“Are you a cousin of Cooper’s?”
“Second or third, we can’t really keep track. I tried making a chart once, but . . .” Eli’s smile was congenial as he shrugged. “I sort of handle things in Cooper’s absence. But we’re all glad to see him again. It’s been too long. We’ve worried about him. We may be upset that he didn’t want to be alpha, but we still love him. We want him to be happy.”
I asked, “Would you mind telling him that?”
“I don’t think he would believe me,” he said.
Pops was giving Cooper and Dr. Moder a run for their money in the hospital debate. Noah had crossed his arms over his chest and set his face in defiant lines, which I’m sure at one point in his life would have shut his grandson down without argument. The arguments circled around and around the room until Cooper finally said, “Pops, for my sake, would you go to the hospital?”
Noah stared at Cooper for a long moment and cleared his throat. “If it will make you feel better, I will go.”
Dr. Moder winked at Cooper. “I’ll call the cardiac department at St. Martin’s, let them know we’re coming.”
“I’ll pull my truck around,” Eli told them.
“Now, that’s settled. Let an old man rest,” Noah muttered, closing his eyes. He snapped them back open and smirked at Cooper. “How many nurses will there be, do you think?”
Cooper snorted and patted Noah’s hand. “Get some rest, you old hound.”
I returned to Cooper’s side. He wrapped his arm protectively around me as the relatives converged on us. Cooper’s cheeks were kissed, pinched, patted, and thoroughly lipsticked. I was generally ignored, which was fine. I think they were waiting for some sort of signal. At this point, surrounded by the crush of bodies, I was just grateful that everyone seemed to be fully clothed.
“Yeah, we need to talk about that Maureen thing,” I whispered as we made it out the other side of the gauntlet, into the waiting room. “You were out of town when my real name got spread around by Susie Q. And, uh, it isn’t Maureen.”
He stopped in his tracks, a mixture of guilt and apology flashing across his features. “It’s not? I just assumed . . .”
“We’ll talk later.”
“How bad could it be?” he asked as we approached a round, smiling woman with an unlined face.
“Later,” I whispered.
“That bad?”
I stopped and murmured in his ear, “Moonflower Freedom Refreshing Breeze Joplin Duvall-Wenstein. OK?”
Cooper stared at me. “Wow.”
“Do you have any idea how long it takes me to fill out income-tax forms?”
Cooper’s response was cut short when the clinic door burst open. A slim, short woman stomped through the door, followed by an older woman with a worried expression. The younger one scanned the crowd until her obsidian eyes landed on Cooper. Her lip curled up in disgust.
Wait a minute, I recognized that scowl. That was Cooper’s scowl.
That was Cooper’s sister.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” she demanded.
Maggie Graham was hard, lean, and built for speed. Her black hair was cut in sharp layers around her face. She was beautiful in a fierce, alien way, like the old Greek mythical monsters that consumed heroes the minute their backs were turned.
Eli stepped through the door, an apologetic grimace wreathing his face. “Sorry, Coop, she saw your truck. I couldn’t stop her.”
“Maggie,” Cooper said, carefully examining her face. “You went and grew up on me.’
“That happens when you leave and don’t look back,” she snapped.
“Just for one day, let’s not have any trouble.”
“I don’t have to listen to you, Cooper. You made sure of that a long time ago. Leave the valley now. You’re not welcome here anymore. You don’t have a home here.”
“Maggie, please don’t,” the older woman pleaded.
Cooper’s voice grew harder, more authoritative. “Maggie, just calm down.”
But Maggie was already crouched, springing toward an attack. My human eyes couldn’t track her movements as she shifted into a wolf and lunged. A dark shape blurred past me, barreling into Cooper. As a wolf, Maggie was smaller than Cooper but no less intimidating. She was compact, but you could see the strength in her limbs, the barely controlled power as she leaped at him.
Cooper barely had enough time to phase before hitting the ground with Maggie’s teeth clamped around his neck. He shook off the tatters of his clothes as he struggled to throw his little sister off his back. Samson started to jump into the fray as family members scattered out of the way, leaving toppled chairs and spilled coffee in their wake.
“No, the fewer involved, the better,” Noah said wearily. “Try to corral them outside if you could. Dr. Moder shouldn’t have to clean up after them.”
Samson and Eli shooed—for lack of a better word—the grappling wolves out the clinic door, and the rest of the pack poured out into the parking lot after them. Cooper was definitely on the defensive, feinting when Maggie snapped at him and rolling when she pounced. But he didn’t fight back. There were plenty of opportunities for him to take advantage of his size, his strength. He could have pinned her a dozen times. Instead, he just tried to keep her from doing any permanent damage, like a resigned parent handling a toddler’s temper tantrum.
I searched the crowd for some sign of reason, someone who would step in and stop this. But most of Cooper’s relatives seemed proud, happy, as if a sibling death match was some sort of cherished holiday tradition. Half were cheering for Cooper, the other half for Maggie. And if I wasn’t mistaken, a couple of them were placing bets.
“This is ridiculous. Aren’t you going to do something?” I asked Eli. “I thought you were in charge. Tell Maggie to stop.”
“I’m not actually the alpha, so I don’t have any real authority over her. Cooper’s still the alpha until he dies. I’m just the de facto leader. If I told Maggie to stop, she’d just snap off a chunk of my hide and then go after Cooper again. Besides, this is how we work things out. It might do them some good.”
I grunted in frustration and looked up to Cooper’s giant cousin. “Samson?”
Samson cast a longing glance at the fight but shook his head. “I told you, Cooper doesn’t want help. Besides, I’ve got scars you wouldn’t believe from jumping between the two of them.”
“Oh, for goodness sake,” I huffed, stalking into the clinic. I saw that while Cooper and Maggie fought it out in the parking lot, Dr. Moder was loading Noah into Eli’s shiny red SUV, covering him with blankets. I glanced around the waiting room for the most viable solution. Since they didn’t have industrial-grade sedatives in the waiting room, I grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall, pulled the pin, and made my way outside through the crowd.
Getting as close to the wolves as I dared, I squeezed the trigger and shot a dusty white cloud over both of them. The two wolves yelped, separating. Maggie recovered faster than Cooper, who was slumped on the ground and seemed to be bleeding from his neck and one paw. She lunged for him again, but I let out another puff of white dust. When that didn’t deter her, I beaned her with the heavy red canister. The pack let out a collective gasp. Maggie whined and wobbled to the ground.
Even as I did this, I wondered what the great burning hell I was thinking. This was not normal behavior for me. Years with my parents had schooled me in the art of passive resistance—letting them rant and rave about my poor personal choices and then doing whatever I wanted to anyway. I did not shout or make threats. I sure as hell didn’t put myself between angry supernatural creatures. What was Cooper doing to me?
“What the hell was that?” Maggie growled, phasing and rolling to her human feet. She pushed her lean, naked form into a crouch, growling at me. She pressed her fingers to the purpling lump growing on her forehead. “Who do you think you are, interfering in pack business?”
“Back off,” I warned her. “You’ve made your point. Now, back off. You’re not the reason he came here tonight. Your grandfather’s going to the hospital, and Cooper’s going with him. He can’t do that if he’s handling your little hissy fit.”
Maggie sneered and advanced on me. Being shot with freezing-cold fire-suppressing chemicals again probably wouldn’t improve her mood, but at this point, I’d sort of cornered myself, and the fire extinguisher was my only weapon. I supposed I could always hit her with it again.
“Maggie,” Eli grunted, his tone far more authoritative than I would have thought possible. “Don’t.”
“Nobody wants either one of you here,” Maggie snarled, ignoring Eli. “You think you’re special because Cooper brought you home to meet the family? What a joke. He doesn’t care about his family. And he doesn’t care about you. When he’s done with you, he’ll run. That’s what Cooper does.”
At the moment, Cooper was on the ground and seemed to be struggling to phase back into a human. Maybe he was more seriously injured than I thought. I tried to keep my voice cool, detached, as I backed toward him, fire extinguisher at the ready. “Look, I’m not going to get into some sort of feminized pissing contest with you. I don’t do that. I don’t like being rude or making a scene. Not because I’m not good at it. I learned from my mother, who’s made a lifelong hobby of making public officials cry. You’re a rank amateur, even if you can turn into an apex predator. Now, step off, you hateful little bitch, or—”
I don’t remember much after that, because Maggie punched me so hard that I felt my jaw somewhere in the back of my neck. Behind me, I heard a bellowing roar and barely registered the sound of claws skittering over the frozen ground. The fire extinguisher slipped out of my hand, falling to the concrete with a loud clang. I swayed on my feet but stayed upright, managing to swipe an upper cross into Maggie’s chin. She let out a snarl and hit me again, right in the eye.
I took some comfort in the fact that it was my head smacking back on the pavement that knocked me out and not the actual punch . . . no, it was pretty lame either way.
15
A Brand-new Sense of
Familiarity . . . with a Stick Shift
I WOKE UP ON A strange couch with a steak on my eye.
“Is meat the answer to everything with you people?” I grumbled, sitting up.
“Slow,” a low, musical voice told me. Someone was keeping a restraining hand on my shoulders. “You’ve been out for a while. We’re still not sure whether you have a concussion.”
I blinked a few times before opening my good eye. Samson, who I was thankful to see was clothed, was sitting in a nearby easy chair. The room was meticulously clean, decorated with scattered photos of Cooper, Maggie, and Samson in various stages of childhood. The walls were a warm, creamy color. A bright blue throw rug was settled comfortably in front of a large brick fireplace. On the mantel were three carved wooden wolves, just like the one Cooper had given me for Christmas.
“We’re glad to see you back in the land of the living,” the musical voice said with a chuckle as the steak was pulled away from my face. I’d heard the words “pleasantly plump” used to describe women before, but they never seemed so apt as when they were applied to Gracie Graham. She was soft and round and had a warm smile permanently etched across her face. Heck, I wanted to crawl into her lap and ask for a story.
“I’ve never seen a human girl take a punch like that,” Samson marveled. “You know, if things don’t work out with Cooper, I’m going to marry you myself.”
“It’s tempting, Samson. But I’ve seen you naked. I’m afraid you’d break me in half.”