Jase and Talley were too busy glaring at each other to respond, so I forced my eyes to the one place I’d been training them not to look all morning.
“How much do you know about Seers?” Charlie asked, barely looking up from his fifth cup of coffee.
I shrugged. “The basics, I guess. Girls with special gifts, passed from mother to daughter. They work with Shifter Packs…” Something occurred to me. “Hey, you’re like my Vice President,” I said to my best friend.
“Exactly.” The death-glare she leveled on Jase turned into a smirk. “And I say I’m staying.”
At that Jase really did explode. He was around the table and in Talley’s face before his chair smacked the tiled floor with a deafening thwack. “What the hell is your problem? Do you want them to drag you back to that backwoods mountain and force you to squeeze out a litter of pups? Is that what you want? Do you want to go back there?” Jase’s body was literally vibrating with anger.
“Sit!” I commanded, moving between my brother and a now sobbing Talley. “You.” I pointed at Charlie. “Explain. Now.”
“Seers are bound to the Pack their born into. Usually, it’s not a big deal. It’s where they grew up, where they belong.” He gave Talley a small, sad smile and I began to see where this was going. “Talley, however, was born into the Matthews Pack, but grew up with the Hagan Pack. She was originally supposed to go back to the Matthews Pack on her fifteenth birthday, but —”
“But her powers hadn’t developed yet.” I handed Talley a paper towel, unable to locate a tissue.
“Yeah. They still wanted her, but since she wasn’t able to See, they didn’t fight too hard when Toby petitioned to keep her. In the end, they accepted a monetary compensation for their loss.”
“You bought her?”
“The Hagan Pack bought her,” Jase answered, still fuming. “And it was a conditional purchase. She was to stay in the Hagan Pack. Now that she’s left, they’ll see the contract as null and void—”
“And they’ll want her back, Super-Seer skills and all.”
Jase’s smile wasn’t pleasant. “You always were the smart one.”
I looked down at Talley, who was finally pulling herself together. “Are they exaggerating?”
She shook her head, eyes downcast.
In all the years Talley and I’ve known each other, I’ve met her father exactly once. There were about three years where Mr. Matthews decided he wanted his daughter to spend six weeks of the summer with him in addition to the week she spent in Eastern Kentucky every Christmas. At the age of eleven, six weeks seemed like a lifetime, and I was convinced I would shrivel up and perish while she was away. My parents, being the kind of loving folks who don’t want to see their child die from loneliness, arranged a family vacation touring the eastern half of the state with a special stop in Frenchburg to visit with Talley.
Angel was a baby, so Mom stayed in the motel room that smelled like rotten eggs while Dad drove Jase and I out to the Matthews’ compound. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. The whole family lived in a cluster of houses at the end of a road that wound between two mountains. Talley said they called it Matthews Holler, and I wondered if it was because all you had to do was holler out your door to talk to any of your family members.
Mr. Matthews was a rough looking man. His hair was dark and wavy like Talley’s, but it looked like someone in a bad mood attacked it with kitchen shears. His face was weather-worn and etched with a hundred tiny lines. Talley always said her dad was old, much older than her mom, but I never imagined him to be grandpa old. Yet, despite his rough appearance, his blue eyes shone with kindness as I ran up the porch steps and flung my arms around my long-lost best friend.
While Mr. Matthews seemed to like me and my dad well enough, he had very little patience for Jase, who grew fidgety the moment we stopped the car. He refused to sit down, preferring to pace around, constantly looking over his shoulder like he thought a black bear was going to come charging down the mountainside at any given moment. The second time Mr. Matthews snapped at Jase, Dad announced it was time to go.
We took Talley out to dinner at a local restaurant called “Cantuckee Cookin’”, the purposeful misspelling causing major annoyance on my part. Surprisingly, it was Jase who spent the majority of the meal trying to talk our parents into taking Talley back home with us. He was convinced she didn’t belong in that world. Dad patiently tried to explain that just because Appalachian culture was somewhat different than what we were used to, it wasn’t necessarily wrong.
In the end we dropped Talley off at her father’s house, she and I in tears and Jase pouting in the backseat. When Talley told him goodbye, he wrapped his arms around her in a bone-crushing hug and said, “You belong with us, not them.”
At the time I thought he was being really sweet, telling her we were her true family. Of course, I had no knowledge of Shifters, Seers, and Packs at the time. I didn’t realize he was talking about her as if she was a piece of property.
Crap. I honestly didn’t know what we were dealing with, but I did know my best friend wasn’t something to be owned.
“Tal, where do you want to be?”
“Here.” Her chin rose a fraction of an inch. “I want to be here with you, in your Pack.”
“Good.” Because there was no way I could handle Jase and Charlie, especially Charlie, without her. “Then you stay.”
Jase growled. “And what do we do when the Matthews Pack comes to take her back? There is, what? Twenty? Twenty-five of them?”
“Eighteen are Changing,” Talley answered. “There are four little boys, but none of them will be Changing for at least another three or four years.”
“Eighteen versus three. I might not be a math genius, but those sound like some sucky odds to me.”
I found my way back to my chair and half-collapsed into it. “What are our options?”
“Send her back to Toby where she belongs, or get ourselves slaughtered by a Pack of hillbillies.”
“Talley isn’t a slave, Jase. She’s staying here.”
“A slave? Don’t be melodramatic. She’s a Seer. There are rules.”
A sudden flash of anger, the wolf straining under my flesh. “Screw your rules. Talley is staying, end of story. As far as I’m concerned, you’re looking at the new Seer Underground Railroad.”