“Well?”
Lanie brought her cup of hot chocolate to her lips and took a cautious sip. She’d meandered over to the town square to kill some time and plan her next moves, and Blue had quickly spotted her. He’d cut a path across the square with a very pregnant woman in tow.
The woman nudged him with her elbow and whispered, “You should say hello first.”
Blue sighed and let go of the woman’s hand long enough to rub his eyes. “Sorry. Right, right. Manners. Willa, this is the notorious Elaine, AKA Lanie, AKA She Whom Someone We Know Pretends Doesn’t Exist.”
Willa’s hand flew to cover her mouth and she giggled.
“Pleased to finally meet you,” Lanie told her. Willa was the first demigoddess Lanie had ever met. Lanie had a ton of questions she wanted to ask, but knew she’d have to indulge her curiosity at some other time and in a less public place.
Lanie pressed down the sip cover on her cocoa cup lid and gave Blue a speculative look. “She’s…uncooperative.”
“What’s her excuse this time?”
“Same as before, though with a less strenuous delivery and more embellishments. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get her to tell me the truth.”
“How do you know she’s not being honest?” Willa asked. “I know Blue can usually tell when Diana’s lying, but that’s due more to Coyote magic than observational skills.”
“I don’t need magic,” Lanie said. “I’ve got logic. Usually, when things don’t make good sense, there’s a practical reason.”
“Oh, good. Blue, you’re here,” came a husky feminine voice from several yards away. A woman in wire-rimmed glasses and a lilac tracksuit waved at him.
“Don’t make eye contact,” Blue warned in a whispered rush. “She’ll put you to work.”
“Yoo-hoo!” the lady called.
“Blue,” Willa murmured through unmoving lips. “You’re not invisible.”
Obviously not, because the lady bounded over and fixed her narrowed gaze on the Coyote. “Stop ignoring me. I need you to climb a ladder. None of the other committee members will do it. Delia shattered her hip last year, Christine’s depth perception is shot all to hell, and I’ve got vertigo.” She thrust a wreath at him. “Go on and hang that. You won’t break.”
Blue snorted. “No, but maybe I just don’t want to.”
“Afraid being a little bit jolly will sully your bad boy reputation?”
Blue’s silence was telling.
Lanie pressed her lips together tightly to keep her laughter from tumbling out.
Willa seemed to be having a similar dysfunction. She’d turned her back to the confrontation and her shoulders were trembling with the telltale sign of repressed giggles.
“You won’t be any less of an alpha if you’re caught holding some garland,” the lady said.
“You think you’re slick,” he said. “You handed me a wreath. I’ll hang your damn wreath, but the garland can hang itself.”
The lady pushed her glasses up her nose and blinked at him.
“Come on, I don’t have time.” Blue’s tone was practically a whine—an odd sound coming from a man who was over forty. The fact that he’d so quickly reverted to that state told Lanie everything she needed to know.
She held out a hand to the woman. “You must be Blue’s mother.”
“Whether he likes it or not.” She shook Lanie’s hand and cut Blue a sideways look.
He rolled his eyes, pressed the wreath beneath his arm, and made ground-eating strides to the light post a couple of older women in Festival Committee T-shirts were staring up at.
“Deb, this is Elaine,” Willa told her.
Deb put a hand over her heart and did one of those long intakes of air like she was about to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” without taking another breath. “The Elaine?”
“Apparently, my reputation precedes me,” Lanie said.
Diana had never talked much about her mother during their relationship. It seemed to have been a sore spot for her. What Lanie knew about the ex-Mrs. Randall Shapely, she’d learned from Blue. Being older and more aware of the circumstances surrounding his parents’ divorce when it happened, his perception of his mother had been far softer than Diana’s for a long time. She’d been young and had needed a mother, and all she’d known as a girl was that Deb had left.
Technically, Randall had Deb expelled from the territory and cut her off from their kids. They didn’t have much of a relationship again until after Blue turned eighteen. Diana had needed more time to figure out who deserved the blame for the estrangement. According to Blue, Deb and Diana had in recent years developed a perfectly functional relationship, and Randall was the one in the gutter.
Deb waved a dismissive hand in Lanie’s direction. “Oh, Diana was very tightlipped about you. I didn’t know you existed until after I moved to Maria, and you’d been broken up for…”
“Six months at least, probably,” Lanie said.
Deb nodded gravely. “She’d never been the sort to be so quiet about who she’s dating. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s never been explicit, but— Blue, you need to hang that wreath higher!” Deb pointed to the nearest pole. “See? Like that one?”
Blue’s lips practically disappeared in his scowl, but he lifted the decoration higher.
“Right there! That’s good.” Deb turned her attention back to Lanie. “Diana had always been very matter-of-fact, but for as long as you were together, she said nothing.”
“She cared too much,” Willa said.
“Ridiculous,” Lanie said. “Nothing would have happened to me if people from the old pack found out about me. I may not be enmeshed in your world, but I’m not ignorant of it, and I know how to protect myself. In fact, I’m probably better prepared to survive shapeshifter bullshit than most shifters are.”
“I think she was right that Randall might have tried to eliminate you if he’d caught wind of you being a competing influence in Diana’s life,” Deb said. “Hell, after the divorce, even I was afraid to start dating again for fear he’d mess with the men just to teach me one more lesson. If it were up to him, I would never be happy.”
“But that doesn’t seem to be her excuse now,” Willa said gently. “Randall wouldn’t dare antagonize anyone in Blue’s territory. The last time he tried, he lost more than a third of his pack to us.”
“There’s something else going on with her,” Lanie said. “I’m trying to ferret out what it is, because as much as I love her, I can’t keep beating my head against a wall waiting for her to come around. It’s time, you know? I want to get married and start a family. I want to do those things with her, but she’s trying to shut me out. I can’t force her to come around. She has to want to do this.”
Deb twined her fingers in front of her belly and scrunched her nose.
“What?” Willa asked her. “You’re making an odd face.”
Deb breathed out the tiniest of grunts and gave her daughter-in-law a conspiratorial look. “Did you know that a female coyote shifter’s sense of smell is approximately ten times more sensitive than their male counterparts?”
“I think I heard Blue mention that once,” Lanie said. “Are you smelling something you want to tell us about?”
Deb canted her head, eyes narrowing again. “Maybe. You know, Randall didn’t like people knowing that I had some abilities that were unusual. He didn’t take pleasure in being able to boast that I brought some magic to the mix that didn’t exist in his family first.”
“You’re talking about your sense of smell in particular, right?” Willa asked.
Deb nodded.
“Ah,” Willa said, nodding too.
“Want to fill me in?” Lanie asked.
Willa turned to her, gaze flitting in her husband’s general direction, likely to check that he wasn’t near enough to overhear. “Before Blue and I got together, Diana told me that I smelled like him. Not just that his odor rubbed off on my clothes, but—”
“It’s inside,” Deb interjected. “It’s a hormonal rebalancing. All Coyotes can smell hormone changes to some degree, but most can’t discern subtleties. Not even the women. Most wouldn’t be able to tell—” she gestured to Willa, “if the smell is inside or outside without a lot of effort.”
“And you can?” Lanie asked.
“Yes. And obviously, Diana can. She inherited my nose. I’d actually be comfortable making the claim that hers is even more sensitive than mine.”
“So, she would know,” Willa said.
“Know what?” Lanie asked.
“That her scent’s clinging to you. Even if she has more or less gone numb to her own scent, after the two of you were apart for so long, she certainly would have noticed it when you returned.”
“Okay, so I’ve got her scent. What does that mean?”
“Scent branding is an evolutionary hallmark of certain ancient shapeshifter groups. Some individuals are better at it than others. Generally, if you’re carrying another animal’s scent, it’s because you’re a permanent partner to that creature.”
Jarred by the new information, Lanie stared agog. Deb had said “permanent partner.” Lanie had known that Diana was hers all along, but having science back up her gut feeling was like stumbling into a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
“So…” Lanie fidgeted with the lid of her hot chocolate and closed her eyes, contemplating. “I take it that is something irreversible?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s something she did on purpose? Because that wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, given her behavior.”
“Oh, no,” Willa said. “Blue tells me that it happens when the animal part of a shifter has chosen a mate. The human part of the brain has nothing to do with it.”
That almost made too much sense to Lanie, considering Diana’s recent behavior.
At least the wild part thinks I’m irresistible.
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Lanie opened her eyes in time to see Blue on approach, knocking pine needles off his shirt. “Why didn’t you ever tell me I smelled like your sister? Even if your nose isn’t as sensitive as your mother’s, you’re an alpha. You’re not an average dog.”
Blue’s brow creased. “I didn’t tell you that?”
Lanie glared at him.
He shrugged. “I thought I had. We’ve been surfing this ridiculousness for so long that I can’t remember what I have and haven’t told you, but yeah.” He pulled Willa against his chest and tucked his chin atop her head. “You do.”
“Otherwise, you wouldn’t have helped me.”
“Probably not. Most shifters nowadays don’t have mates in that way. They connect on a human level, but not necessarily on a magical one. Used to be that people would hold out, whether it seemed they would ever find that perfect mate or not, but not too many people do that anymore. They want to live normal lives as much as they can, and sometimes that means settling.” He made air quotes around the word “settling.”
Lanie’s bunched her lips quirked upward at one corner. “You didn’t settle.”
“Shit, I didn’t even know I was looking.”
Deb poked his shoulder. “The wild coyote in you did. He’s what made you call off that wedding to Bruno’s girl, what, three times?”
Blue shrugged again. “Lost count.”
Willa got pulled away by some smiley, smooth-talking member of the decorating committee, and Blue padded after her with a worried look on his face.
Deb edged in closer to Lanie.
Lanie watched her watch the couple.
They stood in companionable silence for a while, and then Deb said in a near-whisper, “I don’t know what Diana’s hang-up is, but I think I know my daughter well enough to guess that if she’s pushing away someone connected to her on such a rare level, there must be some serious anxiety getting in the way.”
“But what could possibly be causing it? Not the shifter stuff. I don’t buy that. Never did. It’s not my disgust over the things she might have done when she was still attached to your ex-husband’s pack. I know her heart. I know how wrecked she must feel over those decisions. I won’t abandon her for those. If she’s slept with someone else? I don’t care. Whatever. But this push and pull she’s doing—”
“You scare her.”
“What?” Deb’s out-of-the-blue statement was preposterous.
“That’s the only thing it could possibly be. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Scare her how? I’m not the one with fangs.”
“I don’t know how,” Deb said, “and I doubt she’d confide in me about it. She would tell me that everything is fine and that I have no reason to be concerned.”
“But you are.”
“Of course I am. Any mother worth a damn would be. In the years she needed me most, though, I wasn’t there. Maybe things would be different now if I had been. Maybe she would know how to sort through this murk on her own without messing things up even more.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Deb’s shrug was so redolent of Blue’s that there could be no doubt whom he’d inherited the body language from. “Fault doesn’t matter,” the older woman said. “The effects are what matter. That’s what we need to overcome.”
“We?”
Deb’s shoulders fell and voice went quiet. “Don’t abandon her, Elaine. Maybe that plea doesn’t mean much coming from me, but I wish you’d listen.”
“I don’t want to give up on her, but—”
“I know.” Deb sighed and wrung her hands. “The waiting is brutal. I just think that if you find the right combination of words to tell her, or if you can sift out whatever it is that’s holding her back so the two of you can finally scream out your frustrations, you can get past it. Give her a little more time.”
“How much time?” Lanie asked, but she knew better. She knew already that the correct answer was forever.
Lanie was so used to having her life perfectly sorted and ordered—to making lists and checking off the items. To giving herself deadlines to achieve success, on both small and large scales.
But she was pushing against something she didn’t quite understand, and might never truly get. She may have earned advanced degrees in anthropology and folklore, but magic was something to be lived with—not read about. She could make all the lists and timelines she wanted to, but none of those would make a damn bit of difference until she could figure out what was preventing Diana from ignoring what the wilder part of her had already decided to have.
“Time for a change in strategy,” Lanie murmured, rubbing her chin.
“Can I do anything?” Deb asked.
Lanie shook her head and started walking toward Blue and Willa. They’d been press-ganged into attaching garland to the gazebo railings. Lanie could pitch in and help speed up the misery.
“No, but thanks.” Lanie took a final slug of her hot chocolate. She tossed the cup into the trash before reaching into the garland pile. “I’m going to give her everything she wants, and then we’ll see what happens.”