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“You’re blushing.”
Justice was right where I’d left him two blocks over. And still my breath caught in my throat when he stepped out of the shadows.
Because my nearly-a-lawyer cousin—double cousin, actually, the son of my father’s brother and mother’s sister—looked just like his dying twin. Both were olive-skinned with straight dark hair and eyes like wells of understanding. But only Justice peered at me as if I was dog shit stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
I coughed to clear my throat of the bitterness of his expression, then attempted to explain my hot cheeks away. “I ran here.”
Bastion would have known that cough was an evasion. Justice simply didn’t care.
Well, he didn’t care about my emotional volatility. He did care about the mission that had drawn us back into the close proximity we’d eschewed for years.
His eyes slid over me, ignoring my nakedness. “You don’t have it.”
I hugged my pelt closer to my chest before I shook my head in deflated confirmation. I didn’t have it, so we should....
My hand went for the door of the car Justice had been leaning against, but he pushed between me and the metal. “You realize we’re on a deadline. A permanent deadline.”
I clenched my fists, then relaxed them. Reminded myself that it was Justice’s brother who lost a little more will to live with each passing hour. Plus, Justice was skipping a very important capstone seminar to help us hunt for Bastion’s pelt. His surliness deserved the benefit of the doubt.
Still, his ailing brother and I were closer than siblings. We’d been a family of two for the past few years, out earning cash to pay for the others’ education. It wasn’t as if I was likely to forget that our seven-day window had already dwindled down to just a hair more than five.
Bastion’s decline was a pang in my gut that I ached to mitigate. And I had a temporary solution right there in my arms.
Lifting my shed skin until it nearly touched Justice’s nostrils, I raised my eyebrows at the exact same time. “We can stand here all night, or I can use my pelt to ease your brother’s pain.”
Justice’s nostrils flared. “It’s not a pelt. It’s a wolfsfell.”
This argument was cozy as a well-worn blanket. So I baited him, hoping for something lost a decade earlier. “Semantics. If you’d chosen the name ‘Fred’ instead of ‘Justice’ when you were a teenager, would you have been any less likely to study law?”
For one moment, I thought I’d hooked my cousin into his favorite pastime—arguing words and their meanings. My shoulders loosened. Maybe our relationship wasn’t irredeemably broken.
But then Justice’s eyes narrowed. “You’re talking hospice care.” He turned away from me to peer up at the Smythewhites’ rooftop, barely visible as it towered above nearby buildings. “My brother can handle a little ache here and there. What he needs is his own wolfsfell.”
I followed Justice’s gaze, wishing it had been as easy as I’d hoped to swipe back the decade-old stolen object. “I couldn’t get inside the house,” I admitted after a long moment. “There was a guard dog....”
And a man. Tall, dark, handsome....
Irrelevant, I decided, leaving the guard dog as the only road block worth mentioning aloud.
“I’ll research it.” Justice pulled out his phone as if he planned to dive into the issue here and now, after midnight, on a darkened street corner.
He still hadn’t moved out of my way or offered his car keys.
“Bastion needs....”
At his brother’s name, my cousin glanced up. For half a second he was the quarter of our pack he’d been in our youth. The strong, silent type with an emphasis on the first adjective. The one we all sought out when we needed an ear that would never retell our secrets...even if he might pick our grammar apart.
But that familiarity must have been a trick of the light. Because I shifted to my other foot and Justice’s listening glance turned into a scowl.
“We’re low on cash,” he told me. “Make yourself useful.”
He held out his hands, waiting for me to drop my clothes into them. Then he turned resolutely away as I slung my pelt across my shoulders and fell onto four paws.
***
DESPITE WANTING TO quell Bastion’s pain, it was a relief to avoid my newly reunited family for a short while. Among them, I was out of my element. Alone, I could spend at least a few hours returning to what I did best.
So I ran, following the thread of an online conversation struck up hours earlier. “Wife beater slipped me on Madison Ave,” a local had messaged. “Interested? 50/50 cut.”
At the time, I’d scratched my head, wondering why and how Bastion had managed to update his profile on the Bounty Hunter’s Forum in between bouts of vomiting and feverish napping. Because that was the only way our local counterpart could have guessed we were in town.
Knowing my sunny cousin, Bastion had probably thought he’d shake off his sickness then get back to work within hours. He hadn’t, of course. Instead, I’d been the one stuck answering pesky PMs from people I’d never met but who felt like they knew me. That’s what came of Bastion’s forum stories, thrusting thousands of interested readers into our day-to-day lives.
In this case, I’d messaged back a curt: “On vacation.”
“Just in case you get bored,” the local had countered, following up with his telephone number.
I wasn’t bored, but I was in need of both cash and distraction. So I turned toward Madison Avenue, allowing myself to forget both the past and the future. My claws clicked through the silence of suburban sleep as I achieved the site in question. The street was dark, residential. It was after midnight.
And the perp? Jimmy English hadn’t traveled far from the spot where he’d last been sighted. I followed the gray grunge of predator-turned-prey aroma for half a mile until it strengthened into the garlicky smugness of triumph.
The bail jumper had returned home. Of course he had. Didn’t we all crave our dens?
My local counterpart swore the wife hadn’t seen her husband in days. And she probably hadn’t. In wolf skin, I couldn’t see Jimmy either, tucked away in the kids’ treehouse.
But I could smell him. Could hear him. Knew from the scent of rage on the step closest to the bottom that the wife beater was plotting revenge.
Revenge on his spouse, who might not even know her husband had failed to show up for his court hearing yesterday. She was inside, unprotected. He was outside, sharpening his rage.
The capture couldn’t wait until morning. We needed to settle this immediately.
And...I needed backup. Without a human partner—or, you know, clothes—it would be difficult to apprehend a criminal. Apparently I’d been running on adrenaline all night long.
Luckily, suburbanites are lax with locks. I gnawed my pelt off my shoulders then pried the garage door upward, cringing when wheels squeaked on their metal tracks.
But nothing came out of the darkness to check on my intrusion. And inside was just what I’d hoped I’d see.
Stairs leading into what appeared to be a man cave. Old beer. Old socks. Everything old.
Meanwhile, off in one corner, the rarest of modern utilities—a land-line telephone.
Also old. But when I lifted the receiver, I was greeted by a dial tone.
I dialed the local bounty hunter’s digits from memory. Realized too late that I was likely waking him up.
Only, I wasn’t. Slim’s voice was curt. “What?”
“This is Honor. I changed my mind. Wanna be my backup?”
“Address?”
I rattled off my current location...then froze as the point of a knife dug into the base of my skull.
***
I COULD HEAR MY UNCLE’S voice in crisp, vivid memory. “A blade plus your wolf teeth is all you need to protect yourself and your family. A dagger is the weapon of the strong.”
Despite myself, I hummed satisfaction. Because the holder of this particular blade was strong, even though she likely didn’t think she was. The knife point didn’t wiggle even though the woman’s voice, when it emerged, squeaked up, up, up.
“Who are you?”
“I’m a fugitive recovery agent, ma’am. Here to pick up your husband.” I hesitated a moment, then offered further reassurance. “I’m totally unarmed.”
The knife point slid sideways. The overhead light flickered on. To my surprise, the woman behind me laughed.
“I can see that.” Her tone had turned dry.
Which is when I remembered that I was naked save for the pelt wrapped around one wrist like a bracer. I turned...
...and sprinted toward the man looming in the doorway behind her. After all, Mrs. English might be strong when faced with a naked female, but she’d let herself be beaten by her husband for years before reporting him.
And that husband was the one who’d snuck up on both of us. His scent was unavailable to my human nostrils. But I’d perused his mugshot. Knew his face.
Jimmy English. Wife beater and bond jumper in the flesh.
He was furious. Our voices must have drawn him closer. Then he’d assumed—what? That his wife had seen him creeping into the treehouse and ratted him out?
Whatever the reason, it wasn’t me but rather his spouse who drew Jimmy’s ire. He charged toward her, wordless rage bellowing. I changed my trajectory to intersect his path.
As I sprinted by, his wife took in the intruder with the same recognition but much more horror than I’d felt at his presence. The barely healed wound along one side of her jaw was bright red now, her face having whitened around it. She flinched as if the two broken ribs Jimmy left her with had shattered a second ago rather than last week.
I was the naked one, but it was as if Jimmy English’s arrival had stripped his spouse of something far more valuable than mere clothes.
No wonder she cringed, seeming to lose half her height in a second. The knife she’d been holding clattered to the floor.
Scum is awfully good at taking advantage of opportunities. No wonder Jimmy dove past me, stretching for the weapon that would provide the upper hand he should have already possessed by virtue of his bulk.
I couldn’t let him have it. Mrs. English needed the strength of success, not another beating by her husband.
Jimmy’s upper lip curled into a sneer. And I took advantage of his posturing to slide my arm through the gap between his fingers and the weapon.
Too bad my pelt had a mind of its own.
Wolf teeth caught on Jimmy’s elbow, and he lashed out instinctively. I don’t think he even had time to choose a target. Just got lucky when his fist connected with my breast so hard I yelped.
I expected the sound of my pain to send Mrs. English scurrying for cover. Instead, she appeared to have recovered her spine.
Or so I guessed. My eyes were watering too hard to really see her. But I felt the jolt as she kicked her husband with the full force of years of pent-up aggression.
“You bastard! You really think it’s okay to hit a woman young enough to be our daughter?”
Her heel in his groin shook both of us. I rolled sideways away from the burly monster who’d crumpled into a pile of deflated testosterone at his wife’s furious feet.
Mrs. English kept kicking while I leveraged myself upright. Headlights curved across the wall behind me...then stopped.
The timeline had moved up faster than anticipated. Slim must have been out cruising—no wonder the answer to my call had been so prompt.
I’d intended to chase Jimmy into the front yard in wolf form, leaving the capture to my partner. Teaming up with Bastion, the move would have been seamless. Even with a stranger for a partner, I should have been able to stick to the shadows and let Slim cuff our perp.
After that, I would have shifted and called out instructions. Made myself known and ensured I landed my cut of the bounty.
But now I was naked, in a lit room, watching a marital dispute that seemed destined to continue. Because with every kick, the wife appeared to be learning to inhale.
I could steal some clothes, intervene and talk Mrs. English around until she was confused about my former nakedness. Stick to the plan. Refill the pack’s dwindling coffers.
Or I could walk away and let this wronged wife complete her retribution. Slim would find them at his leisure. Jimmy would go back to jail, so the same end would be accomplished. I’d just fail to make my own contribution clear.
“So much for cash,” I muttered, toeing the knife sideways so it wouldn’t end up part of the marital tussle. Justice would be pissed at the lack of cash flow, but I inhaled deeper than I had in hours. For the first time all day, the name “Honor” hung unwrinkled across my shoulders.
Sliding past the raging wife, I shifted in the stairwell and wriggled out beneath the raised garage door. Then I waited in the shadows until Slim disentangled himself from his seatbelt and made his way upstairs.