasn’t something he could put into words.”

  Edmond started to fuss and Susan flipped the rearview mirror down to see his little face screwed up with frustration. “His toy’s in the bag,” she directed Silver, and then had to look away again, though she heard rummaging sounds. When she next stopped at a red light, Silver had the yellow plush rabbit, but she was holding it between two fingers like it stank. Edmond grunted in frustration as he grabbed impotently for it.

  “What? What’s wrong with it?” Susan twisted a hand back and Silver dropped it in. She sniffed the toy, but it just smelled like clean plush.

  “It’s food,” Silver said. “Didn’t Seattle get him a proper puppy?”

  “At least a bear would be better. Isn’t that what humans usually give their children?” Dare’s voice held a rumble of amusement at Silver’s phrasing, but he seemed relatively serious about the subject.

  Susan dropped the rabbit into her lap. “You guys are freaking kidding me. You mean there was a reason they kept giving me stuffed dogs all the time? I thought they were like baby shower gifts.”

  “Not dogs.” Dare snorted. “Human children have bears and blankets. We have wolf pups. Puppies.”

  “Well, I have half a dozen. There should be one all the way at the bottom of the bag.”

  Silver rummaged deeper and pulled one out, a dark, steely gray. She wiggled it in front of Edmond, and he grabbed hold. Susan flicked a glance at Dare. “They didn’t say anything, they just kept pushing them on me. I didn’t know what they wanted.”

  “That one I don’t think they were keeping from you on purpose. They probably didn’t realize there was anything to explain.” Dare gave a short laugh, ironic for no reason Susan could figure out. “Not spending much time with a pack over the past few years threw me in more with humans. I think I probably know more about them than many Were.”

  Susan wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. Was knowing about humans a good thing or a bad thing? Silence settled over them as she turned into her neighborhood.

  “There,” Dare said as they pulled away from a light. He pointed. The park she and John liked to take Edmond to showed as flashes of primary-colored metal among mature evergreens. “The seesaws. If you want to understand shifting for a Were, imagine one of those.”

  Susan glanced over before returning her attention to the road. She’d seen the seesaws at that park plenty of other times anyway. She murmured a noise prompting Dare to continue.

  “In the new—the new moon—it’s like all the weight’s on your side. You have to really push to get anywhere, and then the weight switches and it’s still all on the wrong side when you try to get back. In the full, it’s like you’re evenly balanced. You can swing back and forth with hardly any effort.” He exhaled with a note of dry humor. “And it’s especially easy for your temper to knock you one way or the other.”

  Susan snorted as she pulled into her driveway. Her two-bedroom unit was one of a new townhouse row with the garage hidden at the back, so she had to drive around to pull in. No wonder the pack seemed more emotional around the full moon. Dare’s metaphor did make a certain visceral sort of sense.

  “Have you seen Seattle shift?” Silver asked.

  Susan laughed raggedly and shut off the car. “It sounds sort of dirty when you say it like that.”

  “Not particularly.” Dare opened his door and wrangled his cane out first to take the weight as he pushed himself up. “Seeing the exact moment of shifting is somewhat intimate, but no worse than being nude is for humans.”

  “I’ve only seen him shift once.” Susan hardly remembered what it looked like, either. She’d been too shocked to process any of it at the time. He’d hidden it from her since then.

  Susan started extracting Edmond from his car seat before she remembered she should have unlocked the house door for her guests first. She threw them an apologetic glance. They seemed unbothered, waiting on the step. Silver had her hand tucked into the crook of Dare’s elbow. They looked fantastical with their touches of white, an ice princess and a mortal king. “You should show her a shift.” Silver smiled when Dare started.

  “No.” Dare caught Silver’s eyes in some sort of staring contest. The denial in his expression softened a second later. “What good would that do?”

  “You don’t need to—” Susan started, but Silver forestalled her without breaking her stare, lifting a finger from Dare’s arm to point at her.

  “Don’t be so low-ranked, Susan. We’re just off the full, it won’t be much work. Shifting will be good for his back. It helps healing. And I don’t mind if he shows you.”

  Susan sensed more communication between them in the shorthand that long-term couples developed. Dare snorted finally and Silver looked triumphant, though nothing more had been said. They stepped out of the way to allow Susan and Edmond up to unlock the door.

  Not really living there anymore was a two-edged sword, Susan decided as she surveyed the house with eyes critical in the face of company she wanted to impress. Not much time to accumulate clutter, but since it was out of sight and out of mind, not much motivation to pick up what there was, either. Her mother would have gone into silent disapproval mode immediately, seeing the mountain of opened but not recycled mail on the kitchen table and the clean glasses still in the dishrack.

  Susan pulled off Edmond’s coat, set him in front of his toys in the living room, and started a quick clutter triage. She swept the mail into stacks and gathered jackets from the furniture to hang up. The sound of happy button smashing came from Edmond’s direction. No matter how many expensive, impeccably-researched electronic development toys h
er parents tried to press on her, Edmond always ended up back at the board of bright plastic buttons and pictures Tracy had given him as a present to take home. It was clearly a werewolf hand-me-down, as it had teeth marks on several edges.

  Dare adjusted the blinds even more tightly shut, then gave Silver a look. Susan had dated enough guys to interpret it as “Do I have to?” Silver laughed and took his cane. Susan looked away quickly as he shrugged off his shirt. He was definitely eye candy. Time in John’s house had taught her Were walked around in the nude all the time, but it felt wrong to appreciate another woman’s man too obviously. Were all Were men this hot? Susan peeked again, catching sight of a line of hipbone as Dare pulled down his jeans. He was a lot leaner than John, muscles not so defined, but there still didn’t seem to be an ounce of fat on him.

  Dare folded his clothes and turned to set them on the nearest chair. Susan caught a quick glimpse of his back that made her forget about the ogling. The skin was ridged and rutted with ugly scar tissue nodules, too shiny where they weren’t white. He turned back quickly.

  Then he shifted.

  It wasn’t anything like the movies, and yet it was. The idea of pulling, stretching, that was the same, but Susan had always thought in the movies it looked jerky and painful: clay squeezed and pummeled by an inexpert sculptor. This was like watching someone very skilled at yoga stretching, stretching, until his body gracefully achieved a position you would have sworn was impossible. That was the difference, Susan realized. This didn’t look unnatural. It looked right. Impressive, and clearly an effort, but still right. She didn’t even notice bare skin turn to fur until it was already over, and she wondered how she could have missed something so obvious.