THAT promise in mind, he called Alex the next morning after the kids were off to school and Allie was headed over to Jena’s.
He drove over to Ted and Alex’s old adobe house on the other side of town and waited in the driveway while his friend kissed his new wife good-bye.
It was good to see Ted and Alex that way.
He’d been angry at Alex for what felt like years. But that didn’t mean Ollie didn’t want his happiness. It had been a hard road home for the young wolf alpha, but Alex had made it and was now enjoying his own measure of peace, even if he carried the mantle of responsibility for the town’s economic future.
It was a heavy burden—one he didn’t envy.
When are you going to forgive him?
Shit. As usual, Allie was right. It was past time. Holding on to a grudge never worked well for Ollie anyway. He was too apt to understand other people’s points of view. And at the end of the day, he understood what Alex was trying to do with the resort.
“Hey.” Alex popped open the door and put two travel mugs of coffee on the center console mounted between the seats. “I brought the good stuff.”
If Alex wanted to share his overpriced Hawaiian coffee, Ollie was not going to argue.
“You get my message?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Then Alex grinned. “But I got something better.”
He raised an eyebrow and waited for Alex to speak.
“Cam came through.” Alex slammed the door shut. “And it turns out even tough guys like their spa appointments in Palm Desert. Ready to get your chakras aligned?”
Ollie cracked his knuckles before he put the truck in reverse. “Oh yeah. They’re all out of whack. Maybe punching something is just what my aura needs.”
Chapter Twenty-One
ALLIE WIPED HER HANDS on her jeans, a cloud of dust rising to her nose as she eyed the old attic space now owned by Josie Quinn and her family, who’d moved there after Josie’s husband, Marcus, was killed.
The house, which had belonged to the wolf clan, had been given to Josie, even though she was a Quinn by marriage. But Alex and Marcus hadn’t only been co-workers; they’d been friends. He took his responsibility to Marcus’s widow seriously.
Jena sneezed beside her.
“I don’t”— sneeze—“see anything that tells me Joe was here recently. You?” Jena wiped her eyes.
“Nothing,” Allie said. “I can’t smell anything but dust and old paper. I don’t think Josie’s touched it yet.”
“She says she won’t let the kids play up here until she can clean it out. I don’t blame her for waiting until winter.”
Neither did Allie. Even in the fall, the attic was sweltering.
Allie tapped her foot and remembered when the attic had been Joe’s hideout. His teenage hangout he shared with Sean and Alex. Even Ollie occasionally came over. Then Allie had started coming over, and Ollie had stopped.
So many years she was seeing in a new light.
She walked over and traced initials carved into a beam.
A.S. + J.R.
He had loved her once.
Not enough.
No. Joe’s love had been a shallow, struggling thing. Allie had only realized that after drinking deep with Ollie. She brushed tears from her eyes when she remembered the boy her late husband had been. There was no comparison to Ollie. It wasn’t even fair.
Oliver Campbell could love her fully. Generously. Because he’d been given that love by so many in his life it practically poured off him. But the boy who’d carved hopeful initials into the old house hadn’t been loved like that. He had a hope of it, but none of the determination to make that hope live.
Jena took out a Kleenex and blew the dust out. “So nothing that smells like money?”
Allie shook herself out of her memories. “No.”
Jena waved a hand toward the high windows that let in light on the far wall. “There’s no signs of forced entry. I didn’t even notice any marks in the dust until we disturbed it.”
Just as Allie’s nose was keener than normal even in human form, Jena’s eyes were hawklike even when she was wearing skin. Her visual acuity made her the perfect partner to search Joe’s childhood home, along with the school and the tire shop where he’d once worked. So far their searches had turned up nothing.
“Let’s get out of here,” Allie said, moving the boxes back where the current owners had placed them. “I’m trying to think where else he might have hidden something.”
Jena followed Allie when she walked down the narrow staircase. Josie was at work, borrowing salon space from Patsy on Main Street. Patsy might have shook her head at Josie’s newly purple hair, but she didn’t complain about the rent the vivacious stylist was bringing in from new young clients who used to travel to Indio or Palm Desert to make their appointments.
Yes, the town was changing. But as she locked up with the spare key Josie had loaned her, she thought that might not be a bad thing if it meant Josie Quinn and her small brood of snake shifters would have a safe place to be.
“So, where to next?”
Allie leaned against her minivan. “Ideas?”
“School locker?”
“Checked it.”
“Gym locker?”
“Joe hated sports.”
“Right.” Jena closed her eyes and said, “I’m probably going to regret going there, but… first place you had sex?”
“Ha!” Allie snorted. “Um… hmm. Hadn’t thought about that one.”
“Do I even want to ask?”
Allie cocked her head. “I thought for sure I’d told you and Ted that one.”
“Nope.”
“Huh. Well”—she opened her car door—“it’s not really that big a secret. Where did half the teenagers in the Springs lose it?”
“Ewww,” Jena said. “Not the old cave by the fresh spring.”
“It’s tradition,” Allie said. “Show some respect. Are you telling me you and Lowell never made out there?”
“Sure, we made out and carved our initials and everything, but we didn’t actually have sex there.”
“Well, we did.” Allie started the car as Jena buckled herself in. “And let me tell you, that blanket was not thick enough.”
“Rocks in your back?”
“So many bruises.”
SHE parked in the small lot by Springs Park and took the footpath cutting through the pools. Two of the smaller—and frankly, uglier—springs had been walled off and enclosed in the resort grounds.
The new wall that bordered the park had already been painted with the beginnings of a mural that Willow McCann, Alex’s sister and famed Southwestern artist, had created. Broken tile pieces made to resemble pottery shards gave way to Spanish-style blankets and subtle animal motifs. Wolf. Bear. Cougar and bobcat. Birds of all kinds. And hidden through the swirling designs were clever serpents and darting lizards.
It was a work of art that would have paid Willow tens of thousands of dollars in any major city and been celebrated with speeches and a festival. In Cambio Springs, the children ran tiny fingers over the polished clay and poked their fingers into the mouth of the bear while their mothers gossiped near the playground and the old people wandered back to the hidden spring that refreshed them.
The fresh spring would always be hidden.
Allie and Jena took the small footpath that led behind the mineral springs and past the wall of bougainvillea that had been planted as a precaution. Only residents could know this place existed.
Jena whispered, “Have you been here since—?”
“No.” Allie took a deep breath. “I need to bring Kevin here next moon night. Just him and me.”
Her friend nodded but said nothing more. She waited outside when Allie went into the small cavern where a sandstone bowl had been carved into the rock. The fresh spring held the sweetest water Allie had ever tasted. It was also the secret of their transformation. Years ago, her ancestors had followed a vision into the desert, only to find themsel
ves transformed by the water that had let them survive.
She dipped her head and reached for a gourd dipper one of the old women had set next to the basin. She lifted it to her mouth and drank, letting the water refresh her body first and then her soul. She tasted the earth on her lips and held the memory of her mother’s voice in her mind, letting it wrap around her.
Taste, baby girl. No sweeter water than this.
Will it make me a wolf like you?
It’ll make you whatever animal God put in you, Allison. But not for a long, long time.
Her mother had never seen her shift. It had been her poor father who’d helped her, then called her mother’s cousin to come over and talk Allie back into her human form.
Confusing. Scary. Somewhat painful. And natural as breathing once she got the hang of it.
Not unlike another rite of passage she’d experienced not far from here.
“You gonna bring Ollie here?” Jena asked, leaning against one of the sandstone walls that marked the mouth of the canyon.
“Do I look like I’m still sixteen?”
Jena’s eyes smiled. “I’m thinking about bringing Caleb here. Just to make out a little.”
“Weirdo.”
Jena walked back into the canyon and ducked under a low stone arch. Allie followed her until they stood at the mouth of a small black cave not ten feet off the main path. Taking out the flashlight she’d brought from the van, Allie clicked it on and scanned the cavern, running the light along the edges of the open space, making sure no creepy crawlies had made themselves at home.
“Anything?” Jena asked behind her.
“Nope. Doesn’t smell like anyone’s been here in ages.”
“Oh well.” Jena patted the graffiti-painted walls. “I guess all make-out spots lose their cool factor eventually.”
“Probably right about the time you discover your mom’s name or initials when you’re trying to feel up your girlfriend.”
“That might do it, yes.”
Allie walked around the cave, scanning the ground to see if any places looked dug up or disturbed. Meanwhile, Jena had her own flashlight out, peeking into the many nooks and crannies that kids had carved into the wall over the years.
“Careful,” Allie said, watching Jena put her hand into one. “I don’t even want to think about what sixteen-year-olds might have hidden back there.”
Jena pulled out a small vodka bottle. “Shocking.”
“That’s better than what I imagined.”
Allie froze when she heard footsteps outside. She snapped her fingers once at Jena, who also turned into a statue.
There.
She couldn’t smell in the still air of the cave, but she could hear when something crept closer.
Cat.
By the sound of the footsteps, not a big one. A bobcat, probably, but who would be creeping around without making themselves known? That just wasn’t polite, especially in a place with only one exit.
The hair on the back of Allie’s neck stood up, and she clicked off her flashlight. Something wasn’t right. Was it a wild bobcat? There were plenty around, but they were more than shy. And no shifter would be slinking around outside the cave without announcing their presence unless they were up to trouble.
In the shadows, Allie slipped out of her clothes and into her natural form. The quick ache and pop, the flip of her stomach, and Allie was on the ground, her paws silent in the cool sand.
“Allie?”
She hissed silently, and Jena shut off her light, but she didn’t shift. A bird in a cave was only asking for trouble.
Bobcats might be small, but they were some of the wiliest predators in the desert. In that, Allie’s fox and whoever was outside were evenly matched. She crept to the door and paused, her right paw lifted. Her nose twitched when the first scent hit her nose. In a heartbeat, Allie was sure it was the same cat she’d smelled outside the Cave. But there was something…
Wrong. This scent was wrong. It was a shifter, no doubt, but it didn’t hold the depth of scent Allie associated with their kind. Shifters, no matter their clan, smelled of the complex layers of human and animal, sand and water. This shifter, whoever he was—and she was fairly certain it was a male—smelled wrong. He was unwashed human and panicked animal. No depth. And no scent of water.
She poked her head out of the cave, wishing the sun was farther down. Her only comfort was that cat eyes were as sensitive to light as a fox’s. Both were working at a disadvantage in the afternoon glare.
Allie darted out and under a rock, crouching down so her ash-grey pelt blended into the brush.
A quiet snarl.
He wasn’t wild, but… he was. The shifter smelled more of the wildcats in the canyon than anyone she knew in the Leon or Vasquez clan. And she smelled fear. A lot of fear.
Allie sat forward and shouted an alarm. The shrieking cry echoed in the canyon, resembling a woman’s screams more than the call of a canid. She barked again and caught a shadow moving from the corner of her eye as the bobcat shrank back. He was crouched on an outcropping across from the cave, perched not far from the fresh spring. The cat’s face kept turning toward the spring before it looked away. Then back. Then away.
Allie watched the shifter struggle to keep his eyes on the cave opening three times before she barked again and jumped out into the canyon.
His form stuttered in the fading light, shimmering out of focus and then back. Allie barked again, louder, and the bobcat stumbled on four feet, lurching to the side while Allie jumped closer.
She had no desire to fight the small cat. She just wanted to know who it was. Had a new family moved to town and she didn’t know? If he was, then why did he smell so sick? Just then, the cat turned his face full toward her and let out a wracking shiver. Right before her eyes, he transformed into a young man.
No more than seventeen or eighteen, the teenager looked more like a man than a child. His dark hair was cropped close, and ominous tattoos marked his shoulders, arms, and back. Gothic lettering was scrawled on his throat.
One word: LOBO.
With a howl, Allie lunged forward and nipped at the back of the naked man’s ankle before she darted away. With a shiver and a groan, the man pulled his leg up and started shifting again, but not before Allie saw him spit yellow bile from his mouth. He sprang into his bobcat form and disappeared.
Jena stepped into the canyon two seconds after Allie gave a quick yip signaling all clear.
“Was that…?” Jena looked flabbergasted. “What was that?”
She shifted and rolled to sitting, holding up a hand for the clothes that Jena threw at her. “It’s a shifter.”
“I know that, but who? What was that on his throat? Did you see that?”
“Lobo,” she coughed out, her stomach still wobbling a bit from the two quick shifts. “It said Lobo on his throat.”
“The man who’s after you?” Jena’s eyes widened. “He has shifters? Like us?”
“I don’t know any more than you, Jena. Stop yelling.”
Allie was trying to sort through her memories of the young man while her head pounded. He had been young. Only a few years older than Kevin. But the scars on his body and his extensive tattoos spoke of a hard life.
“He calls himself Lobo,” Allie said. “Lobo.”
“Caleb said it was a nickname,” Jena said.
“Maybe it’s not.”
“So you’re saying this new gang leader—the one who probably murdered Joe—is a shifter?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Allie pointed the direction where the young bobcat had fled. “We know he has shifters.”
“But—”
“Jena?” A sleepy conversation from that morning filtered into the mass of confusion in her head, and Allie’s stomach rolled. “Where’s Ollie?”
“Caleb’s not supposed to know anything about it, but I think he and Alex were going into Palm Desert to follow up a lead on someone Alex found.”
“Someone to do with Lo
bo,” Allie said, jumping to her feet and throwing on her shirt. “Someone who might not be all human. I need a phone. Now!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
OLLIE TURNED THE RADIO UP and rolled the window down, enjoying the bite of creosote in the air. He glanced at Alex, who was drinking coffee and checking his phone.
“Work?”
“Everyone has excuses,” Alex muttered. “And I don’t give a shit about any of them unless Grandma died.”
Ollie smiled, once again reaffirming his belief that more employees just meant more headaches. One of his promoter friends in LA had come to him five years ago, wanting to open another location for the Cave in Coachella, capitalizing on the growing music scene in the desert and taking advantage of the festival traffic in the spring. Ollie had said no for all the reasons that were giving his friend grey hairs.
There was one Cave, and he ran it. Of course, he might be asking Jim to work a few more hours in the future. After all, time with Allie was going to be scarce enough as it was. She and the kids were a package deal, and he wouldn’t have it any different, but it did mean less time alone with her. At least they had their nights working together, even if he couldn’t coax her into his bed. Yet.
“This guy,” he said, turning his attention away from the tempting little fox and back to the goons who were threatening her. “He’s the one who searched Allie’s place?”
Alex tucked his phone away. “According to Cam. One of his dad’s people heard the guy talking about it.”
“Simon Ashford? Sounds like an accountant.”
“He might be,” Alex said. “The more I learn about this Lobo guy, the more I want to know. He’s not what we’ve seen before.”
“But old Simon likes his massages, huh?” Ollie cracked his knuckles.
“Try not to break anything that’ll make him yell too loud. I know the manager, but we don’t want panicked girls calling the cops.”
“I’ll be the soul of discretion.”
“Right,” Alex snorted. “Is it possible for you to be a little presentable? This is one of the most exclusive spas in the desert.”