“Okay. And sometime today I’ve got to water the garden. It’s one of my…” He ducked his head and sighed.
“Quinn Springer. You’re doingchoreshere? Who are you and what have you done with my nephew?”
The moment she said it, she flinched. He might take it wrong, might hear in it some implication he wasn’t himself anymore. Instead he grinned and gave her a shoulder-bump that nearly sent her off her feet.
“Oh! Sorry!”
Ember staggered upright. “Don’t tell me— You can do that to Aaron.”
“I’ve tried to knock him over and he doesn’t budge an inch.”
“Of course you have.” Males of every species were the same.
“I wish you could meet the pack,” Quinn said as they neared the house an hour later. “There’s a cookout tomorrow, and everybody’ll be together. But the alpha might want you to stay here.”
Ten days with fifty acres to explore wasn’t true confinement. Ember shrugged. “You’re the only wolf I’m concerned with, Quinn.”
“But I want you to meet them. This is my home now, and Aaron’s sort of…I don’t know, my adopted uncle? Something like that.”
No, not something like that. Nothing like that whatsoever. Quinn was one person’s nephew, and she was that person. Then again, if she insisted on her “claim” as Aaron would call it, she denied Quinn his new family. And until he could come home, he needed the wolves.
Wow. One thought she never would have entertained yesterday.
“I’m going to ask,” Quinn said. “You could at least meet Jeremy and Lucy and their kids. They’re the closest neighbors. They’re cool. And on the farther side, Aaron’s other neighbor is the alpha.”
She didn’t have the chance to choke on that or ask any questions, because Aaron’s voice barked from the back deck.
“Quinn!”
Quinn leaped into a loping dash as if someone had shot a starting gun and he was in it to win it. Ember ran at the pace of someone with purely human DNA. Aaron stood waiting at the sliding-glass back door, a large red medical box in one hand.
Ember was about thirty seconds behind Quinn, far enough to miss whatever Aaron said. Then he darted across the deck and vaulted past the steps to the ground. Without a single missed stride he kept running. In seconds he was behind the wheel of the black pickup at the end of the driveway, and it rocketed to the road and away in a dusty cloud.
Ember reached the porch at last. “What in the world?”
Quinn sank down on the top step, and she sat beside him. “Zane got hurt. He’s one of the Freeman kids. Lucy called Aaron and said he’s bleeding a lot and she thinks he needs stitches.”
“Do they have a car?”
“Um, yeah. Of course.”
“Then why did she call someone instead of taking him…?” A new detail of life on Lunar Lane crystallized in her mind. “You don’t go to doctors?”
“We try not to. It’s an old superstition, some of the wolves say. But others of them say it’s still legit. You don’t want a medical record with your name on it that’s stamped ‘lupine.’”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, I don’t know. That one law says we have to get treated if we come in, nobody’s allowed to discriminate. But I don’t know, Aunt Em. Some of the old people get really mad about it, and now that I’m a wolf I can tell they’re mad because they’re scared. Things happened to them I don’t know about. And Arlo—he’s the oldest here, he’s like eighty—he says it still happens.”
She set her hand on his knee, and he gave her a smile.
“Not too smelly as long as I don’t wrap you in my arms?”
His chuckle was such a young sound. “It’s all good. I’ll let you know if I need a buffer.”
“Good.”
She sat a moment with the new information. Opened her mouth to ask what Aaron thought—superstition or necessary caution? But no, she’d ask him herself. Hear it in his words.
