The shaking wolf—Lucan—stammers my name on a panted whisper. He draws his wrists closer to his chest, protectively and submissively, projecting the strange impression that he’s more beaten dog than man. “Su-susan.”
“Good,” Cauley says, and without releasing the man’s nape, his other hand gruffly pets the top of the werewolf’s head, mussing the thick hair between his rapidly changing ears. They aren’t a man’s ears anymore. They’re furry and triangle-shaped, and they’re moving—sliding higher up on his skull. “For the foreseeable future, Susan is your alpha. Repeat after me.”
“S-s-susan is my alpha,” the trembling man whispers.
“MOM! Can we see him?” Maggie, my six-year-old, shouts excitedly from the living room where she is not supposed to be. She was told that she was to wait in her room until Cauley gave me the a-okay.
I expect that her older sister at least obeyed the directive. Charlotte is fourteen, and she is, in a word, dependable. Capable too. She wanted to oppose this plan to bring a werewolf stranger into our house for the purpose of babysitting Maggie—yes, that’s what this Deek guy is here for, and I know how crazy that sounds—but Charlotte is enrolled in advanced courses in summer school and thus can’t babysit her little sister herself.
Just how, exactly, did we arrive at this moment, where we’ve elected to have a shapeshifter watch over my six-year-old?
The day before yesterday, the pub was uncharacteristically dead, so Cauley let me head home early. Normally, I always opt to stay for my full shift because I need the paycheck. I’m a single mom with two kids: money is always tight. Because it’s almost Labor Day though—directly after which school begins—it means that Maggie is stuck with a babysitter during the day hours, and she’s miserable.
We’ve had some terrible babysitters.
Being the child of divorced parents myself, I remember all too well how some babysitters acted once my mom had to leave for work. Some were great, but most sitters were hell. And if even half of what Maggie was reporting could be believed, I knew she’d appreciate the rescue.
I pulled up in front of our townhouse, parked at my spot at the curb, grabbed my purse, locked up the car, and groaned as I made my feet take my weight for the two dozen or so steps of sidewalk it takes to make it to the house.
I wasn’t quiet when I unlocked the door. But apparently, the girl I was paying my hard-earned dollars to watch Maggie couldn’t hear me over the blaring TV. I walked in to find the kitchen a mess (typical—sitters don’t clean up nowadays, even though I distinctly remember doing dishes and wiping down counters every day when I was a babysitter myself), there were kale chips spilled out on the floor—what looked like darn near the full bag of them (just what the heck had happened in here? Wasting food? Not in my house, heck no!), and the sitter, Bella, was parked comfy as you please watching television and eating a pan of macaroni and cheese. Seriously, straight out of the pan. Which wouldn’t bother me (one less dish to wash later)—but it begged the question: what was Maggie eating?
Maggie was nowhere to be seen.
Maggie had been claiming that Bella would lock her in her room without lunch. Knowing that Maggie can exaggerate details from time to time, I gave Bella the benefit of the doubt and asked for her version of events, which never ended with Maggie going hungry.
I wasn’t sure what to believe.
But when I marched to Maggie’s room, found a chair wedged under the handle so she couldn’t leave her room, and found her inside, asleep with tears dried on her face, without so much as a bottle of water as Bella sputtered behind me that she’d locked Maggie in for just two minutes—
I. Was. Livid.
Let me mention another point: Bella isn’t a kid. Well, she isn’t a young kid, at any rate. She’s twenty-freaking-one. There’s no excuse for this. I’m paying her to walk Maggie to the park once or twice a week, make sure she isn’t kidnapped, feed her when she’s hungry, and prevent her from burning the house down. That’s all I want. A pet sitter is expected to do better. And Maggie is a good kid, I swear—this is not a difficult job.
Unable to trust that Bella would do a better job in the future—and also very concerned that she might act out some form of misdirected retaliation on Maggie—I fired her on the spot. It left me in a lurch, but I didn’t see how Bella was an option anymore anyway. It seemed we were already in a lurch.
I was fuming about how I’d essentially been paying a girl to treat Maggie the way she did when I went into work the next day. Cauley had taken one look at me, pulled me aside, and asked, “Sue, what’s wrong?”
I’d told him. I’d shared too that in order for me to come into work, Charlotte skipped a full day of heavy-homework-loaded classes to watch Maggie herself since there’s no babysitters available on short notice. As it was, we’d had a heck of a time getting Bella. And since that turned out so well, I didn’t know what in the world we were going to do to make it another week until school started.
(But even then, although the school would be watching Maggie ‘til 3pm, the junior high didn’t release their kids until 3:35. This meant that Maggie would be stepping off the bus at our house before Charlotte’s bus ever arrived. Sure, Maggie was six and she could become a latchkey kid. But lost keys, bus delays, and she was so outgoing and extroverted that talking to strangers was a real concern.)
Cauley had let me vent. I didn’t even know how badly I’d needed to until I felt the prick of tears as I wrapped up how frustrated and out of options I was feeling.
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” I’d groaned, wiping at my face, embarrassed that I’d just blurted out all of the day's events to one of my bosses. How professional.
Cauley had searched both of my eyes, his face uncharacteristically serious. “Give me Bella’s last name and I’ll take care of her. In the meantime, what about your cheater fleabag ex? Jillian, right?”
I laughed a little. “You’re terrible—but I appreciate the support. My ex-husband is Julién, and he works fourteen-hour shifts. He really can’t help watch Maggie—” I’d started to say.
But Cauley was too busy to really hear the whys of it. He was shaking his head. “That was your first clue that he was a gobshite.” He made a face. “‘Julién.’”
Then he’d taken me by the shoulders, looked deep into my eyes, and said the most attractive thing a woman raising two kids on a shoestring paycheck could ever hear: “Swayt hart, don’t you worry anymore.”
He’d searched my face with determination, “You have me.”
My heart had lurched, desperate to have someone who I could truly depend on.
He’d continued, all uncharacteristic seriousness. “And I’m going to make this problem disappear.”
I’d been so overcome with how incredible that would be—it was such a beautiful fantasy—my mouth ignored my brain (which was yelling something I couldn’t make out at the time), and what came out of my mouth had been a heartfelt, “Thank you, Cauley.”
Thank you? What I should have said was, You’re very sweet, but this isn’t your problem. You employ me, or your Pack does, and therefore I’ve been keeping you firmly at arm’s length where I think you should continue to stay. No, I don’t believe I can accept any help from you although I appreciate the offer immensely. Oh, and I need to get back to work now. Excuse me.