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Then she took a deep breath, wiped her palms on her pants, and walked to the front steps of the library. She wasn’t even the target. The least she could do was be brave.
Fifteen minutes later on the dot, a dark blue SUV pulled up in front of the library and Julius popped out of the front seat, bounding up the steps to her. He looked serious until he reached her, and then his face broke into a wide grin.
“Shall we?” he asked. “Hudson kept the car running so we can make a quick escape.”
Quinn had to smile as he led her down the steps and into the front seat of the waiting SUV. As soon as she was buckled, they sped off down Main Street.
Before long, they were winding up a mountain, through the woods.
Every warning her mom had ever given her was sounding in Quinn’s head.
They’re stealing you away so they can do whatever they want to you, her mother screamed in her head. These perverts do horrible things to human girls.
She swallowed and cleared her throat.
“So what’s the plan?” she asked, forcing her voice not to shake. She peeked around the front seat at Hudson, buckled into the back.
Cars just weren’t made for triads.
She blinked at the thought.
I just called the three of us a triad, Quinn thought. She wasn’t exactly sure how that made her feel, but it wasn’t bad. There was something soothing and alluring about the thought, at least.
Hudson grinned and reached over the back of his seat, lifting a picnic basket out of the trunk space.
Quinn raised her eyebrows.
“You actually own a picnic basket?” she asked.
Hudson chuckled.
“Julius’s mom gave it to us when we moved in together,” he said.
“It’s made by a this local craft store,” Julius said. “Most picnic baskets have space for two of everything. This one’s got three.”
“Mrs. Bloom isn’t always subtle,” said Hudson.
“It could be worse,” Julius offered. He turned left, onto a gravel road. “My cousin Hunter’s mom gave them a baby blanket and a copy of The Complete Guide To Shifter Pregnancy when his human mate moved in with him and Ash.”
“Was she pregnant?”
“Nope.”
“Shifter parents can be pretty intense,” Hudson volunteered from the back seat. “There’s three of them, after all.”
Quinn sat in silence for a moment, trying to figure out exactly how to phrase her question.
“So... Ash’s female mate is human,” she said.
“Yup,” said Julius. “Cora.”
“Cute as a button,” said Hudson.
“If she has kids with them are they half-shifter?”
“That’s never really happened,” Julius said. He slowed down, going over some rough parts of the road, and Quinn was glad that they were in a high-clearance SUV, not the Prius. “All the female humans we know, the kids seem like they’re full shifters.”
“It’s apparently a very dominant gene or... whatever,” Hudson said.
