She practically ran out of the room. One of the agents chuckled. If he had long hair, I could imagine it falling over his eyes in some roguish manner. This one wasn’t so bad.
“She’s not scared of you or them. She’s just sensitive. She doesn’t like hurting people or making them feel uncomfortable,” Agent Smith explained. “We’ll get out of your hair now. Um…tell Alpha Everson we apologize for this intrusion. We’re required to come by at least once a year, and normally, it goes smoothly. The parents are never comfortable, of course, but we try to make it easy on everyone involved.”
“Why?” I demanded. “Why do you need to come out once a year? Doesn’t my government trust werewolves to be decent parents?”
“Yes and no. We want to make sure the children are getting the right education and will have a choice to follow their parents or not without being pressured. It’s invasive, for sure, but we’ve actually saved a few kids. Some were being treated like they were werewolves already, which you can imagine, is a much harder lifestyle.”
That would be a rough way to treat a human child. A werewolf youth could handle getting snapped at or getting roughed up a little. It was expected, a necessary lesson in dominance and controlling the animal instincts to learn how to behave, like a wild animal teaching its young. Human kids didn’t need those lessons.
I nodded slowly. “Well, Heath doesn’t do that,” I promised. I’d kill him if I ever caught teeth marks on Carey’s arms, and no amount of feeling I had for him would stop me.
“Of course. You have a nice day.” Agent Taylor bowed his head a little and walked out. I went to a window and watched them disappear down the trail. The woman was already gone, hopefully having headed back to their vehicle with Miss Davis.
Carey was the first person to come up to me.
“There’s always one mean person in the group,” she whispered. “Always. It’s never the same one, but there’s always one who tries to make Dad and Landon feel bad for being werewolves. They always try to make me say stuff that will make Dad look bad.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” I asked gently, looking down at her. “Carey…”
“Because it embarrasses Dad. It embarrasses me. It’s like how my school counselor always pulls me into her office, just for a ‘quick chat,’ so I never bring it up. They just don’t understand, and they never will. Why talk about it all the time when there’s no way to change it?”
There was a naïve and sad wisdom to those words. Why, indeed?
I hadn’t known about the school counselor. That bothered me, but I figured it was best not to bring it up—definitely not today—but maybe another time when my sweet girl wasn’t feeling so obviously bruised.
“How did they only just find out about me?” I crossed my arms. “And why didn’t I see them last year?” This was their second summer in my territory. If this happened yearly, they should have already wanted to meet me.
“Oh, they didn’t visit last year. They talked a lot with Dad after he left the Dallas pack—”
“They wanted to give us time to settle in a new place,” Heath said, cutting off his daughter as he walked back in. “This is the first time I’ve seen them since. This was why I had to run out on you this morning.”
“Ah.” I looked over his face and saw what Carey mentioned. There was shame in his eyes. Something weighed down his normally proud posture, all that powerful Alpha in him crippled by the idea someone thought he wasn’t a good enough father or even safe to be around his daughter.
We stared at each other over her head. I wanted to strangle him because I’d just had to expose myself to government agencies. They would come back and ask more questions. My life now had a giant spotlight on it.
“You might want to tell your family this happened,” he whispered.
“Oh, I plan to,” I snapped. “Damn it, Heath. You could have told me something like this was coming up. I could have prepared something, anything that might have made this go a little smoother. Instead, I was blindsided and didn’t know what I was dealing with. The BSA is out of my league. I can barely handle secret supernatural shit, and now the people who like to expose people like me have been in my house.”
He looked down at Carey, then back up at me. I put my hands over her ears and felt her sigh.
“Don’t get high and mighty with me right now,” I growled. “She can handle a couple of bad words. What I can’t handle is being the person who…” I stopped and inhaled sharply. “Is there a chance they bugged my house?”
“No. They never have before, and they can’t start now. That’s something the North American Werewolf Council fought with them about a decade ago. They can’t secretly spy on us like that. Since you’re ‘human,’ they have even less right or reason to.”
“Good, then I’ll continue. What I can’t handle is being the person who might expose werecats to the United States government. Slip ups might happen, but if they start thinking I’m a supernatural, I’ll have to leave the country. You’ll probably have to leave, too. No one wants that, right?”
“Right,” he agreed softly. I deflated at the defeat in his voice.
“I’m sorry. I’m pissed, but…” I let go of Carey and started to walk out of the kitchen.
“You have every right to be.” I stopped at his words, leaning over to let my forehead touch the frame of the doorway I was in. “I should have mentioned it this morning, should have mentioned it before the last full moon, should have mentioned they might want to meet you because Carey spends so much time with you. I should have mentioned all of that. It’s not easy being looked at like I’m a danger to my own family, and I was too much of a coward to bring it up. I never wanted to tell you about it when we moved in, and then we became friends, and I…was too ashamed.”
“Well, now I know, and we can work with this,” I said softly. “Let me take you three out to lunch.”
“Let me buy.” I opened my mouth to turn him down, but he lifted a hand and kept talking. “As an apology and a thank you for your involvement today. You did great, by the way. None of them really believed you weren’t human. A highly opinionated human is what they’re probably going to write down.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “But you and I need to talk privately later, away from prying ears.”
Carey’s long, drawn-out sigh told me she knew exactly who I was talking about.
Before we left, I grabbed the sketchbook Jabari left me and threw it into a bag. Heath and I had a lot to talk about.
Chapter Four
Lunch went as smoothly as it could with me angry at Heath, while Landon and Carey tried to ignore it. Heath took me and his family out for pizza, something easy and fast because the tension was probably too much to deal with. I had to be angry with him, but I didn’t want to be. There was a difference. He spent the morning kissing me and couldn’t bother to tell me the BSA was coming into my territory. I already knew I had to tell Hasan, and that wasn’t going to go over well.
Once Carey was done eating, Landon took her somewhere in Heath’s truck. I had to ignore her vocal protest. In some ways, she knew more about the world of werewolves and humans than I did because she lived in it while I was an outsider. In other ways, I knew much more about the supernatural world at large, and there were things I knew Heath kept from his daughter.
Even though I knew a lot more than Carey, I barely knew anything myself. Every day, that became clearer, especially when I spent time talking to my family, who were so deep into the supernatural world, I was certain they barely knew what it meant to be human in this day and age.
Heath and I went into his home, in a sense the only neutral ground, both my and Heath’s territory. We walked into his office, me trying to continue to ignore his bad design choices with all the brown furniture. I couldn’t get over that I really didn’t like his favorite colors. Being internally distraught by his interior design helped me ignore the long, drawn-out silence between us.
He locked his office door as I sat down on a small loveseat. I could smell Landon the most, and picturing the scene in my head was easy. Heath would sit behind his desk, facing the door with the large window behind him. Landon would sit here, and they would talk about the family, things that needed to be done, or possibly me. Landon might even relax for just a moment, something I didn’t think I’d ever witnessed. This room was his father’s office, and he could probably be a son, not a werewolf, a second in command, or the older brother. He could just be Heath’s son.
The idea of that image resonated with me because I had done the same thing when I lived with Hasan. I would sit in his office and read a book on a similar couch while he worked. For a moment, I wanted that again. I wanted to visit Hasan and just sit in his office, a refuge where I knew he would protect me from the outside world and let me clear my head.
“You look like you’re thinking about something important,” Heath commented, sitting beside me. “Care to tell me?”
“This couch smells like Landon. There’s a couch in Hasan’s office I’m certain smells like Niko right now. It probably smelled like me for a few years. Hasan would let me hide in his office if I needed to. I want to right now,” I explained, not looking at my werewolf. “I don’t like attention, Heath, and you put a giant spotlight on me.”
“You’ve had a lot of attention since we met. I figured you would almost be used to it by now.” There was a bite of annoyance to his words, which pissed me off.
“Getting used to it and liking it are two very different things. Carey is used to you serving her lima beans at dinner, but she absolutely hates eating them.” I growled softly. “Even then, it’s one thing to expose me further to the supernatural world and another to expose me to the human one. The supernatural world knows what I am, who I am. I’m a werecat, and there’s an expectation I’m left alone. Humans? Heath, exposing me to humans could expose werecats to humans. I’m fairly certain neither of us wants to be the reason that happens.”