Rebecca is hurting us with her stubbornness, and her refusal to accept responsibility cuts all the deeper. My mother has always been a proud, strong wolf, but today, those once-admirable qualities have twisted into something vindictive.
Our family might never heal from this wound.
20
JULIET
Luckily,being a librarian in a small Colorado town means I can wear jeans to work, which makes visiting Courtney’s farm after my workday so much easier.
“Hey!” she calls out to me when I step from my car and onto her gravel driveway.
Courtney has on a threadbare flannel with jeans and a durable-looking pair of boots. Still, somehow, she makes the whole outfit seem catalog-ready. Like she should be an L.L. Bean model.
“Hi.” I wave and cross to meet her. The scents of soil and random animals fill my nose the closer I get. “How’s it going?”
“Great now that you’re here!” She holds up a pail full of grain. “Want to help me feed some chickens?”
“Sure.” Are these her rescued chickens? The ones Roderick’s brother built a coop for? “I don’t have any experience with it.”
“Doesn’t take much skill.” Courtney shrugs with a smirk. “Really, you just throw the shit at them, and they go wild. Like kids and candy.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to throw candy at kids.”
“Oh, so you think I should keep it in the back of my van and invite them to climb in and grab some?” She tsks and shakes her head. “No way. That’s stranger-danger shit.”
I laugh and follow her. Courtney peppers our conversation with other wild remarks as she shows me around her property. The place is spacious, with a larger variety of animals than I expected. In addition to chickens, Courtney has a couple of cows, three horses, a handful of goats, a barn cat, four sheep, and a donkey.
All rescues.
As far as I can tell, she doesn’t run a farm so much as an animal sanctuary. She tells me we’re only looking at a fraction of her property and that it extends for over fifty acres.
“That’s why my neighbors are scarce. Closest are the Jamesons, about half a mile down the road.”
“You mean Roderick and Tanya? Those Jamesons?”
“Roderick moved out years back. He has a place in town, but Tanya and Isaac live there with their … mom.”
Courtney hesitates in a strange way, but as a person with plenty of secrets of my own, I ignore her pause. I also ignore the fact that I’m near Roderick’s childhood home.
Seeming happy to redirect the conversation, she finally takes me to the chicken enclosures. And despite the fact that I know absolutely nothing about raising chickens, it’s clear to me these birds live a life of farmland luxury.
“This coop is for my layers.” Courtney shows me how she feeds the hens, and I enjoy the commotion of their colorful-feathered bodies vying for the food. “And over here”—she leads me farther back to a rainbow painted enclosure—“is the coop Warner helped me build. For all the hens and roosters I can get my hands on in need of a cushy retirement.”
“A werewolf rescuing chickens,” I murmur, feeling a smile curl at the edge of my lips at the odd pairing.
Courtney, instead of sharing in my amusement, goes rigid. Slowly, she turns to face me, her expression slack with shock. “You know about us?”
“I …” Her question throws me. “Yeah. You didn’t know I knew?”
“No!” Worry creases her brow. “Did Zoey tell you?”
“Zoey knows?” Hell. I really hope Warner is as decent of a guy as Courtney claims he is. If Zoey knows about wolves, then she’s in deep. “No. She didn’t tell me. I knew about your kind before I even moved to Pine Falls.” I shove my hands into my pockets, suddenly feeling like I stepped wrong. “I’m sorry. I thought Roderick would’ve told you all.”
“Roderickknows?” The woman stares at me with an intense scrutiny that makes me want to hold on to my skin so she can’t peel it off with her eyes.
“Yeah. He figured it out. And he told Thad, so I thought he’d tell the pack leader, and they’d let all of you know.”
Courtney sets down her bucket of feed and plants her fists on her hips, eyeing me from my double French braids to my now-muddy boots. “Roderickisthe pack leader.”
