Lexie hugged him. “Bye, Dad. Tell Mom we’re going to be fine.”
“I think she’s already adjusted to the idea that you kids are adults now.” Axl gave Fern a quick one-armed hug when she came up to hug him, and slapped Baz on the shoulder, one man to another. “Call if you need anything. Otherwise, I hope not to see you for a while. Oh wait, before I go, let’s take a picture to celebrate the start of the big adventure.”
Herded by Axl, the group formed up underneath the WINDROCK GENERAL STORE sign. Baz put an arm around Lexie, and she threw her other arm over Maida’s shoulders.Declan stood beside his sister, and Fern leaned against him with her long red-gold hair falling in a cascade over her shoulders.
Axl took a few pictures with his phone and Lexie’s, then stepped back, grinning. “Perfect. Let’s roll.”
Maida said a cheerful goodbye to the other girls, hugged Baz, punched Declan in the arm, and climbed into the van. The two vehicles pulled out, first Axl in the truck and then Maida with the van, leaving the remaining four standing beside their pile of stuff in the town they now owned.
“What now?” Fern asked. She had taken off her sandals so she could wiggle her toes in the grass growing up through cracks in the old boardwalk.
Technically, Fern wasn’t related to the others; her parents, Gannon and Daisy, lived and worked on the Pinerock ranch. But Baz had always thought of her as a cousin anyway. She was sylph-like, a delicate wild child who the other kids had always naturally gravitated toward protecting. Her waterfall of curly hair flowed over her green flower-printed dress, making her resemble a delicate flowerbed herself.
“We should probably start getting this stuff put away,” Baz said, looking at the large heap of gear.
“Forget that,” Lexie declared. “It’s not supposed to rain, and we’ve got the whole day. We’ve got a wholetown. We need to pick out houses to live in, and explore, and see if the places we used to go are still here—do you remember the wishing well, Baz?”
“Sure,” Baz said, not entirely truthfully. Most of his memories of the place were faded by time.
“We also need to figure out who’s going to be our new alpha,” Declan said.
He didn’t say it to Baz; in fact, he hadn’t spoken directly to Baz since they had arrived. Whatever closeness they might oncehave shared, as the two oldest boys in the group of cousins, had been left behind with their childhood years.
“Isn’t it going to be Baz?” Fern asked.
“Debatable,” Declan said.
“Look, we don’t even need an alpha, do we?” Lexie asked. “I mean, this is sort of a new clan,ourclan, and we can do things any way we want. We could be a democracy. We could vote.”
“In that case, I vote we need an alpha,” Declan said.
“You just want to argue with everyone,” Lexie shot back.
“Guys,” Baz said. He sighed. It really was going to be nonstop arguing. He wondered if this was why shifter clans had alphas in the first place, so there was a designated person to settle disputes.
He could sense his bear growling, wanting to assert itself, but he pushed it down. If theyweregoing to be their own clan, independent of their parents, he didn’t want to start off as a killjoy who forced everyone to do their chores while there was a whole town waiting for them to explore.
“I agree with Lexie,” he said. “Let’s look around.”
“Whee!” Fern bounced on her toes. “I want to pick a cottage to live in.”
Declan scowled and shoved his hands in his pockets. Baz knew there was unfinished business between himself and his cousin; they were going to have to have it out sooner or later. But for now, Declan went off to explore the town on his own, vanishing down a side street.
As the others scattered, Baz went his own way as well. Away from the gaggle of bickering cousins, he found himself relaxing into the natural peace of the place.
Maybe this really was going to work out.
The idea behind their parents buying the town, when it had gone up for sale, was that there simply wasn’t enough space to accommodate all of them and their eventual growingfamilies on the ranch. Shifters were hardheaded, many of those not connected by mate bonds had a natural tendency to try to dominate each other, and a large group of shifters living together tended to end up with constant infighting. It was natural for young shifters to go off and start their own clans.
“Windrock Clan,” Baz murmured. He liked the sound of that.
There was way more space in the town than four or five people needed, even with eventual mates and kids. But that was part of the plan, too.
Somewhere in the back of Baz’s mind was the hope that their new town might serve a much-needed role for the feral shifter clans that lived in the mountains. The wild clans had little to do with farm- and town-dwelling shifters. But young people who wanted to leave those clans, to go to school or look for mates elsewhere, had little experience with the human world. Baz hoped that Windrock might become a beacon of understanding between the two kinds of shifters, a place where they could coexist, where the wild clans could come to meet others of their kind and acquire things they needed from businesses used to serving them.
He wondered if some of them might be around right now, in fact, quietly observing the new arrivals from the edge of the woods. As he left his cousins behind and turned down a small side street, the sun warm on his back, Baz had a distinct sense of being watched.
But not in a bad way. It didn’t feel hostile or upsetting. It was just there, a general—maybe even comfortable—feeling that he wasn’t alone.
