Chapter Thirteen
Dawnie Reed pulled up in front of the shabby, run-down cabin and stared out the windshield, struggling to keep her bear in her skin.
Her kids were up here at this cabin that they used as one of their bolt-holes. And they’d lied to her about it. Said they were going to be in the mines today. But there was her son Percy’s four-wheeler, hidden under a big pile of brush, and she could scent Eva-Jo and Percy and Gummi—not old scents, but fresh as daylight.
And she still wasn’t sold on Krista and her fated mate being up here for the family reunion. The timing was awfully convenient, and from what her spies were telling her, there was some weird kind of tension between them. At first, she’d questioned whether they were even really fated mates.
She’d had Bo watching them last night, and he’d seen them consummate their mating. She’d sent Pamela to test them, and when Pamela flirted with the big wolf, Krista had flipped her shit and acted exactly like a fated mate would.
So they were probably really mates, but that didn’t mean they were here with good intentions. It hurt to think that Krista might be here sniffing around to cause trouble after all Dawnie had done for her. Once upon a time, she’d planned on handing Krista the keys to her kingdom. Good thing she never told Eva-Jo that, because that ungrateful Krista had scurried out of town and abandoned her family and Dawnie, disappeared for years, broken Dawnie’s heart, and her mama’s, too.
Girl had no loyalty.
Loyalty—that was what made this holler a sanctuary. One that Krista might bring an end to. She still loved that girl, but if Krista had come here looking for trouble… well, the girl wasn’t kin. And she’d bitten the hand that fed her.
She threw open the door of her car and stomped towards the house, her boots crushing down the thick weeds.
The front door banged open, and Percy hurried out to meet her on the front stoop, quickly shutting the door behind him. “Momma, didn’t expect to see you here.”
“I didn’t expect to need to be here.” She glared at him. Both of her boys were a half bubble off bright, but Percy had a kind of low cunning to him.
And his daddy’s mean streak.
He tried for a kiss-ass smile, which meant that he was up to something, the little weasel. “We got all the minerals for you already. Left ‘em down at the house. Just came up here to relax. All them lion shifters, getting in’ everyone’s business—I didn’t want to have to kill none of ‘em, so we figured we’d just lay low a bit.”
“That why you weren’t answering your phone?”
“No signal up here,” he muttered.
“Bullshit. Eva-Jo! I smell you, girl, get out here!”
Eva-Jo stepped out from around the side of the house. With Krista back in town, Dawnie couldn’t help comparing the two of them. They were alike in some ways. Both full of fire, all that ambition, but Eva-Jo had loyalty, too. Krista thought she was too good for the holler. That was why Eva-Jo would be the one to take over for Dawnie someday—if they all survived whatever her stupid kids had done.
“You kids have anything to do with this missing boy? If you have, so help me, it’syourhide I’ll take it out of. You know your brothers don’t have the brains of a dead squirrel between the two of them—that’s why I left you in charge.”
Eva-Jo frowned and folded her skinny arms across her chest, her narrow, pretty face puckering in anger. “You mean did I let Percy hunt a kid after you told him to lay off it? And a rich kid at that? You think I’m some kind of idiot?”
“I hope to hell that kid hasn’t been hunted.” She let her bear show through, just in her eyes, and Eva-Jo flinched.
“He hasn’t!”
“Now, how could you know that unless you knew where he was?”
Eva-Jo stared down at the ground and muttered, “Damn it.”
She turned back to her firstborn son. “Percy, tell me what the hell you did to that child.”
“Geez, Momma, you think I’m some kind of idiot?” he whined. But his eyes slid to the side. They were up to something. Dawnie’s bear could smell it. She’d been right. Those two dipshit boys had done somethinganddragged her baby girl into the mess. And that blustering asshole Michael Coffman was going to set their valley on fire if she couldn’t fix things.
“Neither one of you is too big for me to give you a damn good thrashing,” she warned. “Your bones will take weeks to knit and you’ll be growin’ a new set of teeth.” It wasn’t an idle threat, either. She’d done it before to all of them more than once. In fact, some whispered that it was one of her beatings, with her mind hazed with her own ‘shine, that caused Gummi to go simple. That was when he was six. She couldn’t even remember why she’d beat on him, but after that, she stopped sampling her own wares.
But today, she was ready to put a hurt on someone. Dawnie shifted was one of the biggest bears around, and vicious with it. Not one of her three grown-up children would dare face off against her.
Eva-Jo wilted and seemed to shrink in on herself. “Momma,” she said pleadingly, “don’t lose your shit, ‘cause I got no idea how the hell to fix this.”
“Girl, you want to see me lose my shit, you just keep on stalling on me.”
Eva-Jo’s expression took on a resigned cast, and she hurried over to the door, but it was shut and locked now. “Gummi, you jackass,” she called, “let me in.”
