That sucked, because torturing Austin was her favorite way to distract herself from her family’s money problems.
Her body had its usual reaction when she thought about their sparring. Nipples hardening, skin tingling, a rush of moisture between her legs. She suddenly felt exquisitely sensitive; every tree branch slapping against her skin, every caress of the warm breeze whipping through the trees, made her bite down on her lip so she didn’t whimper with need.
She was like a bitch in heat.
It was so ridiculous. Why did he affect her like that? If the old wives’ tales were to be believed, that kind of reaction meant that he was her True Mate. But that was impossible. Not only did he drive her insane, and she was pretty sure she hated him – they weren’t compatible. She was a fox, he was a wolf. End of story.
Or was it? She didn’t know of any fox-wolf pairings, but that didn’t mean it never happened anywhere.
Fox shifters tended to lie low, even more so than wolf shifters, because they were the low shifters on the totem pole. They couldn’t defend themselves against bears, wolves, or big cats. Whenever possible, they kept their existence secret from all other shifter species, because as soon as other shifter species found out where fox territory was, they tended to move in and take over. Like they had when they’d created the wolf-shifter town of Greenville twenty years ago, encroaching on fox territory and daring the foxes to do something about it.
Fortunately, the wolf pack in Greenville was pretty wimpy. Their Alpha was not a Dominus, and in fact he barely deserved the title of Alpha. Otherwise, the foxes might have found themselves driven right out of Foxhaven, forced to find a new territory.
Foxes, unlike wolves, didn’t form packs. All shifters needed to socialize with others of their own kind if they didn’t want to turn feral, but foxes did it in family groups.
Up until recently, shifter packs, prides, clans and families had kept pretty much to themselves. They all lived in remote areas; they shunned the outside world. There was a certain level of cooperation necessary, to help keep their existence secret from humans, but there wasn’t a lot of intermingling among different types of animal shifters.
In response to the increasing difficulty of hiding their existence in an overpopulated, technologically linked-up world, a national database had recently been created, set up to help shifters around the country work together, but that was very new and mostly served the wolves.
So were there any cases of fox-wolf matings?
She pushed it out of her head. Why was she even giving it that much thought? It was irrelevant. Austin was a thief. He stole her marks from her. She had no respect for thieves. That was what she would keep telling herself, over and over again, until she believed it.
She trotted out of the woods and into the clearing where the To Dine For restaurant nestled among the tall pines, as it had for generations. In an adjacent clearing, her family’s two-story white clapboard farmhouse sat on a lot that was choked by weeds that none of them had time to cut. They were too busy scrambling night and day trying to earn enough money to pay off the lien on their house.
That was why she had first gone into bounty hunting five years ago, when she was seventeen. She’d always been a whiz at self-defense and tracking, and bounty hunting paid a heck of a lot more than waitressing at the family restaurant.
They had a month left. They had taken out a massive loan from Algernon, Lord of All Foxes, and they were still sixty thousand dollars short.
They’d never get the money in time.
Her younger sister Jessamine spotted her and came hurrying across the yard. Jessamine, a born rebel, refused to accept the flaming red hair color that nature handed out to all fox shifters. She had dyed her bangs and the tips of her hair black. Then she’d gone out and gotten piercings all over her face. Septum, stud on the side of her nose, lip ring, eyebrow ring.
She was working today, which was why her apron partially covered her favorite shirt, the one with fishnet sleeves and a picture of a cartoon kitty with a Mohawk and nose ring.
Jessamine pointed at the side of the house. “Where were you? Mom’s doing it again!” she complained shrilly, with a stamp of her combat boot.
Savannah bit back a curse as she looked at where Jessamine was pointing. Yep. Old Man Herbert was chopping wood by the side of the house.
That meant that the jerk had just eaten for free at the restaurant, and now he was doing chores to pay for it. Savannah was sympathetic to people who were just having hard times, but Herbert wasn’t one of them. He had a gambling addiction. All the money he should have been paying for meals with went to the horses.
“And those stupid Haymarch kids are in the restaurant! And Mom is letting that thief Anthony work as a busboy, even though we don’t need him and we can’t afford him and he always steals food. Six pies went missing last week. And he just called me sweetcheeks, and I slapped him! You’d better go deal with him, because if he even looks at me cross-eyed again, I’m gonna knock him into next week.”
Frustration surged through Savannah as she walked into the restaurant.
The eight Haymarch kids and their parents were sitting around the biggest table, tucking into bowls of stew. Mr. Haymarch, a carpenter who was a heavy drinker, kept getting fired because he showed up sauced or didn’t show up to work at all.
Anthony was sitting at the counter, chowing down on an entire pizza instead of working. Looking around the dining room, she saw twenty people, which should have been good news. But she estimated that only half the people eating were paying customers.
She marched into the kitchen, smacking open the swinging door with the palm of her hand. Jessamine followed her in.
Her mother Laurel, a plump, smiling, thirty-years-older version of Savannah, with streaks of gray in her wavy red hair, looked up from chopping onions and smiled.
“Mom!” Savannah hissed.
“Oh, hello, dear! Back already? Did you collect the bounty? How did it go?”
Savannah leaned against a wall, crossing her arms over her chest. “It went terribly. We lost our mark. No money.”
