“That’s all I ask,” he said, his lips quirking.
IT TOOK ME practically dragging Cooper to his truck to get him to leave, but I managed to get through the afternoon relatively unscathed. Lynette gave me the wrong orders, called me by the wrong name, or just slung dirty dishes at me through the pass. It was kind of nice to return to that normalcy.
Evie had agreed to come over to my place for a Sandra Bullock chick-flick marathon. She was going to make something she called “Melt Your Face” margaritas, which had my stomach lining quivering in fear. I’d just popped While You Were Sleeping into the DVD player when Evie was called away from whatever the hell she was pouring into my blender by an obnoxious pop tune from her cell phone.
“Aren’t you a little old for Britney Spears?” I asked dryly.
“Buzz?” she snickered into the phone. “I told you, we’re getting drunk and watching people being obnoxiously likable. Serious girly business—What? What’s going on?”
I sat down on the couch with a heavy thud. Oh, God, who is missing now? Which one of my friends was missing or hurt or worse? I thought of Alan, who had been able to venture out into the woods more often as the weather warmed up. What if he’d been attacked? Abner had been going on his prospecting trips into the preserve lately. Walt had been fishing. Hell, Gertie had been planning to dig a garden in her backyard. None of them was safe. I buried my face in my hands and waited for Evie to get off the phone and give me the bad news.
She snapped her cell phone shut and returned to the blender, measuring and pouring with a chemist’s precision. I stared at her, dumbfounded.
“Well?” I asked.
“Alan found the hikers, what was left of them,” she said, sounding oddly resigned. “Buzz wanted to let me know that Alan asked him to contact the state medical examiner’s office to handle the remains. Buzz is heading up the mountain now.”
I took the tequila and poured us each a shot. “Where were they?”
She tossed back the liquor and winced. “A mile or so from their campsite. They were just . . . bones, scattered around a ravine. Alan was finally able to see them now that the snow has cleared. Buzz said they’d been gnawed on . . . by a lot of different animals. Alan doesn’t want to leave the scene until they can get them somewhere decent.”
I didn’t know why this news was such a blow, when I’d known there was little chance of those boys being alive, that it was only a matter of time until their bodies were found. Knowing that they’d been found made the situation seem so final but at the same time opened up the same old questions. What happened to them? Who had attacked them? Would there be more attacks? Thinking of Alan, sitting on the dark mountain, keeping watch over bones, made my stomach hurt.
“How about we put this off until another night?” I suggested, reaching for my Tums. “Buzz is probably going to want to see you.”
“Buzz is going to help Alan,” she said. “And you and I have a date with too-good-to-be-true romantic comedy.”
“Evie.”
“Moonflower,” Evie shot back. “What else can we do? They’re up on the mountain, and we’re here. It will be hours before they’re home. Do you think there’s anything you could do to help Alan?”
I shrugged. “What if I told Alan, ‘Hey, I know where you can find a huge population of wolves. How about we go make some dental impressions and compare bite marks?’”
“Then you’d betray Cooper and the pack after they trusted you with their secret,” she said, slamming the bottle down on the counter. “This isn’t something we’re meant to interfere with, Mo. If I’ve learned anything from living with the pack, it’s to let them sort out their own problems, figure this out on their own.”
“It’s not exactly a squabble over the last Moon Pie. The problem is, they may or may not have someone in their pack who’s killing people!” I cried. “Your husband is up on that mountain. Alan is up on that mountain. What if whatever is out there comes back to that ravine looking for its trophies?”
“Is that honestly what you think is happening?” Evie demanded, the color draining from her cheeks. “You think someone in the pack is doing this?”
“You’re telling me that you haven’t thought of it?”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Those people are my family. They might hurt someone in a fight, but none of them is capable of random killing. I meant that this is probably just some rogue werewolf, a loner who enjoys any kill. If that’s the case, the pack will hunt him down. Honestly, Mo, sometimes I don’t know what goes on in your head.”
“Well, then, tell me what to think. You’re so sure of yourself, sure of the pack. Tell me what to think so I don’t feel so damn guilty all the time. How can you watch Alan beat himself up over not being able to find the wolf every day, when you know you could help him?”
“How will handing my family’s secret to a representative of the U.S. government help anything?” she asked quietly. “And I can watch Alan struggle because I’ve had years of practice keeping secrets. Dead-liners aren’t able to phase. The one service we can offer the pack is our silence. I didn’t grow up in a hippie love commune where you made a collage every time you had a thought or a feeling!”
“Hey, that’s not fair!” I shouted. “I don’t run around expressing every thought in my head. I just think we have some responsibility in this situation.”
“We don’t even know what this situation is.”
“Fine,” I growled. “But don’t use what I’ve told you about my parents against me, Evie. I don’t throw your family’s meat consumption and distracting random nudity up in your face.”
I clapped my hand over my mouth. Evie’s eyes bugged open, and she doubled over laughing. I shook my head. This was not the way I’d wanted the evening to go.
“That was a really impressive growl, Mo. Cooper would be so proud,” she said, grinning. “I’m sorry, hon. Sometimes I forget how new you are to all this, how shocking this life has to be for you. I take it for granted sometimes. And if I thought I could stop more people getting hurt, I would find a way to help. But I don’t think this is something you or I will be able to stop.”
“I didn’t mean to yell,” I told her. “I hate feeling so . . . helpless. I don’t want this to cause problems between the two of us. You’re one of the few people I can talk to about this stuff.”
“Agreed. We will not allow werewolves to cause problems in our friendship,” she conceded, hitting “frappe” on the blender. She asked loudly, “How many girlfriends can say that?”
THE DRINKS AND Sandra Bullock–based confections were consumed, a bonding experience that repaired the minor damage to my friendship with Evie. The next morning, Lynette troubled herself to bring an order to the pass and grumbled, “Mo, you’ve got a customer who’s asking for you. He’s cute.” Lynette looked supremely annoyed, which was her general expression when it came to me. I didn’t know if she was upset by the loss of a potential tip or a potential date.
As I crossed the dining room, Buzz came through the door, stomping mud off his boots. Evie flung her arms around him and squeezed until I thought he’d turn purple. He chuckled. “I missed you, too, babe.”
“How’s Alan?” I asked when Evie let him come up for air.
“Glad to give the boys’ families some closure, but otherwise, he’s sick and tired of this shit,” he said. “He’s still up at the site, helping the coroner, well, gather everything up.”
“Did he see any tracks in the ravine, anything to help track the wolf?” I asked, even as Evie arched her brow at me.
“Washed away by the snowmelt,” he said, lowering his voice. “Besides, in the winter, food gets scarce. A dead body is going to attract every scavenger for ten miles. There’s no guarantee you’d get the right wolf if you could follow tracks.”
“What about setting traps in case it comes back?”
“No more scavenger talk,” Evie said, shuddering and giving me a pointed look. “People are eating.”
Apparently, Evie had given more thought to my “pack member” theory since last night. And she obviously didn’t appreciate me telling Buzz to try to capture one of his in-laws. I put my hands up in a defensive “subject dropped” gesture.
“I’d better get to my table,” I said, smacking Buzz’s shoulder affectionately with my order pad. “I’m glad you’re home safe.”
When I approached the booth in question, Eli looked up from the menu, flashing his perfect white teeth. “Mo, it’s nice to see you again!”
I looked back at Evie, who was so absorbed in her husband that she hadn’t noticed the werewolf politician. “Eli, to what do we owe the honor? I’ve never seen you in here before.”
He tapped the table, indicating that I should sit. There was something imperious about the gesture. This was a man used to giving orders and having them followed. Eyeing the string of tickets lining up at the pass, I stayed on my feet. A flicker of annoyance, of doubt, sparked in Eli’s eyes, but he covered it well. “Well, I wanted to touch base with Cooper. I figured he made the effort to come to the valley, I can do the same. Maybe if we’d reached out a little more before, we wouldn’t have come to this point. But I guess I missed him.”
“Have you heard about the hikers?” I asked quietly. He nodded. “Evie says that a rogue, uh, hunter could be responsible. She said that the . . . NRA could track the responsible party down and keep them from hurting anyone else.” Eli nodded again, his face grave. “Do you think the organization could do that sooner rather than later? I don’t think this is going to stop. I think it’s just going to get worse. The warm season’s coming up. We’re going to have more people going into the woods—”
“So, what do you do while Cooper’s out of town?” he asked, interrupting me with a blithe expression.
Caught off-guard by his abruptness, I shook my head. Was I talking too loudly? Was my gun-control analogy not clever enough? “This,” I told him, my eyes narrowing. “I work. I live my life. The world doesn’t stop because Cooper’s not right here.”
“Trust me, I know that,” he said, giving me a thin smile. “And that’s where I think we could help each other out, Mo.”
“I know there are parts of the pack that he misses, Eli. But I also know that there are . . . relationships that he feels are beyond repair. I wouldn’t put a lot of pressure on him to come back. At least, not right away.”
Eli leveled his gaze at me and used what I can only call a tone of subdued authority. “You need to understand that we are going to get him to come back, one way or the other. Just having him visit the other night did a lot for my pack. Made them feel like things were back to normal for the first time in years. I want that for them. The stability. And I want Cooper to have his family back. It would be nice if we could all get what we want.”
I leaned across the table and whispered, “So, you’re saying that you’ll search for the rogue if I encourage him to move back to the valley? I would think you would want to do that for your own good, for your family’s safety.”
His lip curled as he peered up at me with those guileless brown eyes. “Well, you’re in a position to help nudge him back home, aren’t you? I’d hate for you to nudge him in the wrong direction, especially when this situation could work out so well for us. Work with me, Mo. It’s what’s best for you.”
I wasn’t quite accustomed to werewolf social interactions, but I knew when I was being threatened. I smiled blandly, refusing to rise to the bait. “Excuse me for a minute.”
