“Midget, you reek of . . . guy.” His eyes narrowed as he caught Nick’s scent. “Dr. Girlie Face? You spent the night ‘stranded’ with Dr. Girlie Face?”
“I’ll kill him,” Cooper growled
“Not until after I kill him,” Samson countered.
They both lunged toward the truck. I caught them by the scruffs of their necks and pulled them back.
“You’re not killing anybody. We got into a wreck. He’s injured. I whacked my head. I couldn’t phase to run home and leave him alone. He was a perfect gentleman.”
Samson and Cooper locked eyes. “We kill him anyway,” Cooper said. Samson nodded.
“Come on!” Cooper exclaimed when I shoved him back. “This is a time-honored tradition! Older brothers hurting and/or scaring the crap out of their sisters’ boyfriends. It’s the whole point of having a little sister!”
“Cut it out, Coop! And he’s not my boyfriend!”
“But—but!” Samson sputtered.
“Fine, fine,” Cooper conceded. “We won’t kill him because he’s interested in you. We’ll kill him because judging by the way your clothes are clearly thrown on, I’m assuming that he saw you naked or saw you phase. Either offense warrants me knocking the crap out of him.”
“I phased while I was asleep.” I cringed. “I whacked my head pretty hard and must have needed the beauty sleep.”
Cooper nodded. “Damned inconvenient.”
“So, he knows our secret? Much better reason to kill him,” Samson said, rubbing his hands together gleefully.
I snapped at him, “Samson, shut it. We just have to think this whole thing through. Now is not the time for one of the nasty, bloody overreactions you end up apologizing for.”
“Not this time, Maggie. This time, I have a well-thought-out three-step plan.”
“Hi, guys,” Nick said, limping around the side of the truck. “Look, there’s no reason we can’t—” Crack.
Nick made a startled “uhf” noise. His eyes rolled back, and he sank to his knees. Samson was standing behind him with a tree branch in his hands.
“Did I knock him out?” Samson asked, raising the tree branch over his head to strike Nick again.
“Are you crazy?” I yelled, dropping to the ground next to Nick to check the wound on the top of his head. “You could have killed him! This is your plan? What are steps two and three? ‘Find a shovel’ and ‘Dig a hole’?”
Nick was well and truly unconscious. But his pulse was strong, and his breathing was even. I sprang up to my feet and punched Samson in the nose, knocking him flat on his ass.
“Told you she liked him,” Cooper said.
“Ow! What the hell, Maggie!” Samson grunted, cupping a hand around his bleeding nose. “That really hurt!”
“It was supposed to hurt, dumb-ass!” I yelled, flexing my bruised fingers. “What is wrong with you?”
Samson swiped at his nose. “This is just step one. Step two is we take him to the clinic in Grundy. We call Buzz to report the accident. And then we tell Nick that he hit his head really hard during the crash, and if he saw anything, like Maggie turning into a werewolf, it was probably just a bad dream. You know, the result of his concussion.”
“Have you been watching soap operas again?” I demanded.
“It’s actually not that bad of a plan,” Cooper said. “And if he goes around telling everybody he saw you turn into a wolf, he’ll just get laughed at. It will discredit him. People will think he’s loony.”
My chest ached a little at the thought of Nick being mocked by locals. But I had to admit it wasn’t totally misguided, as plans went. It was far better than Samson’s idea for getting us out of trouble when we knocked over Mom’s china cabinet, which centered on faking a robbery by carnies. “There are four steps in your three-step plan,” I muttered.
Samson brightened, and tossed Nick over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
“Would you be careful with him?” I yelled.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to save your truck, Mags,” Cooper said, trying to distract me from fluttering around Nick’s unconscious form like an overwrought soccer mom.
I sighed, prying the tailgate open, knowing that my scent, mixed with Nick’s, was now billowing out of the truck full-force. My face flushed hot, and Cooper pretended to be fascinated by some moss on a nearby tree.
“I don’t think there’s a wrecker on earth that will be able to haul it out of here,” I said, grabbing my bag. I rescued the necessary paperwork from the glovebox and claimed a couple of CDs from the floorboards. I took my dad’s Saint Edmund medal from its honorary spot on the rearview mirror. The lot was stuffed in my emergency bag. I slid my still-damp boots onto my feet, as it seemed we would be walking home human. I stood at the edge of the ravine and stared at my former transportation. It felt as if I was losing my last connection to my dad.
“It’s OK, Maggie,” Cooper said, wrapping his arms around me. “I’ll get you an older, shittier truck when we get back to town.”
“Ass.” I coughed to cover the sniffle caught in my throat and punched his arm.
“Can we get going?” Samson demanded, shifting Nick’s weight. “I’ve got things to do.”
“No, you don’t,” I scoffed.
“We’ve got to get Samson a girlfriend,” Cooper said. “Speaking of which, what exactly happened between you and Dr. Girlie Face last night?”
“Nice attempt at a segue, but it’s none of your business.”
“But you’re, you know, being all careful with him. Being protective. You don’t do that.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not a monster, Coop.”
“Maggie, you once left a date at the emergency room with appendicitis because you didn’t want to miss the previews for a Steven Seagal movie.” I glared at him. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s sort of nice to see this softer side of you. But, uh, Maggie, please understand, this is a conversation I never, ever wanted to have with you, but Samson was right. That guy’s scent is all over you, and vice versa. You two obviously got . . . pretty close last night. And it seems like we interrupted something when we showed up.”
“No comment.”
“Thank you,” he said, shuddering. “It’s just you’ve always said you were going to . . . you know, with another wolf. I just want to make sure you’re not rushing into anything. Of course, keep in mind that I don’t have a lot of room to throw stones here, since I pretty much leaped into a relationship with Mo without even thinking of looking. And you’re my baby sister, so I prefer not to think of you even doing that until you’re, oh, eighty or so. Or when I’m dead. Whichever comes first.”
“Cooper, stop.”
“Thank you,” he breathed.
“No, you’re right. You interrupted something. And it would have been a mistake. I realized that as soon as I snapped out of the haze I was in. I let my hormones and all that ‘we almost died’ adrenaline get the better of me.”
“He seems like an OK guy,” Cooper admitted. “I mean, I have to hate him a little bit, because it’s my brotherly duty. But as guys who want to nail my sister go, I guess you could do worse. Like Lee.”
“Nice.”
“So, are you going to see him again?”
I shook my head and chewed on my bottom lip. Nick was changing me, making me weak, distracting me. Making me irresponsible and putting me this close to making life-altering decisions on a whim and a whiff of pheromones. I hadn’t even thought about my family the night before. I didn’t worry about whether my mother was worried about me or if Pops’s heart-cath results had come back from Dr. Moder yet. All I could think about was Nick. That was unacceptable. I had people counting on me. People I loved and to whom I owed far more loyalty than some random guy I’d know a few weeks. I shrugged, trying to give Cooper my most convincing nonchalant sigh. “No. I’m done. This is over.”
CAMPED OUT IN the uncomfortable waiting-room chairs in the Grundy clinic, I stared at Nick’s face for most of the night. Dr. Patterson, who spent two days a week at the Grundy clinic, assured me that the “blow to the head”—Samson’s dumb-ass idea—probably didn’t do any long-term damage. The masochist in me wanted to take in as much of Nick as I could while I could, because what I was about to do would keep me away from him for the foreseeable future. I kept thinking of a passage in the final act of Romeo and Juliet, something about “Eyes, look
