Page 23 of A Pack of Lies and a Big Bad Wolf

We're in the grove behind the meeting building, five of us in a loose circle on the grass with our lunches spread between us — me, Rose, Amaryllis, Peyton, and Gemma.

I chew my chicken savagely.

“Can you at least tell me how the treatment of my brother is going?” I ask Amaryllis. “Is there any progress?”

She frowns. “I am working on some different angles,” she says carefully. “I am continuing to…evaluate.”

A sudden terrible suspicion flares up. “Is Kieran in any way preventing you from helping my brother access his wolf?”

Amaryllis hesitates. “No,” she says finally. “He is not preventing me.” There’s more to the story, I can tell, but I also don’t think she’s lying to me. So what could it be?

We hear footsteps thudding towards us, and I twist around to see Kieran stalking towards us.

His eyes land on me.

"You didn't come to my house last night."

The absolute nerve of this man. I glare at him with everything I've got. "You noticed?"

"None of us are speaking to you,” Rose snaps. She links her arm with mine.

Amaryllis, sitting on the other side of me, links her arm through my other arm. Gemma and Peyton link arms with each other and Rose.

"Oh, for fate’s sake!” Kieran shouts. “Peyton, Gemma, what is your beef with me?”

"Solidarity," Gemma says to her potato salad.

“Down with the man!” Rose yells.

Peyton pumps her fist in the air without turning around. "Preach."

There’s a long silence.

"Well," he says. "I'll leave you to your estrogen-fest, then. Some of us have work to do."

He stalks off. My wolf involuntarily lunges after him, almost making me shift, almost taking me with her.

"Don't you dare," Rose says.

"I wasn't going to."

"Your face was going to."

“What does that even mean?” I say, annoyed because she’s right.

I was absolutely going to. My face is a traitor and so is everything south of it. But I pick up my fork and eat Gemma's potato salad and sit with these women in the sunshine and pretend very hard that I'm not listening to his footsteps get farther away.

Amaryllis walks me back to my cabin in the late afternoon. We've spent the day together — she showed me the apothecary where Rose makes her potions, and the greenhouse where the healers grow their herbs, and I pretended to know what hushbell blossoms were for while she pretended not to notice I was pretending. It's been the first genuinely easy afternoon I've had since we arrived.

Then we come around the path to my cabin, and I stop walking.

There are boxes on my porch. Three of them, heavy cardboard, one partially open and showing a brass press I recognize because I used to own one almost that good. Beside the boxes sits a small bag from whatever passes for an electronics store in this part of Arkansas — inside it, a new phone, still in the packaging, a model roughly four generations newer than the one he murdered last night. And tucked under the phone, a folded piece of paper.

I open it. One line, in handwriting I don't recognize: Paid in full — Gary Kovacs. And a number, which is the number I owed, down to the last cent.

I stand there on my porch holding that piece of paper, and for about three seconds, every feeling I own tries to fire at once — relief, fury, gratitude, humiliation.

Then the fury wins.