Bayou Blues (7 page)

She turned towards me, carrying a huge metal soup pot filled with water, and beamed at me. Her once-dark hair was streaked through with silver, and there were lines around her eyes and mouth, but it was easy to see what a knockout she’d been in her youth.

“Genie, my beautiful darlin’. You’ve been gone too long.” She set the pot on an already red element and pointed me towards a jar on the counter filled with ladles, spatulas and spoons. “Get yourself something to stir with and you can mind my grits while I start the bread.” Lina refused to let Callum buy a bread machine for her. She firmly believed everything tasted better fresh and made by hand.

I obeyed her directions and grabbed a wooden spoon from the jar, returning to the island to stand next to her. Werewolves didn’t wear perfume because our sense of smell was too strong, and we’d be overwhelmed by the scent all day long. But for as long as I’d known her, Lina wore a perfume that smelled of lemons and sugar. I leaned against her, breathing her in, and planted a kiss on her cheek.

For a little girl growing up with no mother and only Amelia to turn to inside the pack, having Lina around had been a godsend. She was the mother I’d never had, kissing my scrapes better before I had werewolf healing power, making sure I ate right—her number-one priority for everyone in the pack—and helping me grow up to be a good woman.

I owed a lot of what was normal about me to Lina.

Passing me a heavy bag of corn grits, she held up four fingers to indicate four cups needed to be added to the pot. I fumbled around for the one-cup measure, then waited for the water to start bubbling. All the while Lina was moving around with the grace of a much smaller, much younger woman. She added flour and a half dozen other ingredients to an old ceramic bowl and mixed them until they were dough, then set about kneading the bread on the big slab counter. As she worked she hummed old show tunes from
Singin’ in the Rain
and
Damn Yankees
. “Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets)” had been our unofficial theme song when I was younger, when I had no idea what the suggestive lyrics meant.

The pot began to steam and bubble, reminding me of a very different maternal figure, my great-grandmother. I wondered if she was out in the bayou right now cooking up some sort of potion. Seemed like her idea of a fun weeknight activity.

“How’s that handsome man of yours?” Lina asked as she punched the bread dough.

I spilled four cupfuls of grits into the pot and immediately began to stir as the water hissed around them. I hadn’t discussed Cash much with anyone in the pack except Lina and Magnolia, Amelia’s daughter. Magnolia and I were about the same age, and I was fairly certain she had her eye set on Ben, but my clueless brother hadn’t noticed.

Magnolia was interested in gossip about living with a guy, because her life was the epitome of sheltered here with the pack. Lina wanted to know about Cash for entirely different reasons.

“He’s good,” I replied, not really sure what to say. For the briefest flicker of a moment I wanted to ask Lina what she knew about Wilder, but the older woman was far too astute, and she’d start asking questions I didn’t want to answer. I was only curious.

Right.

“Good?” Lina snorted and flipped her dough. “Good is how we describe the weather. Good is a word for a book you liked but kept forgetting to finish. It’s not how you talk about a beautiful man you’re in love with.”

I’d once shown her a photo of Cash and me on my phone, and she hadn’t stopped calling him handsome since. I was starting to think Lina had a crush on my boyfriend.

The grits had begun to thicken as I stirred, so I turned the heat down and removed the spoon, going to one fridge to collect the butter and garlic, then getting paprika from the pantry. It was all a stall tactic to keep from talking about things with Cash, but it didn’t matter how long I put it off, Lina would circle back around again like a hungry vulture.

“He’s been really busy with school, and it’s making him kind of a grouchy dick,” I announced finally.

In spite of my being twenty-one, I half-expected Lina to scold me for my language. When she didn’t smack me with a spatula, I let out a sigh of relief.

“Is he still treatin’ you good?”

“Good enough. He isn’t being mean to me or anything. Just aloof and short-tempered. I don’t think all this recent werewolf media attention is helping.”

Lina made a thoughtful mumbling sound. “You think he’s bothered by it?”

“I’m not sure.” I sliced cubes of butter into the thickened grits and seasoned them with some nearby Australian pink river salt. Only the best ingredients in Lina’s kitchen. As I was stirring in the paprika, I said, “I think me being a public figure bothers him. We used to joke about the whole princess thing a lot, make fun of it. But I think he’s started to realize I
am
a princess and the whole world knows it.” Returning the butter to the fridge, I grabbed some aged white cheddar and found the cheese grater on a hook next to the island.

“He doesn’t like that you’re powerful?”

I grated a healthy dose of cheese into the pot, more than she normally might, but I liked my grits cheesy. Sometimes when I made them in the city I’d cheat and use Velveeta because I liked how smooth it was, and I secretly thought grating was a pain in the ass.

“I think he didn’t know what he was signing up for when he started dating a werewolf. Now he’s learning what it really entails, and he’s not such a big fan of having an exotic supernatural girlfriend.” I bit my lip. This was the first time I’d said what I was feeling out loud, and voicing my concerns felt like a betrayal to Cash.

“Maybe he’s under a lot of stress. With law school.” Lina was playing devil’s advocate. She would probably never tell me outright to end things with Cash, especially considering how long he and I had been living in sin together. I think she was hoping we’d get married and she’d be able to babysit our adorable mixed-race, potentially werewolf children.

That was something he and I had never discussed. He’d teased me a few times about the idea of getting married, but we hadn’t once had a serious sit-down discussion about it. I knew he wanted kids since he was from a big family, and I did too, but if we ever planned on having any, we’d need to talk about the possibility of them having werewolf genetic markers.

Not just anyone could be turned into a wolf, in spite of what horror movies had led the world to believe. A person needed to meet certain genetic requirements in order for them to become a werewolf after being bitten by one. Children with two werewolf parents were guaranteed to carry the DNA, but it wasn’t always a sure bet with only one parent. It happened more often than not, but not in every case. Rarer still were the outliers, the people with no werewolf family connections at all who carried the right DNA. Those ones were the odd cases who became weres after being bitten by a rogue, or by accident.

I wondered if Cash understood the likelihood that our kids would have my werewolf genes. And if they did, I wanted them to be a part of the pack. The choice would ultimately be theirs, that was how the Awakening ceremony worked, but I would never deny them the opportunity to be a part of this world I loved so much.

Realizing I’d been ignoring the grits, I quickly turned the heat to its minimum setting and stirred the thick light yellow mash until all the cheese and butter were completely blended. Once it was all mixed, I sampled it.

“
Yum,
” I said, unable to stop myself. The real cheese was much better than Velveeta.

“Don’t you forget who taught you how to cook.”

“Never ever.”

She had finished folding the bread dough back into the bowl to let it rise, so she came over and bustled me out of the way, sampling the grits to make sure I’d done all right. Her approving smile was worth all the compliments in the world.

“Good job, baby.”

“So, what do you think I should do about Cash?”

“You got any better offers?”

I thought of Wilder and then immediately banished those full frowning lips from my mind.
Bad, bad Genie.

“No.”

“Then give him time. And you
talk
to him. Lord almighty, girl. All the problems in the world can be solved by talking them over. Either he can love you for who you are, or he thinks you’re going to get in his way. Doesn’t matter. Either way you know.”

Easy for her to say it didn’t matter. As far as I was concerned it mattered a whole lot.

“Now go on. I’ve got work to do.” She kissed me on the cheek and swatted my butt like she had when I was little. “Check the drink fridge. I hid something in there for you I didn’t want those boys down at The Den getting their hands on.”

The Den was our on-site bar. After too many brawls had started thanks to high-strung werewolves mingling with townsfolk, Callum decided it was smarter and safer to build a bar on his property where the shifters could drink in private. And that had been
before
the secret came out. I had been too young when I left to spend any real time there, and since returning from the swamp I hadn’t taken much interest. Technically, at twenty-one, I was only just
now
legally allowed to be in there, but that hadn’t stopped Ben from going years earlier.

I opened the fridge and pushed aside a carton of orange juice to find a band-new six pack of Abita Strawberry Lager hiding at the back.

“Oh, Lina, you’re an
angel
,” I squealed, grabbing a bottle of my favorite beer. I kissed her again and made a dash for the kitchen door with a bottle in hand before she could shoo me out.

I leaned my face against the wet tile in the shower, letting the hot water beat down my back. The still-cold bottle of Abita was clutched in one hand, the bottle’s surface now beaded with sweat from the steamy bathroom. The cool beer was a perfect complement to the shower, but it did make my head a bit swimmy.

Now that I was home, I felt safe enough to let my guard down.

How sad was it, though, that my guard had to be up at all? I was supposed to be living a nice, normal life, going to school, hanging out with friends. Yet none of those aspirations seemed to be panning out for me. If I couldn’t even drive home without fear because some psychos wanted to kill me, I couldn’t qualify my life as normal.

After what had happened in New York, with the dead coming to life and the world on the edge of complete destruction, I thought I had made it through the worst the universe could throw at me. I thought I was
done
with the monsters and the madness.

As much as I could be done when I was a werewolf myself.

The last thing I expected was to be confronted by monsters of the human variety. No matter how much I thought I understood the depths people could sink to, there would always be another psycho crawling out of the woodwork to remind me how terrible things could get.

I took another sip of the strawberry-flavored beer, smiling at the taste of summer on my tongue. This little reprieve couldn’t last long. The shower was one of the only places on the grounds I could get any real privacy, so I did most of my best thinking there. With all the male pack members in and out of the house at any given time, using the other bathrooms to clean up after runs, Callum had insisted I get my own private bathroom.

It wasn’t huge by any standard, an en suite with a tub-shower combo, but to me it was heaven. The one place I was guaranteed to have me-time, for however long the hot water lasted.

Tipping my head back, I let the water course through my hair.

What would a queen do?

While I wasn’t gunning to take over the throne the way Ben was, I still tried to imagine what Callum or Secret would do in my shoes. Okay…maybe not Secret. My sister wasn’t much for subtlety or politics, and her solution would probably be to meet the Church of Morning head-on, guns blazing.

As tempting as that might be, it wasn’t going to solve our problem. Killing a bunch of humans, however awful they were, would only succeed in making us look like homicidal lunatics.

But all the same, we couldn’t leave Hank to get killed. It didn’t matter how I felt about his opinions or his personality. It didn’t matter whether or not he was good person. He was pack and that was it, end of story. And he was Wilder’s brother.

Back to Wilder again.

I’d made it through most of the shower not thinking about him, but with a teeny beer buzz going, my internal musings circled back in his direction. I wanted to know more about him. Where he’d been for the last several years, why Ben hated him and what he was really like.

Yet every internal alarm bell I had was ringing with warning, telling me it was a bad idea to spend any more time with him than I absolutely had to.

And if common sense told me to do something, I naturally wanted to do the exact opposite. Go figure.

Of course, following our earlier meeting with Callum, I didn’t believe for a second Wilder was going to hold back and wait for the pack to act. I might not know the guy well, but I had a nagging suspicion he was already back at the garage packing a bag to chase Church members down on his own.

Or with you
.

On a scale of one to “let’s do tequila shots!” it was the worst idea I could have had in the given circumstances. Run off with a complete stranger to save his racist brother from crazy people?

Where do I sign up?

I shut off the water and the air from outside seeped past the shower curtains and dimpled my skin with goose bumps. I wrapped myself in a soft towel and took another sip of beer.

Maybe the idea wasn’t as hopeless as I was thinking. During my time in the city I’d made connections with the type of individuals whose special skills would put Liam Neeson to shame. I knew Callum didn’t want anyone going after the Church for taking Hank, but he probably also thought there was nothing I could do.

I felt duty bound in two different directions. On the one hand I wanted to obey Callum, but on the other I knew a member of my pack was in mortal peril. If it was in my power to help Hank, wasn’t it my job as a leader of the pack to do that? Callum had said he would try to help Hank, but I knew his greater fear was protecting our public image. Hank might be dead before Callum had a chance to do anything diplomatic to save him.