Moon Stalked

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

“You’re blushing.”

Justice was right where I’d left him two blocks over. And still my breath caught in my throat when he stepped out of the shadows.

Because my nearly-a-lawyer cousin—double cousin, actually, the son of my father’s brother and mother’s sister—looked just like his dying twin. Both were olive-skinned with straight dark hair and eyes like wells of understanding. But only Justice peered at me as if I was dog s**t stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

I coughed to clear my throat of the bitterness of his expression, then attempted to explain my hot cheeks away. “I ran here.”

Bastion would have known that cough was an evasion. Justice simply didn’t care.

Well, he didn’t care about my emotional volatility. He did care about the mission that had drawn us back into the close proximity we’d eschewed for years.

His eyes slid over me, ignoring my nakedness. “You don’t have it.”

I hugged my pelt closer to my chest before I shook my head in deflated confirmation. I didn’t have it, so we should....

My hand went for the door of the car Justice had been leaning against, but he pushed between me and the metal. “You realize we’re on a deadline. A permanent deadline.”

I clenched my fists, then relaxed them. Reminded myself that it was Justice’s brother who lost a little more will to live with each passing hour. Plus, Justice was skipping a very important capstone seminar to help us hunt for Bastion’s pelt. His surliness deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Still, his ailing brother and I were closer than siblings. We’d been a family of two for the past few years, out earning cash to pay for the others’ education. It wasn’t as if I was likely to forget that our seven-day window had already dwindled down to just a hair more than five.

Bastion’s decline was a pang in my gut that I ached to mitigate. And I had a temporary solution right there in my arms.

Lifting my shed skin until it nearly touched Justice’s nostrils, I raised my eyebrows at the exact same time. “We can stand here all night, or I can use my pelt to ease your brother’s pain.”

Justice’s nostrils flared. “It’s not a pelt. It’s a wolfsfell.”

This argument was cozy as a well-worn blanket. So I baited him, hoping for something lost a decade earlier. “Semantics. If you’d chosen the name ‘Fred’ instead of ‘Justice’ when you were a teenager, would you have been any less likely to study law?”

For one moment, I thought I’d hooked my cousin into his favorite pastime—arguing words and their meanings. My shoulders loosened. Maybe our relationship wasn’t irredeemably broken.

But then Justice’s eyes narrowed. “You’re talking hospice care.” He turned away from me to peer up at the Smythewhites’ rooftop, barely visible as it towered above nearby buildings. “My brother can handle a little ache here and there. What he needs is his own wolfsfell.”

I followed Justice’s gaze, wishing it had been as easy as I’d hoped to swipe back the decade-old stolen object. “I couldn’t get inside the house,” I admitted after a long moment. “There was a guard dog....”

And a man. Tall, dark, handsome....

Irrelevant, I decided, leaving the guard dog as the only road block worth mentioning aloud.

“I’ll research it.” Justice pulled out his phone as if he planned to dive into the issue here and now, after midnight, on a darkened street corner.

He still hadn’t moved out of my way or offered his car keys.

“Bastion needs....”

At his brother’s name, my cousin glanced up. For half a second he was the quarter of our pack he’d been in our youth. The strong, silent type with an emphasis on the first adjective. The one we all sought out when we needed an ear that would never retell our secrets...even if he might pick our grammar apart.

But that familiarity must have been a trick of the light. Because I shifted to my other foot and Justice’s listening glance turned into a scowl.

“We’re low on cash,” he told me. “Make yourself useful.”

He held out his hands, waiting for me to drop my clothes into them. Then he turned resolutely away as I slung my pelt across my shoulders and fell onto four paws.

***