Page 15

“That was political.”

I glanced at the Carpenter house. Levi was currently reenacting his rescue for two younger children with more bravery than he’d had during the actual event.

“Send me the name of whoever proposed the change,” I said. “I’ll read the documents and talk to Mom before dinner.”

“The hearing is Tuesday.”

“I’ll have something before then,” I promised.

“See that you do.”

The line went dead. No goodbye. Yet another thing Aunt Karen didn’t waste her time on.

I slipped my phone into my pocket and headed in the direction of home, hoping to get at least an hour to myself before dealing with another perceived crisis. I had made it halfway across the road when a crash came from the house opposite Grandma Ruth’s. It was followed by shouting and something metallic crashing to the floor.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

It could have been a dropped pan. I hoped it was a dropped pan.

“You owe me twenty dollars, Trevor!”

I changed direction.

The pack was small by most standards, though it rarely felt small when everyone wanted something at once. It had formed with the Blackwells generations ago, before anyone kept clean records, then split through marriages and inheritance into three primary bloodlines: the Blackwells, the Carpenters, and the Kipners.

It all sounded simple until actual relationships entered the equation.

Some Carpenters were blood relatives. Others had married in. One branch of the Kipners came through Grandma Ruth’s older sister, while another had no Blackwell blood at all but had been absorbed into the pack after a marriage three generations earlier. We had adopted children, stepchildren, latent shifters, and a handful of people whose exact relationship required a diagram and the patience of a professional archivist.

It made dating difficult.

Packs were communities, not automatically families in the biological sense. Still, anyone considering a relationship within the pack generally checked ancestry first, which quickly killed romance.

My mother had looked outside the pack when she began dating after years of being single. Part of that was practicality. Part of it was that she had already known every eligible person in our community since childhood, and most of them had either shared a bathtub with her before age five or thrown up in her car as teenagers.

Julie came from another pack.

That had worked out well for everyone except the alpha’s son of Julie’s pack, who had wanted her for himself and refused to accept no as a complete answer. Julie had turned down his requests resolutely, even though it caused her to be exiled from her pack.

Another raised voice snapped me out of my thoughts as I stepped onto the porch. I didn’t bother knocking. I opened the screen door and went inside.

Trevor stood in the living room, a hot glue gun tucked into the back pocket of his jeans, several lengths of embroidery thread wrapped around one wrist, and a tiny plastic frog attached to his shirt. He was facing Mason Carpenter, an eighteen-year-old cousin from the uphill branch. Mason had his hand held out, as if he was there to collect a major debt rather than twenty dollars.

Neither of them noticed me.

“I told you I have the money,” Trevor said.

“Then give it to me.”

Trevor paused. “It’s being processed.”

“You’ve been saying that for two weeks,” Mason snapped.

“Websites have processing times, Mason. I didn’t invent that.”

Mason crossed his arms. “You invent everything.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”