“See?” Davey stuck her tongue out at me. “He doesn’t mind. Still,” she added with another glance at him. “I didn’t mean any offense.”
“None taken,” he said. “I was fourteen and a half. Went fishin’ in the woods and ran into a big black cat.” Billy shrugged. “I mean, I’d heard things. People talk, and there had been some…sightings. But I didn’t take that any more serious than Bigfoot, ’n shit. ‘Till I saw one. I musta caught him by surprise, because he swatted at me. Got me pretty good, too.” Billy pushed up his sleeve to show a set of four claw marks curving around his right forearm. “But then I started shouting, kinda swinging my fishing pole at him, and he ran off.”
“It was too late for you, though, right?” Doug said, lifting his glass.
“Yeah. I tied my shirt around the wound and headed home.”
“You didn’t go the hospital?” Davey asked.
“Nah.” Billy waved off the question as he scooped up a handful of peanuts from the community bowl. “My mom believed hospitals were where you go to die. She sewed me up, then slathered my arm with Neosporin. In the middle of the night, I got a high fever, so she put me in the tub, packed in ice from the gas station up the road. The fever broke, but then I started twitching, and…well, you know. I grewfur, ’n shit.”
“So, she knows?” Davey looked so hopeful that I almost cut Billy off, to keep him from telling her the rest of the story. “Your momknows?”
“She did, yeah,” he said. “This was before we knew about any Pride. Before there was one here, I guess.” Billy tilted his head in my direction. “What’s it been, three years since Titus took over?”
“Three and a half, since the founding of the Mississippi Valley Pride. Before that, it was the free zone. No support system. No shifter law. It was basically the wild west.”
“Your mom must have been so freaked out!” Davey breathed.
“Yeah, I guess.” Billy shrugged. “But, I mean, she’d heard the same stories I had. They had similar ones in the hills in West Virginia, where she was from. Legends, she called them. Until I became one. She kept it a secret without even knowing that was the rule, because she was paranoid that if anyone found out, the government would do experiments on me.” Billy grinned. “I think she watched too much late night sci-fi.”
Personally, I didn’t think his mom was far from the truth, about government experimentation.
“She died a couple of years later,” Billy added.
“Is that when my parents hired you?” Davey asked as she refilled the snack bowls. “I remember you were pretty young.”
“Um…about a year after that. I stayed with family for a while, but it didn’t really work out. Too many secrets.”
Doug snorted. “I bet. Furry, snarly secrets.”
“Pretty much.” Billy turned back to Davey. “It was actually Charley that hired me, though. I met her through Eamon.”
I nodded. That was before I was infected, back when Eamon was just a friend of my brother’s and a regular at the bar my parents owned. I’d had no idea that shifters existed, or that Ben was one. Or that Eamon and the teenager he’d taken in were anything other than human.
“I brought him on to bus tables, at first,” I told Davey. “But then Dad took Billy under his wing and taught him about the grill, and the rest was history! You were the best damn seventeen-year-old fry cook in the state!” I added, shifting my focus to Billy.
He beamed at me. “Speaking of which, I better go prep some burgers.”
“He’s only three years younger than me,” Davey whispered as the kitchen door swung shut behind him. “How is it that he seems so much younger?”
Doug Myers snorted. “That’s what happens when you lose your mom young.” He sipped from his mug, then seemed to reconsider. “‘Course, that’s also what happens when youneverlose your mom, and she won’t let you grow up.”
“Personal experience?” I teased.
Doug flipped me off as he slid his empty mug toward me.
The bell over the door rang while I was getting him another beer, and as I turned to hand it to him, a familiar scent surrounded me, swept in on a breeze through the open door.
Titus.
His gray-eyed gaze fixed on me instantly, and anyone unfamiliar with him might have assumed that he’d registered nothing else in the room.
I knew better. Titus Alexander had catalogued every scent and counted every body in the room before the door even swung closed behind him.
“Charley,” he said, and every shifter in the bar froze. Heads swiveled in his direction. Pulses echoed rapidly all over the room, like fingertips tapping at the back of my mind. There was something about Titus’s voice—about his presence—that demanded respect and screamed “authority.” It was a strength. A gravity. An Alpha-ness that I couldn’t put into better words, but I could feel every time I was in the room with him.
Even Davey could feel the change. The sudden tension in the bar, which would remain until Titus—as Alpha—made it clear why he had come, and that he meant no harm.
