Watcher by Holley Trent

CHAPTER THREE

Leticia had been in the shower for a couple of minutes when Jim poked his head into the bathroom and said, “Mind the clock. The wash cycle is supposed to take forty minutes. Want to make sure you have plenty of time to dry your dress.”

“What time is it now?”

“Seven thirty-five.”

“Okay. Eight fifteen, it is.”

“Or a little sooner. Some folks get impatient. They’ll take your stuff out of the washer and dump it wherever if you’re not there when the machine goes off.”

Leticia poured the infinitesimal amount of shampoo from the hotel-provided bottle into her palm and rubbed her hands together. “You sound like you know from experience.”

“Yeah. I was transient before I moved to Norseton.”

“Oh. Right. I knew that.” Chewing the inside of her cheek contemplatively, she distributed the shampoo through her thick hair the best she could and scrubbed her scalp. “You must have learned to travel light.”

“I did. That’s why it was so easy for me to move around in the community when Adam needed to give a Wolf family the place where I was staying. I had whatever I could keep in a big rucksack and pretty much the clothes on my back. I could be packed up and moved within an hour.”

She chuckled and ducked beneath the spray of shower water to rinse her hair. “Transient’s a hard way to live. Right now, I live in a temporary apartment. I’m trying to make it feel like home the best I can, but, you know…” She shrugged but realized he couldn’t see her.

“Why temporary?”

“For one thing…” Sticking her arm out the shower curtain gap, she patted the wall rack until her fingers felt terrycloth. Deeming the item light and small enough to be a washcloth, she drew it in to her. “The building is scheduled for a top-down renovation and is vacant except for me. The owner said I could have a place there until I found something suitable.”

“What would be suitable?”

“I’m not sure yet. I want to be close to the center of town. I like how short my walk to the clinic is. I don’t want to pay close-to-work prices for rent, though. I’m only working thirty hours a week right now because of my school schedule. Some of the real estate near the executive mansion is seriously spendy, even with all the subsidies we get.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“And I actually like my place. If there were a way to buy it out as a condo, I would try to in the future. My landlord doesn’t actually care if I make improvements. He said if he liked my work enough, he’d leave everything alone. But anyway, there’s no real urgency on his part for me to leave. He kinda works around me, and I get out of the way whenever contractors need to get into see wires or pipes or something. Where do you live now?”

“House with some of the contract guards the Afótama will be phasing out of duty soon. I took over the mortgage payments, so it’s technically in my name now.”

Leticia nudged the shower curtain aside and gaped at him. Even with the shower water pelting against the tub floor, she could hear him perfectly well. The bathroom had excellent acoustics.

I should have all my conversations in here.

“I hadn’t heard about that,” she said. “Do they think they’ve finally got enough staff that they can get rid of the outsiders?”

Most of the male Wolves provided security services to the Afótama—their hosts. Norseton did have a small police force that ably handled most mundane issues in the community of several thousand, but the clan royals needed more intensive protection. The Wolves were discreet and efficient. While they had their fair share of pack drama, they at least were quiet about it.

Jim grunted. “According to the clan chieftains, we’ve got just about enough Wolves providing security now that the strain has diminished. We’re actually able to work more reasonable shifts. They think that with two or three more Wolves, Petra can stop recruiting for a while. Not gonna lie, it’ll be nice to have my house to myself.”

“I bet that’ll be awesome.” Leticia squinted at the label of the other little bottle in the shower and confirmed it contained conditioner. “The queen’s aide Lora is always so worried that the staff isn’t careful enough with the contractors. They all have to sign non-disclosure forms about their work in the community and what they see while living there, but I think people feel like they can’t be themselves around them.”

“Trust me, those guys don’t know shit about what the Afótama are, the fairies piling in, or the Wolves around them, either.”

“How is that possible?”

“From the beginning, the chieftains made sure to phase them in and out often enough that none of them ever had a chance to see anything interesting. Trust me, those guys talk a lot. They don’t know what I am, and they sure as shit don’t know about Afótama magic. I suspect some of their ignorance has to do magic, actually. I’d bet money that someone—whether it’s one of the royals or one of the fairies they’re related to—is spinning some kind of charm that affects the contractors’ comprehensions of what they’re seeing.”

Leticia expelled an appreciative grunt, à la Jim. She liked living around so many careful people. Until recently, she’d had no idea how much anxiety she’d been holding inside of her about uncertain things. The fact that there were wise people who’d already thought about the disasters that might happen diminished the feeling of generalized suspense she lived with. She’d even been able to pick up a couple of hobbies.

“That’d be really smart,” she said. “Covering things from multiple angles, I mean. Keeps some of the risk of surprise lower.”

“Yeah. I think the clan royals have enough things to be stressed about without having to fret about what ex-contractors will slip up and say after they’ve left the community.”

At the knock at the room door, Jim stepped out of the doorway, muttering, “Room service got here fast.”

“Yeah, they said they would be quick.”

He closed the door.

She hoped he’d return. She wanted to talk some more, either about the vagaries of Norseton settlement or about…nothing in particular.

He was surprisingly easy to have a conversation with. Rather than terse, rushed sentences, he offered context, and patiently, at that. He didn’t seem to mind talking, at least for the moment. People had a way of changing with their company and circumstances, and she doubted he was any different than anyone else in that regard.

Hopefully, he’ll still have things to say later.

She scoffed at herself as she doused her hair beneath shower spray again.

She was thinking about later while they were still in the mess of the right-now. She didn’t even have clean clothes to put on.

The familiar timbre of her middle sister’s voice just outside the bathroom made Leticia go rigid.

Not room service, then.

She turned her better ear toward the door. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, only that no one was raising their voice. That meant that Graciella couldn’t have been too overwrought about the previous night’s events and that Jim hadn’t tossed any blame at her.

At least, not loudly.

Growling dejectedly, Leticia gave up on trying to process their words. Even Wolves who could not shapeshift had better-than-average hearing. Leticia’s hearing was merely average in one ear and very poor in the other. As far as she knew, nothing had happened to her to cause the condition. There’d been no childhood accidents, and her mother hadn’t taken any unusual medical risks during pregnancy. She’d simply gotten an unexpected developmental quirk and didn’t even know if it was fixable at her age, or at all.

Her family had done their faithful best to not draw attention to her deficiency back in her old pack. That meant no doctors had ever been consulted. She hadn’t even been born in a hospital. Their old alpha didn’t trust them, or really, the pack members who sought care too willingly.

She hurried through the rest of her shower, got out, and wrapped towels around her hair and body. By opening the door an inch, she could hear the voices better.

“…flight, and we’ll have to rebook them,” Graciella said.

“What about the flight?” Leticia called out.

“Cancelled. There’s some kind of computer issue holding up the timetable for the airline today. We’re hoping we can fly back to New Mexico this evening, but there are no guarantees. Every airline is flying full planes nowadays.” Graciella poked her head into the bathroom doorway and gave her sister an assessing scan. Likely seeing nothing unusual or changed about Leticia, Graciella continued, “We shouldn’t count on all of us being able to find seats on other airlines.” Leaning further into the steamy room, she hooked her index finger into the top edge of Leticia’s towel, tugged, and peeked past Leticia’s cleavage.

“Stop that,” Leticia hissed and snatched herself away. Grabbing Jim’s stick of deodorant off the counter, she whispered, “If you’re looking for a bite, or maul, or anything else, I’ll save you the trouble. There’s nothing there. We didn’t do anything.”

“Anything?”

Leticia bumped the door closed with her heel. “Apparently, I passed out. Who gave me alcohol? And why did you…”

She cringed at her sister’s rapid press of a finger against her lips.

That was always Graciella’s signal that Leticia was louder than she thought she was.

After clearing her throat, Leticia tried to whisper even softer. “Why did you let me get married? Don’t you need your birth certificate for that?”

“You gave yourself alcohol,” Graciella said levelly after moving more to Leticia’s right side. Her sisters tried to stay on that side if they needed to talk. “Illegal, yeah, but we weren’t going to micromanage you. You’re a grown woman, and we’ve all had a sip or two before turning twenty-one. We cut you off pretty quick, though.”

“Apparently not quick enough. I barely remember anything.”

It was Graciella’s turn to cringe. “Damn. Might be a Wolf thing. Have to look into that because that’s weird. And I had your birth certificate. Lisa made sure I had copies of both of ours because we were traveling. You can never predict what’ll go wrong, so you have to be prepared for everything. And I let you get married because…”

There was commotion and voices outside the door—perhaps the room service had arrived.

Graciella waited until the voices had moved farther into the room. “Because it made sense, okay? Whether or not that was a good idea, I don’t know, but last night, I thought so.”

Leticia chewed on her sister’s explanation in silence. She wasn’t angry. In fact, she hadn’t really reached that emotion since waking up. Though she’d been cycling through a litany of powerful feelings, none were near the irate end of the spectrum. Mostly, she’d been uncomfortable because of her ignorance and her apparent willingness to go along with someone else’s plan.

She steeled her spine. They could quibble more about her bridal situation later. Being stranded in Vegas was the more pressing issue. “Did anyone call Alpha about the travel problem?”

“Mm-hmm. He told us not to stress and that we can hunker down here if we need to wait until the airline gets their shit together. For now, he’s doing okay with the staff he has available.”

Leticia gave the open deodorant a sniff and crossed her eyes.

Pine.

Her sinuses hadn’t felt so open since that time she’d accidentally spread wasabi onto her bread, thinking it was avocado. “Is there an estimated time for when the computers’ll be back up?”

“In the email blast the airline sent out, they only said that it would be no earlier than two, and then, of course, they’d need time to issue tickets.”

“And we had an afternoon flight.”

“Mm-hmm. The only guaranteed ways out of here today are driving or Amtrak. Those plane tickets were non-refundable, so one way or another, I’m flying home.”

“What are we going to do all day?”

Graciella cheekily cocked a brow. “If you can’t figure that out,” she said low, “maybe we should get your hormones checked when we get back to Norseton. That man didn’t signal a single objection to you groping him like a saddle horn last night.”

Never before had Leticia so much wanted to have a floor open beneath her and swallow her whole. She was not going to have that conversation with her meddling sister, and she was not going to try to recall herself pawing at that man. Mortification didn’t even begin to describe how she felt. If she could be invisible for a day or two, that would be an excellent start to improving her worsening mood.

“I meant about the room,” she snapped, finding her voice again. “Checkout’s at twelve.”

“Mm-hmm.” Graciella smirked, and Leticia didn’t like it. Her sisters didn’t really do mockery, so she always felt a little unmoored when they drifted into those all-knowing moods.

“Okay, well, we all called down to the reception desk.” Graciella relaxed her expression to a neutral one and turned her gaze up to the ceiling. She did that a lot when she was trying to recall events. “They let us extend our stay at the day rate and will hold our rooms for tonight if we can’t get out of here.”

“That’s nice of them.”

“Not nice. Opportunistic. Much like your apartment, this hotel is under renovation. They’re only at half occupancy right now. They don’t have all their amenities running right now.”

“Ah. At least the washers and dryers are. My dress smelled absolutely ripe this morning.”

Graciella snorted. “We were all pretty ripe last night just from walking through the lobby downstairs. Even the hallway carpets up here have a funk. If I can smell it, imagine how bad it must be for the Wolves who can shift. Finn’s been sneezing all morning.”

“Did I bring a bag? I can’t believe I’d come all the way here just with Queen Tess’s dress. And if so, where is it?”

“Your bag?” Graciella’s face fell as though someone had dropped a bunch of rocks into her gut. “You really don’t remember anything? Even from before you drank?”

“I’m starting to worry a lot about this.” Leticia wrung her hands. She had to do something with her nervous energy. “I don’t remember much about last night. Mostly, I remember the cab ride. Jim caught me up on what happened later. I guess he figured out something was off about me because he didn’t touch me.”

“That’s good.”

“That he didn’t want to touch me?”

“Who said he didn’t want to? Your concern should be that he shouldn’t have, given your state, and he didn’t. That’s good. Fits right in with what we already know about him.”

“Hmm.” Leticia stopped wringing her hands.

Graciella had made a good point. The true test of character was when people could misbehave, knowing they wouldn’t be punished, but chose to take the higher road.

“I’ve got your clothes, by the way,” Graciella said. “We were in a rush. You couldn’t find your overnight bag, so you tossed your stuff in with mine. You said it didn’t matter if our underwear touched because we used to share a bathtub.”

“That sounds like something I would say,” Leticia mumbled. The logic didn’t really stack up, but she probably thought she sounded sensible at the time.

“It’s your Modesto practicality.” Graciella squeezed through the slightly opened bathroom door and left Leticia to finish getting ready.

Leticia did the best she could with the supplies she had on hand—Jim’s—and was detangling her hair with her fingers when Graciella returned several minutes later. She thrust a sweater and a pair of jeans through the door gap.

“You’re an angel.” Leticia unbundled the roll of clothing and found a clean bra and pair of comfortable underwear inside.

“Hurry out, or they’re not going to leave us anything to eat.”

“They? Who is they?”

Her sister had already walked too far to hear the query.

Leticia dressed in a hurry and nervously reentered the room. She didn’t know what she was walking into or what new schemes her sister may have ensnared her into.

Spotting Finn at the desk, though, she let out a breath of relief.

Oh, it’s just him.

Her brother-in-law leaned with one knee on the seat of the rolling chair, smearing butter onto a muffin. The threat of sisterly chaos was always so much lower when he was around.

As proficient as Graciella was at keeping his wolfish agitation at bay, he seemed to be equally adept at keeping moods mellow—perhaps because everyone wanted to keep him that way.

He was probably the most tenderhearted monster in Norseton.

Raking her gaze over the feast distributed between the desk and dresser top, Leticia’s jaw dropped. “I…ordered that?”

When she’d asked the room service operator what would be best, she’d only half heard the response, despite having her good ear against the receiver. There’d been so much background noise in the kitchen. The employee had rattled off numerous group meal options, and Leticia had thought she’d agreed to a basic hotel special. She hadn’t expected them to send an entire buffet upstairs.

Instinctively, she looked at Jim, worrying that he’d be upset. He’d said not to scrimp, but she didn’t think he’d intended for her to buy enough food to feed six hungry men.

“Coffee?” Jim held the decanter up to her as well as an empty cup.

There was no aggravation in his tone. Not even the mildest note of annoyance.

Maybe I didn’t mess up?

“Um.” She tried to turn her grimace into a smile as she accepted the drink. “Sorry about all the…” She gestured to the table. “I was overwhelmed.”

“Know that feelin’,” Finn said. “If I don’t get Gracie to make my calls for me, I don’t get nothin’ done.”

“Don’t feel bad. You can’t help that.”

Many of the male Wolves had lacked adequate socialization before arriving at Norseton. They simply weren’t proficient with certain interactions most people would have found routine and ordinary, but most had gotten so much better.

She picked up an empty plate from the stack and put a hardboiled egg on it. The toast looked good, too. It was that fancy, wholesome kind with seeds and flaked grains on top. She’d always found that kind of bread held up well beneath huge mounds of jelly.

Jim nudged the sausage links closer to her. The log-shaped grease spots on the cloth beneath told her that nine were already missing, and she didn’t see them on anyone’s plates. She took two of the last three and saved some room for bacon.

Assuming there is any.

Snorting, she lifted the lid of a nearby dish and discovered a solitary edge of bacon left unmolested.

“Sorry,” Finn said.

“I don’t know why I worried about it being a lot.” She gave her head a self-pitying shake and snatched the last sausage link. “Trying to eat with the pack is like playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.”

“I don’t think he would have been quite as hungry if dinner hadn’t been so scant,” Graciella said.

“I don’t remember dinner. Or if I even had it.” Leticia gave Jim a sideward glance.

The shake of his head was nearly imperceptible.

He probably thought she’d cry or something if he were more direct.

Maybe I would, she thought, closing her eyes for a self-check. Drunk, married, and unfed. The evening’s story is coming together.

“We ended up going to see a late show,” Graciella said. “They served dinner. Finn wasn’t into it, though.”

“Yeah, I was,” the Wolf balked.

Graciella’s laughter pealed heavenward. “No, you so weren’t. You were half falling asleep.”

“’Cause you was touchin’ me. Whatcha expect? Touch me long enough, and I always nod off.”

“Modesto girl magic, hmm?” Jim murmured.

He was staring out the window onto the Vegas Strip, so Leticia could watch him unselfconsciously.

He’d shaven.

She hadn’t noticed he’d shaven, and she couldn’t recall a time when she’d ever seen him with a clean jaw.

Looks smooth.

She decided she liked smooth on him. It wasn’t that the shave had improved his looks any. That would be hard to accomplish no matter what he did. The subtle change had only stripped away some of the Wolf-tiredness they all carried on their persons. Sometimes, the quality of their magic made them appear older than they were.

“Can’t call it the Modesto girl magic nomore,” Finn said as he thoughtfully chewed. “Ain’t no more Modesto girls unless Leticia plans on keeping the name.”

Cheeks burning hot as a Las Vegas sidewalk, Leticia dropped her gaze to her egg.

Before that moment, she hadn’t considered the name issue. She still didn’t feel married. She may as well have not even been in attendance for all she could recall of the event.

She didn’t have any problem with taking Jim’s name if he wanted her to have it.

Does he?

She didn’t risk trying to get a read on him. She didn’t want him to see something repelling in her expression that she truly hadn’t meant to put there. Instead of investigating, she halved, salted, and hot-sauced her egg.

“How does that magic work, anyhow?” Jim asked.

“Colt’ll ’splain it to you good,” Finn said.

“Yeah, you should probably ask him when we get back to Norseton,” Graciella said. “I guess he’s the best at talking about our energy because he’s felt it the longest. For now, here’s the nutshell explanation. The women in our family kind of had to evolve a certain way. I guess after living for so many generations in packs with brutal alphas, they accidentally forced some defensive magic out their Wolf energy.”

“And it works best through touch?” Jim asked.

Leticia looked at him just long enough to confirm he was still looking out the window. What she could see of his face appeared to be pleasantly relaxed.

Graciella shrugged. “Sometimes, proximity is enough. Our mother and our abuela used to keep the pack back home from going berserker on run nights.”

“Did the alpha know?”

Leticia snorted and plopped into the corner seat. “No. If he’d known we had any kind of magic, either active or passive, he might have tried to sell us off or something.”

“Or something worse, you mean,” Graciella said.

Leticia cut her sister a sour look. “That kinda goes without saying.”

“Good thing you got out when you did, baby.” Finn laid his head against Graciella’s shoulder, and she promptly gave his messy hair a playful tousle.

Even when her sister was aggravating the hell out of her, watching her with Finn always made Leticia smile. There seemed to be something in their love that genuinely humbled. So many Wolf pairings back in their old pack seemed to have the opposite effect. The partners got reckless and brash, not only with people in the community but with each other. There was no rest to be had in those sorts of Wolf homes.

“And to think, we would have never been able to leave if not for Lisa getting out first,” Graciella said. “What about you, Jim? Any unusual magic in your birthpack?”

When Jim finally turned from the window, the fleeting evidence of a grimace departed his face.

Silently, he moved back to the desk and topped off his coffee.

Leticia and her sister shared a look. They didn’t have to be telepaths like the Afótama to know what each other was thinking. Sometimes, silence meant words needed to be gathered, and hard truths needed to be abraded before they were spoken.

“If there were any,” he said after a minute, tightening the knot of anticipation in Leticia’s gut, “I’m sure my father would have either found a way to exploit them or else expelled the people who had them. He didn’t even like having the Wolves of the Eurasian strain in the pack. That’s why Colt got put out. He got too big too fast.”

“Why’d you get put out?” Leticia blurted. She clamped her lips together, cursing herself. She hadn’t meant to sound so incredulous—like he wasn’t big enough or good enough to be a contender. It was just that when she could actually keep up with a conversation and was sure no words had fallen into her left ear’s waste bin, she often spoke before she could think.

Jim wasn’t the hugest man in the Norseton pack by any stretch of the imagination, but he was strong and intelligent. No reasonable alpha could have been in such a hurry to send their own flesh and blood away.

But she kept forgetting that most Wolf alphas weren’t reasonable. They were power-mad authoritarians whose tenures were predicated on squashing dissent. The rot in the ranks went back generations.

Leaning against the windowsill, Jim stared into his coffee cup.

Leticia’s belly growled loudly because she still hadn’t had a bite.

When the others all looked her way, she hastily recanted. “Never mind. You don’t have to ans—”

“Yeah, I do have to answer. Maybe put half an egg into your mouth while I do it.”

She did and hoped the chewing would quell some of her nerves. She was self-aware enough to recognize her jitters had been seeded from a desire to be impressive to the man she’d woken up married to. Likely, she’d shit the bed with that already, though. Since arriving in Las Vegas, Leticia hadn’t been giving anything close to an outstanding performance. She was giving musty, yellowjackets-buzzing-in-her-skull energy, and she was usually so much better than that.

“He told me to leave because his new wife wanted me gone.” He met her craven gaze over the rim of his cup and sipped. “She hated my mother and hated me for looking like her, I guess. My mother moved up to Canada after the divorce, so it was only a matter of time, really. My father told me to git, so I got gone. I don’t stay where I’m not wanted.”

“That’s disgusting,” Graciella countered with an indignation Leticia hadn’t heard out of her since Delaware. “Our father cared about family above all. Maybe he’s not the strongest or the best of fighters, but again and again, he sacrificed pride to keep us all together and safe. I don’t think he would have behaved any differently if he’d had sons, either. He wouldn’t have felt threatened by them. He would have wanted them to be more than he was.”

Agreeing wholeheartedly with her sister’s assessment, Leticia nodded. After swallowing a mouthful of egg, she dipped the corner of her toast into a little jam pot and gathered up her words carefully, just as Jim had. “I think…our father would be very proud to have a son like you.”

Silence threaded through the room once again, but the heaviness of it was different. Instead of being anxious, the quiet was soft and reflective, and Leticia didn’t think the change was due to effort on Graciella’s part. Neither of them was magically massaging the group mood. They were simply sitting in a changing tide.

Raising his cup to his mouth once more, Jim broke the quiet. “Knowing what I know about your father, I’ll claim that as a compliment.”