“Sure. No problem.”
They got to work and Dewi tried to shove it all out of her mind.
Mostly, she succeeded.
But later that evening, after Ken had fallen asleep spooned around her, Dewi still stared at the wall and wondered if she’d ever be able to shut off that dark voice.
The one that sounded like Endquist.
The one that taunted her, haunted her nightmares.
The same one she knew was the last voice her parents ever heard.
CHAPTERTWENTY-NINE
Dewi
Over the next several weeks,Dewi—and everyone else—was relieved to see great improvement in Tamsin’s state of mind. To the point that Duncan and Badger felt comfortable easing back to taking turns with only one of them staying with her at a time and alternating days. Then staying with her only at night.
Now, closing in on the end of May, the men were available to her any time over the phone, but other than visits only lasting a couple hours at a time, she was leaning more on Brianna and Malyah, on Nami and Da’von, on Carl and Mateo.
Dewi had used Tamsin’s condition as another excuse to stall scheduling her trip out to Idaho and with the other Enforcers. Instead, Ken set up weekly video conferencing with all of them for Dewi, with Peyton’s blessing to handle it that way.
But it made Ken and Beck both happy that Dewi was, in some ways, actively making an effort to try to take things easy, meaning she was able to force herself to accept and justify it without heaping too much guilt on herself.
Bebe couldn’t understand why she couldn’t bring little Maisie home with her every day, but she and Dania both loved helping Tamsin and the others around the house when Malyah and Brianna weren’t working with them on lessons. Ken spent several mornings a week there, too, juggling his usual duties with trying to create lesson plans that were age- and skill-appropriate for the kids so they could evaluate them for the teachers in Idaho and then, come fall, get them all on a lesson schedule.
But they still had no answers about Bebe and Dania, although there hadn’t been a repeat of the scuffle between the girls.
On that Friday, Dania and the twins had a regularly scheduled check-up with their pediatrician, so Leila opted to take the day off work and keep them home. Dewi knew all that because Ken had also stayed home that morning to catch up on some work instead of driving over to work on lesson plans with Malyah and Brianna and Tamsin.
That didn’t mean the morning was a smooth one, unfortunately. Because Dewi, with Badger’s help, had been juggling calls from the Argyros family. The pack was still in the process of finding them a new home and jobs so they could get them moved.
Apparently someone else in Calvin’s family—Dewi wasn’t sure who although it seemed there was an older brother and a cousin involved—was harassing the family while trying to make contact with Calvin, convinced he was “in a cult” and wanting to extract him.
Yes, ironic.
Then they’d received a call from Sarasota, needing an Enforcer down there to scare a clueless human boyfriend away from a packmate’s teenage daughter. The kid tried to break up with him and he’d…
Well, acted like a stupid boy.
Beck volunteered to go down there to see if he could scare the boy off without having to bring a Prime into the situation. Beck had already been scheduled to go handle a mediation in Arcadia that afternoon between a couple of cousins. He could stop in Sarasota on the way.
Joaquin was on his way to Orlando already with Martin to help a newly resettled pack family from Mexico.
And all this had started before 8:00am Dewi’s time,beforeshe had consumed her first cup of coffee.
Dewi didn’t blame the Argyros family one bit, especially Karolos, who was begging Dewi to let him start ripping out throats. And she was doing her best to talk him off that ledge to buy time for Tyrone and Carbry to get there and help out.
Finally, she extracted a promise from him to hang tight and let the Enforcers handle it when they arrived in a few hours. When she dropped the desk phone handset back on the cradle, she stood, grabbed her coffee mug, and headed toward the kitchen.
“Well, that was as much fun as cauterizing an amputated toe,” she told Ken, who with Badger was waiting for another pot of coffee to finish brewing. “What thehellelse can happen today?”
In her back pocket, her cell phone rang.
“Now ye did it,” Badger cackled. “Ye tempted the Goddess.”
She craned her head around to yell at her phone. “That wasnota challenge-accepted situation, dammit!” She yanked it out of her pocket and answered without looking at the screen. “What?”
