“Carter, come on. We’re getting out of here.”
“Mom’s out there!”
“Don’t worry about your mom,” Will said. “She’s got a gun.”
“But not with her! She locks it away in the safe every time she comes back from her shift. She's out there, being eaten by wolves!” The boy was near hysterical, and in that state went running back out to the yard as fast as his legs would carry him.
Will went after him. Fortunately for him, there was no longer a brutal battle taking place on the lawn.
The entire vicious scene had evaporated. Maddox was not there. Lorien was not there. Ivan was not there. Candy was there, with a very strained expression on her face.
“A coyote,” she explained. “And two strays. Very strange. They’re gone. Thank you, sir, for coming to our aid.”
“Oh. Uh.” Will tried to play along as smoothly as humanly possible. “No problem. Glad you’re okay. Are all the dogs… are they all safely gone?”
“Safe as can be,” she replied.
“Right. Good. Okay. Bye then.”
“Are those my overalls?”
Will heard the guy asking the question as he walked away as swiftly as possible, trying to play it cool until the night enveloped him. It was going to be a very, very long walk back to the city.
Lora breathed a deep sigh of relief. Seeing William in her own home with her son and her husband had almost been more than she could bear. Two worlds had collided, two pasts and two presents. The secret she’d hoped to hide forever had just saved her little boy.
“Carter, go have a bath and go to bed," she said. He was babbling about wolves and a man fighting, though nobody was listening to him. Carter was almost always talking about someone fighting someone else, usually in a video game.
Soon the house was quiet. Chuck cracked a rare third beer for the evening. Lora had one too. She needed it.
They sat in silence, draining their cans. Hopefully, Chuck hadn’t seen anything and had already lost interest. Hopefully, another game would come on tv, or maybe just some people who had opinions that Chuck did not share. That would be a good distraction too.
“Lora. That young man. The one who came charging inside and swore at me…”
“Yes?”
“He looked a lot like Carter.”
“No, he didn’t,” Lora laughed uncomfortably. “I didn’t think he did, anyway.”
“He did, Lora. And he looked a lot like the pictures of your father when he was younger. I heard Ivan talk about a son. Are you hiding something from me? From us?”
She looked at Chuck. He’d basically laid out the truth for her. All she had to do was make the admission. All she had to do was Stop. Fucking. Lying.
Instead, she snorted into her beer.
“You think I have a secret son who saved Carter from a pack of wolves in our yard? I work in a supernatural division, and even I think that’s a stretch. It was a coyote and a couple of strays, and the man who helped looks like every other man his age. It’s the haircut.”
“Carter hasn’t stopped talking about him. They really could have been brothers,” Chuck said, irritatingly becoming observant for once.
“We were lucky a passerby noticed the danger Carter was in,” Lora said. “I was too focused on those wild beasts. We should focus on being grateful instead of accusing one another of secret families.”
“True,” Chuck said, guardedly.
Lora had not felt this bad in many years. In as many years as it had been since William was born. She was not only lying to her husband. She was now actually gaslighting him too. She was a dishonest, terrible person, and nothing could change that.
Chapter Eleven
“Why is it that I can rule over a million vampires with hardly an incident of concern, and yet the supernaturals I invite into my own home cause more trouble than the rest of the city put together?”
“Sounds more like a you problem than an us problem,” Lorien said, making himself immediately unpopular with that unerring instinct he had for making a bad thing worse.
Maddox stalked back and forth in front of Henry, Will, and Lorien who were all lined up in his office. Will and Lorien were more or less unscathed. The same could not be said for Henry.
“There is not one of you, not a single one of you who was obedient today. Henry, you allowed your personal agenda to supersede the task at hand. You put my boy in harm’s way, and you have very possibly destroyed one of my favorite agent’s marriages. To call your short tenure here a disaster would be to understate it.”
“Where is Ivan?” Henry was like a dog with a bone. A battered, bruised, beat up dog with a bone. Maddox had whipped his fucking ass out there in Candy’s backyard, swiftly and decisively, leaving no illusion of parity between them. Maddox was king, and all knew it.