Moon Dance (4 page)

Dana squeezed her eyes shut.
“Please don’t throw things.”

“
What?” said
Avery.

“
Not you. Piper,” she said.
“She’s destroying the living room.” When it came down to it, Dana
still hadn’t gotten the dishes from breakfast into the dishwasher,
and it was already time for lunch. She’d spent most of the morning
on the phone with Avery.

Avery chuckled. “Tell her
Daddy loves her.”

It wasn’t funny, at least
Dana didn’t think so. “Well, you can tell her yourself how much
Daddy loves the mess she’s made.”

“
Oh come on, Dana, she’s a
kid.”

Piper perked up.
“Daddy?”

Dana sighed. “Look, Avery, I
had a thought.”

“
Daddy on phone?” said
Piper, crawling onto the couch and reaching up for the phone. “I
wanna talk. I wanna talk.”

“
Oh, I can hear her,” said
Avery, and Dana could hear the smile in his voice. “Hey
Pipers.”

Sighing again, Dana relinquished the
phone to Piper.

Piper sat down on the couch,
holding the phone to her face, grinning like a loon. “Hi,
Daddy.”

Dana got up and began
picking up all the coasters that Piper had tossed around the room.
She stacked them back into their container and then placed them up
on the breakfast bar, out of Piper’s reach.

“
When you coming home?”
Piper was saying.

Dana went into the kitchen
and began shoving dishes into the dishwasher. Avery could go on his
she’s-a-kid spiel all he wanted. The fact of the matter was that if
the house was messy when Avery got home, he’d flip out. He hated it
when the house was disorderly, and he blamed Dana, not Piper for
the state of it, which was rich, considering Piper was the source
of all the mess.

“
No,” said Piper. “Mommy not
playing with me. She in the kitchen cleaning up
breakfast.”

Don’t tell him that. Jesus,
that’s the last thing I need.
She could
just hear Avery when he got home, scolding her about not getting
anything done before noon, when—as Dana knew full well—she was
supposed to be making lunch.

Hell, before this whole baby
thing, Dana had cooked a meal once every two weeks. She’d lived on
frozen meals and takeout. But now that she was a stay-at-home mom,
she supposedly had so much more time to prepare food.

“
Mommy,” called
Piper.

“
What?” said Dana,
exasperated.

“
Daddy says you behind
schedule.” Except she didn’t really pronounce schedule properly.
She couldn’t say the “sk” sound.

Dana rolled her eyes.

Piper laughed loud and
bright.

Dana stalked back into the
living room. She held out her hand. “Give me the phone.”

“
No,” said Piper. That was
her new favorite word.

“
Piper Alice Brooks, give
your mother the phone.”

Piper just laughed again.

Dana reached down and
snatched the phone out of Piper’s grasp. The toddler promptly burst
into wailing tears.

Dana walked away.
“Avery?”

“
Why’d you take the phone
from her, babe?”

“
I need to tell you
something,” she said. “I had a thought. About what Cole said about
all of us being in danger.”

Piper, still crying, was
trailing after her. “Want to talk to Daddy! Want to talk to
Daddy!”

“
Why are you bringing that
shit up?” Avery sounded annoyed.

“
Because maybe
this
is what he was
talking about. Maybe whoever attacked the SF out west is going to
attack us here.”

“
Daddy!” Piper
screamed.

Dana rounded on her.
“Quiet.”

“
Don’t yell at her,” said
Avery.

Dana sucked in air to keep
from yelling at
Avery
. “This is important, okay? And she’s so loud, I can’t even
think.”

“
Well, then comfort her or
something.”

“
She’s only screaming
because she wants to get her way.”

“
You didn’t even let her say
goodbye to me,” said Avery.

Okay. Okay, fine.
Dana handed the phone back to Piper. “Talk to
Daddy if you want. When you’re done, hang up. I don’t need to say
goodbye to him.”

Piper hiccuped, cradling the big phone
in her tiny hand. Her face was red and there was a tendril of snot
running out of her nose.

Great. Should she go get a
tissue now and start the wrestling match that it would take to wipe
Piper’s face, or should she just let it go?

Maybe she’d let it go. There
were dishes, after all.

Dana went back into the
kitchen and continued loading the dishwasher, listening to Piper’s
quavery voice on the phone with Avery. “Mommy took the phone from
me, and I want to talk to you.”

Dana banged a plastic bowl
against the counter. It was always like this. It was always Avery
and Piper against her. Avery gave into every single one of Piper’s
whims, and she always looked like the bad guy. And no matter what
happened, she was never good enough. Never patient enough, never
clean enough, never “on schedule” enough.

It was going to drive her
insane.

She hadn’t planned to have
children. It was very rare for werewolves to conceive, and it
wasn’t something she’d spent much time worrying about. None of her
former co-workers had any children, so none of them understood. But
when everyone found out she was pregnant, they were all so excited
for her, because it was such a big deal for there to be tiny
werewolf babies, and they all said, “Oh, you
have
to stay home and take care of
the baby.”

Dana didn’t really want to
stay home. She had liked her job as the Pack Liaison Branch head.
Sure, it would have been a tough job to do with a small child,
considering it took a lot of travel, but she could have found ways
to make it work. The novelty of her child made it easy to find
willing babysitters.

But after the fuss everyone
made, she felt guilty doing anything except staying home. It wasn’t
as if she and Avery couldn’t afford it, after all. The SF took care
of them. And she did want to spend time with her daughter. She
wanted to be a good mother.

But this…

Twenty-four hours a day and
seven days a week with a little being who couldn’t have a proper
conversation, who threw things and made messes, who screamed
anytime she didn’t get her way…

Well, it was harder than she
thought it was going to be. Sometimes, Dana wished that she’d never
gotten pregnant with Piper. Sometimes, she wished the little girl
had never been born.

And then she felt horribly
guilty for thinking that. What kind of mother was she, anyway?
Mothers were supposed to love their children.

But… hell, she
did
love Piper. More than
life, more than anything on earth.

Still, she didn’t know who
she was anymore. She never saw anyone besides Avery and Piper. She
never left the apartment except to go grocery shopping, and that
was a highly difficult task to do with a two-year-old. She felt
like she didn’t matter.

And the worst of it all was
that…

When Cole had called her
yesterday, she’d had this memory, a flash of what it had been like
with him. Cole wasn’t exactly boyfriend material, and she’d always
known that. But Cole had been utterly obsessed with her. When she
was in the room with Cole, she knew he wasn’t paying attention to
anything besides her. She remembered the way he would suck in
breath at the sight of her naked skin, the way his voice sounded
when he called her “beautiful.” Cole made her feel… important and
cherished and special.

And right now, she felt like a
glorified maid.

No, not even a glorified
one. A maid who really ought to be fired because she was doing such
a terrible job, one that her employers kept on because they didn’t
have anyone else to fill her position.

She wasn’t sexy Dana Gray
anymore.

Instead, she was just Mommy. She
showered every three days, kept her hair in a sloppy bun, and was
usually wearing stained clothes and picking up after her
toddler.

Dana shoved the rest of the
dishes into the dishwasher and closed it. She took a deep
breath.

“
Mommy?” Piper was back in
the living room, hanging up the phone.

“
Yes?” Her voice
shook.

“
I hungry.”

Of course she was.

* * *

After Avery hung up the
phone with his daughter, he smiled to himself for several minutes,
thinking about how adorable she was and how much he missed her. He
couldn
’t understand why Dana didn’t feel
grateful to be able to spend so much time with the little
girl.

But thinking of Dana
reminded him of what she’d said about Cole. Much as he hated to
admit it, she might be right. However, he wasn’t convinced that
Cole knew anything about the massacre out west. Still, he did have
Dana’s cell phone, and he’d been planning on having it checked out.
Her theory was as good an excuse as any.

He really wanted that bastard locked
up.

So Avery popped in to the IT
office and went over to Jeff Moore’s desk. “Hey, buddy.”

“
Brooks,” said Jeff. “How
are you?”

“
Well, you know, reeling,”
he said. “And you?”

“
Yeah, just wishing I had
something to focus on other than the attack out west,
man.”

“
Might have something for
you, then,” said Avery, pulling Dana’s phone out of his pocket. “It
might be connected, I’m not sure, but even if it’s not, it’s a
lead.”

“
Lead on what?”

“
Cole Randall.”

Jeff raised his eyebrows. “I
thought he was dead.”

“
You and me both,” said
Avery. “But I talked to him yesterday. He called my wife on her
phone. I know it’s a long shot, but maybe you could trace the
number, see if you can get anything on it?”

“
This the phone you spoke to
him on?”

Avery nodded.

Jeff held out his hand for
it. “What did he say?”

Avery handed him the phone.
“He said that we were all in danger, and that we should get out of
the SF headquarters.”

Jeff’s lips parted. “You
don’t think…?”

“
I don’t know,” said Avery.
“Maybe he’s connected to that madness out west. Maybe the people
doing it are planning on doing it again. I can’t be sure. But it
seems like something we should check out.”

“
Definitely,” said Jeff.
“I’ll get right on it. Let you know if I find anything.”

* * *

It was easier to be a man on
the run when everyone in the world was convinced you were dead.
Cole had done it the other way, in which the SF had known he was
out there and had actively hunted him. This way was definitely
preferable. After he
’d escaped from the SF
the first time, he’d gone into hiding with Enoch Borden and his
group of werewolves. Enoch and the others had even been
instrumental in getting him out, talking to him through the walls
using their wolf hearing.

Back then, he’d been on
board with everything that Enoch and the others thought.

It was partly the
discussions he’d had with Enoch and others like him that had driven
him to attempt to create a pack in the first place. Creating the
pack had led to some failures—certain wolves who wouldn’t submit.
He’d had to kill those wolves so that they wouldn’t be able to
identify him, and because of that, he’d been dubbed a werewolf
serial killer.

Once Cole had a pack, he’d
intended to use it against his father, James David Hadley, who ran
a cult-like farm and preyed on young women.

But after Dana
Gray…

Well, everything had been confusing
after Dana.

Anyway, his father was dead
now, so he didn’t need a pack for that reason. And his other
reasons, the reasons that tied him to Enoch and the others, those
reasons didn’t seem to make nearly as much sense. Cole was no
longer sure that werewolves were some kind of superior race or that
they should wipe out humanity.

He wasn’t nearly as bothered
by killing as “normal” people might be, that was true. More often
than not, Cole saw death as part of the cycle of nature. If
werewolves killed according to their instincts, then that was what
nature dictated. He knew that most people saw it as a tragedy, and
Cole wasn’t denying that death was painful.

But lots of things were
painful.

No matter what happened, life was
pain.

What was the point in trying
to avoid the pain? Trying to stop the pain from happening? Nothing
would ever make everything okay. So there didn’t seem to be much
reason to try, at least Cole didn’t think so.