Chapter 19

19

Drizzle started on the drive back. When we returned to Shoreline, Bolin was waiting outside the leasing office, two coffee cups in hand, one again chilled and topped with whipped cream, the other a hot beverage with steam wafting through the hole in the lid. He also had a thick book with a leather binding tucked under one arm, a placeholder ribbon dangling from its yellowed pages. Did that have to do with the case?

I recalled having it appear in my mind when I’d been a wolf, along with the certainty that I would learn something if I examined it while in that form.

“There you are,” Bolin said as I walked up, though Duncan had managed to get me back five minutes before office hours began.

He’d parked his van in a staff spot and watched me head up the walkway. When I looked back, thinking of our interrupted kiss, he lifted his metal detector, as if promising he would be around if I wanted to visit later. My gut flip-flopped with nervous anticipation at the thought of a lunchtime break in his van. He’d said he would leave soon, but we’d had a moment after that, hadn’t we? Maybe he would linger longer.

“Here I am.” Forcing my attention to Bolin, I pointed at the book. “What’s in there?”

“Instructions on how to get rid of fungi.”

“Fungi? Did a tenant complain about mushrooms sprouting by their patio?”

“Not mushrooms. The mold you asked me to look into. It’s a fungus, remember?”

“Oh right.” I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice. Even though mold was the scourge of the Pacific Northwest, and eradicating it from the complex was always a priority, I’d hoped Bolin had found more information related to the case. “Is there anything about magical remediation in there?”

“There is. I’m still researching, and I’ll need to find another spell to retard growth if there are leaks again in the future, but there’s an enchantment in here that can eradicate fungi and at least temporarily keep it from coming back. I think I know how to place it.” Bolin bit his lip. “Hypothetically. I’m a neophyte in this area.”

“If it turns out that you can wave your hand, murmur druidic words, and magically deal with mold, I may not let you walk away from this job.”

“This job? You mean this unpaid internship that I’m doing so I can learn a good work ethic, gain real-world experience, and prove myself to my parents?” His nose crinkled with distaste, and I had no doubt some of that was a direct quote.

“Maybe I could ask them to pay you.” I hadn’t wanted an intern, but that had been before I’d believed he could be useful. “And mold is so insidious in Seattle that you could start a lucrative business going around to apartment complexes and applying that magic. I suppose you couldn’t tell people you were using paranormal remediation means. Maybe you could claim it’s a new chemical process.”

Bolin leaned against a post for support. “Driving around Seattle to remediate mold is not the kind of travel I’m interested in doing.”

“St. Lucia might have mold too,” I said, plucking out one of the places he’d mentioned where his parents had property.

Bolin gave me an aggrieved look.

I lowered my voice and stepped closer to him. “Do you still have that wolf case at your father’s house?”

“Yeah. I got the impression that you didn’t want it on the premises here.” He glanced toward Duncan’s van.

I hadn’t told him anything about Duncan’s keen interest in it, and certainly hadn’t mentioned the cameras, but Bolin was smart enough to figure out more than I’d said. At the least, he knew that such a rare magical artifact had value—he probably knew that better than I.

“Will you bring it back tomorrow?” I asked. “Or tonight would be even better.”

With the full moon due that evening, it would be easier for me to change. The day after, I was less certain about.

“Tonight? You want me to drive all the way home and then come back here?”

“Yeah, it’s called working late. Interns have to do it all the time.”

“Fetching a trinket for you isn’t in my job description.”

“Are you sure? Long ago, when I was an intern, I had to do all sorts of gopher jobs. Well, go-for jobs is what I think we called them.”

Bolin sighed, looking like he would prefer to be anywhere but here after five p.m.

“Bring it back to me this evening, magically eradicate the mold in that apartment, and I’ll tell your parents that you’re a fine intern and I’ve taught you everything they wanted you to learn.”

He sighed again. “Do you know what the root of the word bribery is?”

“You might not have guessed because of the intelligence gleaming in my eyes, but I don’t know the roots of many words.”

“Except werewolf.” Bolin’s eyebrows twitched. “I heard Animal Control swung by because a tenant reported big gray dogs fighting on the lawn. Wolves, she told them, but he put coyotes in his report.”

He’d put that in his report because that’s what I’d told him.

“When you build an apartment complex next to the woods, you might get some wild critters,” I said blandly.

“Hm.” The way Bolin eyed me made me wonder if he was reassessing his belief in werewolves. He also looked toward Duncan’s van again.

I patted him on the shoulder. “If I’m not here when you come back with the case, you can leave it in the office in a drawer, but don’t tell anyone about it, okay?”

Especially anyone with a magic detector.

“All right.” Coffees in hand, Bolin stepped into the office.

I spotted a tenant with a leashed dog approaching and raised a hand to close the door, not wanting anyone to hear a chance comment about the case. Before I could close it, Bolin leaned out again.

“The medieval word briber originally meant trickster, beggar, or robber. The bribes were their ill-gotten gains.”

“Fascinating.” I closed the door on him.

When the tenant walked up, a curly-haired Doodle mix at her side, I braced myself for a comment about wolves or coyotes. All she did was inform me that the poop-bag dispenser by the dog potty area needed to be refilled. The mundaneness of the request filled me with relief .

As I headed to one of the storage sheds to grab supplies, I attempted to focus on the work issues that needed to be addressed that day, but my thoughts kept wandering. Somewhere along the line, I’d decided that I would indeed go to my family’s hunt that night. I needed to learn, as my mother had suggested, what was motivating my cousins to come after me.

After the previous night’s hunt, I felt more confident about going out to join the pack. I wasn’t confident they would tell me what I wanted to learn, but I doubted I would embarrass myself. I remembered how to change into a wolf and how to be a wolf. Over the years, I might have done my best to forget the magic, but the magic hadn’t forgotten me.

During the previous night’s hunt, I hadn’t glimpsed myself in any pools of water, so I hoped I was as magnificent as Duncan had claimed. Since the gray in his hair showed up when he was in wolf form, I worried that mine would too, that the pack would see me as old and weak. I’d felt strong and powerful when we’d taken down the deer, but facing an ungulate without fangs wasn’t the same as confronting another wolf. And I might have to confront multiple wolves.

After filling the bag dispensers on the grounds, I looked toward Duncan’s van again. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask him to come along for moral support—the pack would find his presence even more offensive than mine. But I wondered if I should tell him what I planned and ask him for advice. Or would he just listen to me rant about my family? He had said he would be available if I wanted to talk.

“Do you want to talk or finish that kiss?” I muttered to myself.

Instead of answering, I headed to the van.

Despite waving his metal detector earlier, I didn’t think he’d left with it. Was he taking a nap in his bed? He wasn’t visible in the cab, so I assumed he was doing something back there. Maybe his equipment needed lubing .

As I approached, the morning’s drizzle turning to rain, his voice drifted out through the window I’d left open earlier.

“You didn’t tell me she was so hot,” came distinct words from the back.

I froze. Who was he talking to?

“Especially as a wolf,” he added with a soft laugh.

He was talking to someone about me . Someone who knew I was a werewolf ? What the hell? That narrowed the possibilities a lot.

A thunk came from inside, like the lid of a case closing.

I lunged to press myself against the side of the van so Duncan wouldn’t see me if he looked out a window. Ears straining, I tried to catch the other side of the conversation. My werewolf senses had been improving as more and more days passed since the last dosage of my potion, so maybe…

“You saw her as a wolf?”

Horror, chagrin, anger, and other emotions I couldn’t name ran through my body. My hands clenched into fists. I recognized that voice. Chad.

“Yeah,” Duncan said. “We hunted together.”

“You’re not supposed to be hunting with her. Or talking to her at all. I didn’t hire you to go up there and contemplate her hotness .”

My jaw clenched as much as my fists. Betrayal entered the mix of emotions tightening my chest and making me want to punch things—starting with Duncan’s van.

The bastard who’d cleaned out our savings accounts—including our kids’ college fund —had paid Duncan to come here? To come and… do what? Spy on me?

“I know. Relax. I found your box, but she was with me at the time, so I couldn’t take it.”

The wolf case. Of course. Duncan had tried to get me to leave him alone with it .

“Why couldn’t you search the apartment when she wasn’t there?” Chad asked.

“She’s there a lot. She works here, you know.”

“No shit, but you’re supposed to be an expert at your job.”

“I’m an expert at finding things, not breaking into people’s apartments and stealing them.”

“It’s my artifact. It’s not stealing.”

I was so angry that I almost didn’t have room to allow confusion into my mangled mix of emotions. But my brain did stutter over that line. Where would Chad have gotten a case made by druids? And why would he have even wanted it?

“It’s taking what’s rightfully mine,” Chad continued, “that she kept me from getting when I went back for it.”

“You didn’t mention where you got it.”

I had little doubt that Chad had stolen it and that it wasn’t truly his, as he claimed. What right could he have to a druidic artifact?

“That’s none of your business. I’m only paying you to retrieve it.”

“I did go back to her apartment when she was gone,” Duncan said, “but she’d moved it somewhere. I haven’t sensed it since we were alone together.”

“What do you mean alone together ? You’d better not be screwing her.”

“Why do you care? You left her, right?”

“She’s still my wife, you bastard.”

I most certainly was not . Just because he’d refused to sign the divorce papers didn’t mean we were still married in the state of Washington.

“That’s not what she said.”

“Don’t listen to what she says,” Chad snapped. “She’s not what she pretends to be.”

I wished that weren’t true .

“Were you the one to put the cameras in her bedroom?” Duncan asked. “To keep an eye on your box? Or on her ?”

Chad didn’t answer the question. Instead, voice so low I barely caught it, he said, “I can’t believe she’s turning wolf. Now . All those years, I wanted to see that. I wanted…”

“To sleep with that?” Duncan asked.

“Hell, yeah, I wanted to see the wolf come out. I could always feel her magic, like she was part animal, strong and sexy as hell. Why do you think I kept coming back all those years? I never wanted to be married and chained to a woman.”

“Didn’t you have children with her?”

“Not intentionally. That was her wish.”

I ground my teeth at the lie. We’d agreed to have children. He’d said he wanted them too. He’d actually been around back in the early years of our marriage.

The revisionist history, and listening to them talk about me, made me seethe. I wanted so badly to leap into the van and strangle Duncan. Even more, I wanted to strangle Chad, but he probably wasn’t in the country. He could be calling from his girlfriend’s yacht . I hoped the same pirates who’d shot Duncan found Chad and filled him with lead.

As the cool rain fell, pattering on my head and running down my flushed cheeks, it crossed my mind to wonder if they’d met on some dock in an exotic locale. World travelers cavorting around and doing who knew what.

“Just get the damn artifact,” Chad said. “I’ve been searching a long time for what’s inside.”

“What is inside? Knowing might help me guess where she would have put it.”

“That’s none of your business either. Force her to tell you where it is if you can’t find it on your own.”

“I’m not forcing a woman to do anything.”

“Finding things is supposed to be your great expertise. ”

“It is. I’ll keep looking around. I don’t know why you couldn’t get it yourself though. You put it in that heat duct, didn’t you?”

“Years ago. Before I’d figured out how to open it. And before she put out a restraining order on me. I tried to go back for it, but she’s turned into a real bitch.”

“Since she found out you were screwing other women?”

“Don’t sound so sanctimonious. You were flirting with one of my girls right in front of me.”

“She was flirting with me .”

“Fuck off, wolf.”

“That’s no way to talk to someone doing you a favor.”

“You’re charging me a fortune to collect something that’s rightfully mine,” Chad said. “It’s practically extortion.”

“This was your idea.”

“Just get the damn case. I wouldn’t have left it if I thought she was going to change the locks and would physically throw me out when I showed up. I thought having it under a werewolf’s bed, however diminished a wolf she always was when I knew her, would be safer than sticking it in a bank vault, but that was a mistake.”

“I’m guessing you’ve made a lot of them.”

“Fuck off,” Chad repeated and hung up.

“He really inspires loyalty in the people he hires,” Duncan muttered.

Unable to contain my anger any longer, I threw open his sliding door and glared into the van.

Duncan fumbled the phone and almost dropped it.

“You were hired to come here and search my apartment and steal something?” I demanded. “And you had the gall to flirt with me? To kiss me? When you were working for the one person in the world I truly loathe?”

“Well, if the case belongs to him?—”

“ Belongs to him? A priceless, centuries-old magical artifact made with druid magic? How the hell would Chad have become the rightful owner of something like that?”

“Druid magic?”

“He had to have stolen it,” I roared, ignoring the question. “There was no way my idiot, conniving, and entirely magicless mundane husband got it legitimately. He hasn’t done anything legitimately in his whole life.”

“I suppose that’s possible.” Duncan looked flustered for the first time since I’d met him. “But you didn’t know it was there, so?—”

“So it was okay for you to barge into my apartment with your magic detector to find it and take it?”

My voice had risen to a yell. Maybe a scream. A couple of people who’d been heading from their cars to their apartments paused to watch us.

Maybe I should have toned it down, but, in that moment, I was too furious to do so. Furious that Duncan had betrayed me. Furious that Chad was still in my life after betraying me over and over again. Furious that my cousin was trying to kill me. Furious about everything .

The rage flowing through my veins made my nerves tingle and my skin prickle with heat. Hell, was I going to change in the parking lot in the middle of the day?

No. I wanted to punch Duncan—I wanted to shift into a wolf and rip his throat out—but I made myself step back. Voice hoarse, I said, “Get out of my parking lot.”

Duncan lifted his hands. “Look, I’m sorry, Luna. I just came here to find a lost thing. It sounded like an adventure, and you understand that I crave that, right? I didn’t mean to?—”

“Get out!” I thrust a finger toward the exit. “Or I’ll have your van towed and dumped into Puget Sound, and you’ll never find a magnet big enough to lift it out. Especially since I’m going to kick your ass all the way to Canada while that’s happening. ”

Duncan opened his mouth again, but I growled. It came from deep within my chest and sounded far more like a wolf growl than anything a human could utter.

He must have realized how close I was to changing and making good on my threats.

“Okay.” Duncan fished in his pocket and flicked something toward me, like someone tossing a coin into a fountain.

Worried it was more dangerous than a coin , I jumped back instead of catching it. The small object landed on the pavement with a faint tink .

My wariness made Duncan shake his head sadly, but all he did was whisper, “Good luck,” before closing the sliding door, climbing into the cab, and starting the van.

My chest rose and fell with deep breaths. I couldn’t stop seething. Even more people had stopped to watch, and I tried to calm myself. I couldn’t change into a werewolf in front of them. I’d lose my job if I did. I might lose everything.

I snatched up the small coin—no, it was the locket we’d found the night before—and almost hurled it after Duncan, but that wouldn’t do anything. Besides, his van was already rumbling through puddles on its way out, spraying the mailboxes at the entrance. It turned out into the street and drove away.

I stood there for a long time, my fists clenched and rain falling on my head.