“I mean, yaaaay,” Ricky said in the least convincing cheerful voice ever.
I laughed. “I’d appreciate it, kids.”
“Shouldn’t you call the cops?” Teresa asked as the teens filed out of the room.
“I sort of am the cops around here,” I reminded her. Teresa had lived in Portland for a while, after getting engaged to a male from one of the local packs. She lived there for two years, an incredibly long engagement for a were, before deciding that he wasn’t a good match, and moved back home. Her mother had told my mother that the bastard had called it off and mated with a human.
City life had left Teresa a bit out of sorts. She was used to public transportation, restaurants, movie theaters, cooperating with the human authorities . . . .
“Oh, right,” she said, frowning. “It’s just been so long since we’ve had any sort of trouble. I sort of forgot the procedure.”
“It’s OK. Thanks for sending the kids over. I’m pretty sure I have a brigade of aunties helping me already, but the kids will make the job go faster. Do you need anything here at the school?” I asked as she walked me out of the schoolhouse. “Supplies? Snacks?”
“Nope, we’re pretty much covered, as long as I can get the Gilbert kids to stop chewing on the nap-time mats.”
“I miss nap-time.” I sighed.
“Who wouldn’t?” She chuckled, waving me away.
When I arrived at the office, the smoke had all but disappeared. Mom and the aunts and gathered outside the building, whispering among themselves, while the kids worked.
“What a mess.” Mom sighed, kissing my cheeks and checking me over for obvious wounds. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I promised, wiggling out of her grasp. There were people watching, for goodness sake. “And I’m not sure what happened. We might need to have a pack meeting later, OK? Can you all tell your families?” The women nodded earnestly. “For right now, how about you go home and let the kids do the heavy lifting? Burn off a little of that energy.”
I heard my aunt Bonnie, Ricky’s mother, whisper, “Please, Lord,” as the ladies dispersed.
I walked into my office and found that Rebecca, the most organized soul in the group, had already started sorting through the papers and trying to salvage some of my ripped file folders. Ricky and Benjamin were in deep conference regarding which caustic substance would best clean the smoke marks from my ceiling.
After convincing them that hydrochloric acid was probably overkill, I directed the others to help me gather my paperbacks and throw what couldn’t be saved into the Dumpster out back. As I leaned over to right my slashed office chair, I caught the faint whiff of a familiar scent. Something clean and floral under the smoke.
Fabric softener. The same sort of April Fresh scent that had lingered on my truck.
I leaned closer, inhaling. It was new, definitely not something that had been clinging to my chair that morning. I tried to circulate through the room and subtly sniff the kids to check if maybe they’d cross-contaminated the chair with their moms’ laundry habits.
But kids today, what with the Dateline sex-predator exposés, notice when an adult sniffs them. Frankly, that made me feel better about the kids’ survival instincts. And it ended up being an exercise in unnecessarily creepy futility, because none of them smelled April Fresh. Spring Meadow? Mountain Breeze? Sure. But not a whiff of April Freshness.
I didn’t know what to make of it. I believed the kids when they said they didn’t barbecue my office. And we hadn’t had a stranger wander into town for random vandalism in, well, ever. And I couldn’t shake the odd coincidence that the undercarriage of my truck had smelled like dryer sheets. Who the hell would want to cut the brakes on my truck? Or toss my office? One act seemed rather serious, while the other just annoyed the hell out of me and cost me a new wastebasket. And who the hell used so much fabric softener that it obliterated all other traces of their natural scent?
Eli. The pack’s former alpha would have thought of something like that as he was terrorizing and attacking people near Cooper’s home in Grundy—Susie Quinn, a couple of teenage hikers, Abner Golightly. Cooper had been convinced that he was doing it himself, that he was having some sort of wolf blackout, which was exactly what Eli wanted him to think.
Cooper had a harder time remembering his time as a wolf than most of us. The more time a wolf spends with the pack, the clearer memories are during the phasing. There was a sort of collective memory among us, which could be unfortunate, given some of the stupid shit Samson pulled while on four legs. Since Cooper had spent nearly two years away from the pack, he was practically an amnesiac. When people started dying and Cooper thought it was possible that he could hurt Mo, he thought his only option was to leave.
Eli would have pulled something sneaky and backhanded like messing with my truck or setting fire to the “seat of my authority.”
But Eli was dead, which left me without a suspect list.
8
Battle Scars
I CIRCULATED THROUGH THE VILLAGE, warning the older members of the pack to keep an eye out. And able-bodied pack members were going to be running perimeter a lot more often. We didn’t want the police traipsing around the valley. I couldn’t run fingerprint analysis on my own truck or my office door. So, beyond increased patrols, there wasn’t much I could do.
And that’s what had me on four legs, running along the lip of the valley on a Monday evening. Well, I was supposed to be running along the edge of the valley.
After Uncle Frank mentioned our possible intruder problem, Lee had shown up with “reinforcements,” big burly males from his pack to help run patrols. I think he saw it as some sort of courting gesture, a “see how well we will all work together when the two packs are in-laws” thing. He kept trying to organize us into pairs and send the troops to “strategic locations” in the valley, but he didn’t know where those points were. And again, he just wasn’t that smart.
The meeting spiraled into a chaotic mess, and it took Samson bellowing “Shut the hell up!” at the chattering mob of weres before I could get everyone calmed down and paired off.