And speaking of which, Calder appeared in the doorway behind Arik, with the faux-casual demeanor of a man checking on someone while trying not to look like he was checking onsomeone. If Arik had been thrown off by tonight’s events, Calder had to be reliving their past twice as hard—he’d been old enough to remember all of it. He was probably having trouble letting Arik out of his sight.
Ian had turned bright red and started to sputter, but Arik bulldozed right over him, saying, “So you think they had some kind of illusion spell on them? Or on the car, maybe?”
Thank gods, he got it without a lot of explanation. I also enjoyed the way he always picked up what I was putting down when it came to magical brainteasers like the not-not-people in the car.
“Notjustan illusion spell, that’s what I’m saying. A spell that hid the fact that—”
“That there even was an illusion,” Arik said, as I finished up with, “—that they were using a spell in the first place. Yes. Exactly.”
“Huh.” Arik trotted down the steps, suddenly looking much less tired. “Let’s go check it out. Ian, tell Matthew to get me with the mate bond if anything changes with them, okay?”
I popped up on tiptoe to kiss Ian’s cheek, ignored his grumbling about Arik being an asshole, and off we went. Hawthorne and Armitage had a mystery to solve—like the Scooby Gang, only usually with a lot more fatalities. We were awesome.
Chapter 5
Ian
Nate’s incredible ass epitomized the expression,I hate to see him go, but I love to watch him leave. I stared after him, mesmerized by how it flexed in those tight jeans. Arik actually had an amazing ass, too, and if he hadn’t been mated to my brother and also best friends with my mate I’d have stolen a glance.
But that way lay someone clawing me in the chest. Nate would make it his mission to grow claws solely for that purpose.
Nate was talking as they went around the corner of the house. “We can’t take too long, you really do look like—”
“Like shit, yes, thank you. I promise I’ll eat afterward. You can make me a sandwich if you care that much,” Arik groused, sounding about as affectionately grateful as a fucking prick of a cat could sound. Lost in the cereal aisle? Christ.
“You sure you wouldn’t prefer a can of Fancy Feast?” I grinned. Thank you, Nate. At least he could give as good as he got with Arik, even if no one else could. “That way you don’t even have to pick up a sandwich, if you’re too tired. You can just stick your face in there and slurp up all that delicious whitefish and gravy. I hear it’s whisker-licking good. Not that I’d know.”
Arik’s indignant voice listing some of the ways he intended to apply whitefish and gravy to Nate’s anatomy, both inside and out, faded away as they left the range of my alpha hearing, partly drowned out by Nate’s peal of laughter.
Calder had come down the steps to stand beside me, and he shook his head and sighed.
“Yeah, seriously,” I said. “Is anyone ever going to tell them that they don’t hate each other anymore? They keep tryingto go through the motions, but it’s getting kind of ridiculous at this point.”
Calder raised his eyebrows. “I was hoping maybe you could tell them.”
“Are you kidding?” He shrugged, and it was my turn to sigh. “How stupid do you think I am?”
He smiled at me, showing way too many too-sharp teeth, even by my standards. But getting a smile out of him at all hadn’t been easy for the first few months he’d been here, and I was damn glad he finally felt comfortable enough to be more himself. He’d saved Jared’s life, brought him home to us. He could’ve been a total asshole and I’d still have liked him.
“Not that stupid, apparently,” Calder said, after a slight pause—long enough that I couldn’t miss the fact that hehadthought I was that stupid thirty seconds ago.
Whatever. Not everybody could be a rocket scientist. I’d made my peace with it.
We both stood there silently for a few seconds, contemplating the Nate and Arik problem. The answer came to me in an unusual flash of brilliance.
“Matt can tell them,” I said, right as Calder said, “I think this falls under the pack leader’s purview.”
We both laughed and headed into the house. Yep. I liked him fine.
As we headed upstairs, I asked him if they’d found anything out about our surprise guests, and he filled me in: according to her driver’s license, the mom’s name was Jessica Ruiz, and they lived in Southern California, in a smaller town in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles. Josh hadn’t found anything in the car besides two well-loved stuffed animals in the back seat, now reunited with their owners, and a bag in the trunk with a couple of changes of clothing for each of them. Calder thought that meant they’d bugged out quickly; no one planned atrip the whole length of the state with their kids in tow without packing a lot more than that. I agreed with him. No matter what the details might be, it didn’t paint a great big-picture view of their story.
“The toddler’s name is Jonathan, but he keeps saying his sister’s name is Potato. So I’m guessing maybe he’s not a totally reliable narrator,” Calder said. More grimly, he added, “But he also clams the hell up when we ask about his dad. And that reaction’s reliable. I just don’t know what it means.”
Yeah. There could be a few reasons for a mom and two little children fleeing without most of their stuff, with the dad a sore subject. Maybe he was dead? Murdered in some kind of pack dispute? Or any kind of dispute. Shifters had a lot of strengths, and I’d used to think our tendency to solve arguments with violence was one of them. More honest. More natural. Less fucking talking when no one would be persuaded anyway.
I still preferred to rip somebody’s guts out when he deserved it, but I’d come to realize maybe we, as a society, could stand to do a little more thinking first.
Matt operated like that—hence his position as the pack leader. Jared and I had chafed under his boring, steady common sense when we were younger.
