The Cougar's Bargain (31 page)

“His head must be totally spinning at everything happening,” Ellery said.

“I think he's half shocked and half relieved.”

“It's weird when insanity makes more sense than the orderly, structured life you left behind, doesn't it?”

That certainly seemed to be the case to Hannah. “I think what he saw in Afghanistan was more frightening than anything we've got going on here. He couldn't explain it very well, but he tried to tell me a little during the drive up here. Bits and pieces as he digested it, I guess. I think, at first, he thought what he saw was some kind of mirage, but mirages don't follow you and they don't try to suffocate you. Whatever it was didn't follow him back to the U.S., fortunately. I think Lola's going to try to talk to him, but she wondered if he was dealing with some sort of malevolent spirits bound to that place.”

“If anyone could figure it out, it'd be her.”

“Or maybe Agatha.”

“Hannah!” shouted Mrs. Foye from the back door of her house. “You stay right there!” She went back into the house and let the screen door slam behind her.

“Oh,
shit
. What did I do?”

“Nothing. She's been trying to have a conversation with you for like five days. Didn't you see the missed calls on your phone?”

“Yeah, but I didn't think anything of them. People leave messages for important stuff.”

Glenda jogged over carrying her temporary foster son, Travis, on her hip. Travis and his sister Jamie were living on the ranch until their mother—a Cougar in rehab—could collect them. Miles kept an eye on them when Glenda was busy.

Glenda set the three-year-old down and he immediately made a run for the sprinklers irrigating the grapevines near the greenhouses.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I just gave him a bath.”

Ellery waved a dismissive hand. “Just leave him. Less stress that way.”

“Sounds like what Floyd used to say about the boys when he got tired.” Turning to Hannah, Glenda propped her fists on her hips and stared.

Oh shit.

“Do you not remember me telling you I needed to talk to you before you left?”

Hannah shifted her weight. “Um. Vaguely.” Actually, she remembered being somewhat relieved she'd gotten away before Glenda could say whatever she was going to. Hannah didn't know why the woman terrified her so much, but it seemed to be a common sentiment throughout the glaring. Glenda had a mean bite and she wasn't even a cat.

Glenda sighed. “For Pete's sake, woman, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciated you doing what you did for Ma—Ha.” She squeezed her eyes closed and groaned. “My son, I mean.”

“Sean,” Hannah whispered.

 Glenda pounded her fist against her thigh, exasperated. “I know the name. I
swear
I do. I shouldn't have named him after my father. After thirty years, I'm still not used to saying that name out loud because you're not supposed to call your parents by their names. There's some kind of mental disconnect.”

Hannah's guard had gone up the moment Glenda opened her mouth, but it was hard to be upset when the woman was struggling so much. And maybe it was the hunch to the older woman's shoulders or the tiredness in her eyes, but Hannah backed down. She was so used to hearing criticism that it was all she expected. It was a habit she hoped to be free from soon.

Hannah jammed her hands into her jeans pockets and shifted her weight again. “Oh. Well, you don't have to thank me. My motives were pretty selfish.”

“I know about your bargain. Mason told me.”

Hannah groaned. She was going to have to tell Sean what she'd done at some point. He was probably going to be angry. She certainly would have been if someone had tried to pawn her off. He had the right to know that she'd done it and also that she wanted to put it behind her. She'd done it because she was afraid and had felt guilty.

“We all do what we have to do to stay afloat,” Glenda said. “Sometimes we're not so kind to each other when we're treading water, but we can try to make up for it when all is said and done.”

“If you want me to—”

“I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about
me
. Remember, I was once where you are now. I loved Floyd, but I didn't want all the other stuff that came with him. I was a hard person to be around for a very long time. So. I think it'd be a good thing for the both of us if we sat down over a cup of coffee and hashed it all out.”

“Oh.” Hannah shifted her weight and looked to Ellery to reassurance. Ellery nodded.

She struggled to push the words out, but somehow managed to say at the end of a clipped breath, “I'd like that.”

Hannah meant it. She had to live in that community and she wanted to be liked, especially by Glenda. It was hard not to respect the woman, in spite of the contentious start to their acquaintance.

At the sound of a horn, the ladies turned in unison to see Sean and Steven opening the doors of the truck parked near the fence.

Steven jumped down, closed the door, and gave Ellery a sideways squint as he jogged over.

Ellery sighed. “I guess you know what I am now.”

“Yep.”

“I'm still the same-old Ellery. If I were going to hex you or something ridiculous like that, I could have done it a long time ago. I was born a witch.”

“That all sounds logical and reasonable in my head, but y'all gotta give a guy a couple of days to adjust to all this.”

“Are you going to be here for a couple of days?”

Steven crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back on the heels of his sneakers. “Might as well be. I was about to lose the first of many weeks of stored vacation time, so I figure I'll use it making sure Hannah's squared away.”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “You know damn well I'm fine. You're here because you want to go Indiana Jonesing.”

Steven put his hand to his chest and gasped in feigned insult.

Belle popped up quiet as a cat from gods-knew-where, looked at Sean with some hostile expression Hannah didn't understand, and then turned her back to him to address her mother. “Mom, the slow cooker just beeped.”

“All right, folks, go eat. I don't know if you'll be able to get a good meal after tonight with everything being up in the air. Supposedly, Hank and Darnell should be back soon.” Glenda headed toward the grapevines, ostensibly to grab Travis.

“What were they able to find out about the Sheehans?” Sean asked Belle.

She didn't respond. She hightailed it to Glenda's without another word.

Ellery gave Sean's bicep a squeeze and pushed him toward the house. “Ignore her. She's acting like that to all of you right now. Mason got it for most of the morning and she's blocked Hank's number from her phone.”

She pushed him along, placating him, although he didn't say anything, and Hannah was glad it was Ellery and not her. Some avenger
she
was—afraid to talk to her own mate—but she didn't know what she was supposed to say.

Or
do
. Maybe she didn't need to say anything at all yet.

She realized she'd slowed enough to trail about fifteen feet behind Ellery and Sean when Steven gave Hannah a nudge and leaned down to whisper, “Who's the tart redhead?”

“Belle. The youngest of the Foye siblings.”

“How young?”

“I think she'll be twenty next month.”

“Of
course
she will.
Ugh
.”

Hannah didn't even want to know what that disgusted sound was about. She had an inkling of an idea, but knowing her brother as well as she did, she suspected he wasn't going to act on any sudden romantic whims. She couldn't blame him, given her own emotional handicap. Fortunately, he got to go home in a few days and wouldn't have to worry about any Foyes, including the fairer one.

Hannah didn't have that luxury … and she was glad for it, even if she was terrified at the same time.

Sean, Hank, and Mason stood in a tight clump beside the barn the next morning in view of the gazebo where Lola sat meditating and the fence where Ellery and her witchy brother-in-law Claude stood, staring out toward the hellmouth. Foye huddles weren't unusual things. Sean worked with his brothers almost every day in the woodshop, but he couldn't remember the last time they'd had a conference about anything other than furniture production or Mom's surprise birthday parties.

Hannah kept walking past them. Not really within earshot—even for someone with a Cougar's superior hearing—but close enough that she pulled Sean's attention away from the discussion every time she passed with that wheelbarrow.

Mom had probably put her to work carrying greenhouse waste to the compost bins, but Sean found it suspicious that Mom would pick that particular job at that particular moment. It wasn't exactly pressing, given all that was going on.

Mason gave Sean a knock to the back of the head. “Focus.”

“She's distracting.”

“She wouldn't be your mate if she weren't. Get it together, anyway. We need to figure out this mess with Belle.”

“But if the problem is something's drawing her toward the hellmouth, wouldn't it be resolved by its closure? I mean, this is a short-term problem, right?”

“I don't know for sure. Ellery worries it might be another few weeks before those guys will even want to attempt the closure. They've not only got to get—what are they calling him now?”

“Bill,” Hank said. “Apparently, that's the name he responds to.”

“Okay,
Bill
. They need to get him acclimated, for one thing, and for another, they want to wait until conditions are right. Apparently, some dates are better than others depending on how the planets are aligned or how strong tides are or some spooky crap like that. Ask Ellery to explain it if you want to know the nitty-gritty. It went way over my head.”

“So, say we have another month of …” Sean let his words fall off when Hannah walked past with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her tight jeans. A rare, desert breeze made the hems of her—
his?
—flannel shirt dance up around her waistband. She gave him a little wave and kept moving. “That's my shirt,” he said.

“She looks better in it,” Mason said. “You were saying something about another month?”

Sean closed his eyes, gave his head a hard shake, and tried to focus.
Just don't look that way.
Willpower hadn't been so easy to come by lately, so he didn't know why he bothered trying. She would always have his attention when she was near. She pulled at him as if with a psychic shepherd's hook—an urgent
Look at me
that he couldn't ignore, and didn't really want to. He wanted to be looked at—to be
seen
—too.

Mason gave him a nudge. “Come on back to Earth.”

“Sorry. Uh, if we have another month of potential demon issues, I think the best thing for Belle is for her to not be here.”

“That's what I suggested,” Hank said. “I told her she should just stay in town until everything's done, and she cursed a blue streak at me and slammed the phone down.”

“I think I proposed something along the same lines,” Mason said. “She couldn't close the connection on me because I was standing right in front of her and not on the phone, but she did take a swipe at me. I could
command
her to stay away from the ranch as her alpha, but I don't really want to pull rank on my own sister. The idea pulls knots into my gut.”

But he'd pull rank on
me
.
Sean gritted his teeth and tried to swallow the hurt, but too much of it had built up over far too long. He needed some space, some distance from his brothers, and he'd have to steal it soon, no matter what they said.

“Can we keep her under lock?” Hank asked.

Sean scoffed. “Not doing that again. No way. It was the wrong thing to do with Hannah, and I'm not gonna do it to Belle. We've got to let her make her own choices, even if they're not the ones we'd make ourselves.”

Mason and Hank stared quietly at Sean for a long while. It was always so uncomfortable being under their scrutinizing gazes. It was so hard standing in his own convictions around them because it always seemed that whatever he thought wasn't good enough.

He put up his hands and stepped away from the huddle. “You know what? Never mind.”

“No, no. Wait,” Mason said. “I'm just thinking. You're right. I don't want to take away her freedom or have her resenting any of us. The last thing we want is for her to feel scorned.”

“Our family's good at that, right?”

Hank gave Sean's shoulder a hard punch. “Come off it.”

Sean punched him right back. “The fuck is wrong with you, huh?”

Hank gave him a forceful shove against the barn wall that made the whole kit and caboodle rattle. Hissing from the pain, Sean pushed away from the barn and grabbed Hank by the shirt.

Mason reached in between the two of them and pushed them apart. “Chill out. Both of you.”

“Is that an
order
, Alpha?” Sean rolled up his sleeves and locked a glare on his oldest brother, whose placid expression turned hostile in the blink of an eye.

It'd been so long since the three of them had been in a legitimate fight, and Sean didn't even know who threw the next punch. All he knew was that fists were flying, his scalp ached from some asshole yanking his hair as they fell to the ground, his nose hurt like hell, and at some point his fangs had dropped and he'd torn up his own damned lips.

Still, they kept swinging, two against one, or one-on-one-on-one—Sean couldn't even be sure—but for as much it hurt, it felt so good to get the anger out.

There was no winner. There never was, really. They just sat there against the wall, staring at each other, and their Cougar energy poking at each other as if the animal parts of them weren't ready to give up the fight.