There was a long silence. “Papa?”
He closed his eyes and sank back in his chair feeling his heart expand with almost painful intentness as his wolf fought with the man who knew his daughter hated him: didn’t want to see him, ever. She had been there when her mother died.
“Stella?” He couldn’t imagine what it took to make her break almost forty years of silence. “Are you all right? Is there something wrong?” Someone he could kill for her? A building to blow up? Anything at all.
She swallowed. He could hear it over the line. He waited for her to hang up.
Instead, when she spoke again, her voice was brisk and the wavery pain that colored that first “Papa” was gone as if it had never been. “I was wondering if you would consider doing a favor for me.”
“What do you need?” He was proud that came out evenly. Always better to know what you’re getting into, he told himself. He wanted to tell her that she could ask him for anything-but he didn’t want to scare her.
“I run an agency that places foster kids,” she told him, as if he didn’t know. As if her brothers hadn’t told her how he quizzed them to find out how she was doing and what she was up to. He hoped she never found out about her ex-boyfriend who’d turned stalker. He hadn’t killed that one, though his willingness to do so had made it easier to persuade the man that he wanted to take up permanent residence in a different state.
“I know,” he said because it seemed like she needed a response.
“There’s something-” she hesitated. “Look, this might not have been the best idea.”
He was losing her again. He had to breathe deeply to keep the panic from his voice. “Why don’t you tell me about it anyway? Do you have something better to do?”
“I remember that,” she said. “I remember you doing that with Mom. She’d be hysterical, throwing dishes or books, and you’d sit down and say, ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’”
Did she want to talk about her mother now? About the one time he’d needed to be calm and failed? He hadn’t known he was a werewolf until it was too late. Until after he’d killed his wife and the lover she’d taken while David had been fighting for God and country, both of whom had forgotten him. She’d been waiting until he came home to tell him that she was leaving-it was a mistake she’d had no time to regret. He, on the other hand, might have forever to regret it for her.
He never spoke of it. Not to anyone. For Stella he’d do it, but she knew the story anyway. She’d been there.
“Do you want to talk about your mother?” he asked, his voice carrying into a lower timbre; as it did when the wolf was close.
“No. Not that,” she said hurriedly. “Nothing like that. I’m sorry. This isn’t a good idea.”
She was going to hang up. He drew on his hard-earned control and thought fast.
Forty years as a hunter and leader of men had given him a lot of practice reading between the lines. If he could put aside the fact that she was his daughter, maybe he could salvage this.
She’d told him she ran a foster agency like it was important to the rest of what she had to say.
“It’s about your work?” he asked, trying to figure out what a social worker would need with a werewolf. Oh. “Is there a-” His daughter preferred not to talk about werewolves, Clive had told him. So if there was something supernatural she was going to have to bring it up. “Is there someone bothering you?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that. It’s one of my boys.”
Stella had never married, never had children of her own. Her brother said it was because she had all the people to take care of that she could handle.
“One of the foster kids.”
“Devonte Parish.”
“He one of your special ones?” he asked. His Stella had never seen a stray she hadn’t brought home, animal or human. Most she’d dusted off and sent home with a meal and bandages as needed-but some of them she’d kept.
She sighed. “Come and see him, would you? Tomorrow?”
“I’ll be there,” he promised. It would take him a few hours to set up permission from the packs in her area: travel was complicated for a werewolf. “Probably sometime in the afternoon. This the number I can find you at?”
Instead of taking a taxi from the airport, he rented a car. It might be harder to park, but it would give them mobility and privacy. If his daughter only needed this, if she didn’t want to smoke the peace pipe yet, then he didn’t need it witnessed by a cab driver. A witness would make it harder for him to control himself-and his little girl never needed to see him out of control ever again.
He called her before setting out, and he could tell that she’d had second and third thoughts.
“Look,” he finally told her. “I’m here now. Maybe we should go and talk to the boy. Where can I meet you?”
He’d have known her anywhere though he hadn’t, by her request, seen her since the night he’d killed his wife. She’d been twelve and now she was a grown woman with silver threads running through her kinky black hair. The last time he’d seen her she’d been still a little rounded and soft as most children are-and now there wasn’t an ounce of softness in her. She was muscular and lean-like him.
It had been a long time, but he’d never have mistaken her for anyone else: she had his eyes and her mother’s face.
He’d thought you had to be bleeding someplace to hurt this badly. The beast struggled within him, looking for an enemy. But he controlled and subdued it before he pulled the car to the curb and unlocked the automatic door.
She was wearing a brown wool suit that was several shades darker than the milk and coffee skin she’d gotten from her mother. His own skin was dark as the night and kept him safely hidden in the shadows where he and people like him belonged.
She opened the car door and got in. He waited until she’d fastened her seatbelt before pulling out from the curb. Slush splattered out from under his tires, but it was only a token. Once he was in the traffic lane the road was bare.
She didn’t say anything for a long time, so he just drove. He had no idea where he was going, but he figured she’d tell him when she was ready. He kept his eyes on traffic to give her time to get a good look at him.
“You look younger than I remember,” she said finally. “Younger than me.”
“I was thirty-five or thereabouts when I was Changed. Being a werewolf seems to settle physical age about twenty-five for most of us.” There it was out in the open and she could do with it as she pleased.
He could smell her fear of him spike and if he’d really been twenty-five, he thought he might have cried. Being this agitated wasn’t smart if you were a werewolf. He took a deep breath through his nose and tried to calm down-he’d earned her fear.
“Devonte won’t talk to me or anyone else,” she said, and then as if those words had been the key to the floodgate she kept going. “I wish you could have seen him when I first met him. He was ten going on forty. He’d just lost his grandmother, who had raised him. He looked me right in the eye, stuck his jaw out and told me that he needed a home where he would be clothed and fed so he could concentrate on school.”
“Smart boy?” he asked. She’d started in the middle of the story: he’d forgotten that habit of hers until just now.
“Very smart. Quiet. But funny, too.” She made a sad sound, and her sorrow overwhelmed her fear of him. “We screen the homes. We visit. But there’s never enough of us-and some of the horrible ones can put on a good show for a long time. It takes a while, too, before you get a feel for the bad ones. If he could have stayed with his first family, everything would have been fine. He stayed with them for six years. But this fall she unexpectedly got pregnant and her husband got a job transfer…”
They’d abandoned the boy like he was an old couch that was too awkward to move, David thought. He felt a flash of anger for this boy he’d never met. He swallowed the emotion quickly; he could do that these days. For a while. He was going to have to take that run when he got back home.
“I was tied up in court cases and someone else moved him to his next family,” Stella continued, staring at her hands, which were clenched on a manila folder. “It shouldn’t have been a problem. This was a family who already has fostered several children-and Devonte was a good kid, not the kind to give anyone problems.”
