“Happen to bring along twenty gallons of soapy water, did you?”

“Smart-ass,” I mumbled under my breath, but I reached into my pocket and said, “We need to set fire to the stand.”

His eyes rounded. “There’s someone in there.”

“I wasn’t suggesting we kill them,” I grumbled at him, shooting him a scowl that would have felled a lesser man. “You need to distract them. Get them out of there.”

“How am I supposed to do that? There’s one way in and one way out.”

“I’ll start the fire, you tell the server you can see smoke, then run around the side, and I’ll head in and grab them and get them out without standing in the blood.”

“Not a bad plan,” he mused. “Do you have a cigarette on you?”

I glowered at him. “No.”

He simply cocked a brow. “Don’t bullshit me. This is no time to be in denial about your habit.”

Though I carried on glowering at him, I reached into my coat and grabbed the packet of poison sticks that had been manhandled over time.

They were old. Not as old as my habit, but I had them in there just in case. Some days, you needed a crutch, and in our job, those days came often.

Still, I hated being dependent on human poison, so I went as long as I could before falling on my sword.

He flicked a glance at the packet, then instructed, “Make sure it’s the cigarette that starts it. Otherwise, the fire department will look for arson, and it needs to appear accidental.”

“This isn’t my first rodeo,” I muttered, flipping him the bird as he wandered around the side of the stall. Halfway around, when the back of the stand caved in to reveal the contents on sale, he shot me a look and grinned.

From that grin alone, I knew there was at least one woman manning the stand.

When his charm came on thick and fast in the next few minutes, I looked around for some paper that would get the fire going nicely.

If we were in the city, or maybe even a bigger town, I knew there’d be a major problem with our plan. But this was Drake’s Point County. The firemen were volunteers and weren’t exactly experts. On top of that, most of the town’s crimes were handled by the pack, leaving the sheriff and his two deputies to deal with the parking and speeding tickets, as well as domestic issues that were out of the pack’s reach.

If things came to a head, which I doubted, I knew Eli would smooth things over with the sheriff, who knew about us, as did all the sheriffs who served the county, but I preferred to keep things nice and simple.

Using the season to my advantage, I grabbed some of the leaves that had been tossed all over town, thanks to the nasty winds that had torn through the county, clumped them together, and tossed them on the bloodstain. When the area was covered with foliage, I grasped some more, checking they weren’t wet from the day before yesterday’s downpour, then lifted the lighter to them and waited, patiently, for them to catch on fire.

I rolled my eyes when I heard Austin charm the staff tending the stall. There were two of them, two females as luck would have it. I never understood why women always lifted their skirts for Austin. His charm wasn’t charming at all, but it always worked.

Gently blowing the lit leaves until the flame was stronger, I carefully placed it onto the pile of detritus I’d crafted and watched as the fire slowly began to grow. I fanned the flames until a mushroom cloud of smoke billowed up from the pile.

Eying it and trying not to cough, I reached for the door to the stand and opened it. As I peered through the gap I made, I saw my brother flirting with the women, and waited until I caught his eye. Nodding slowly, I opened it farther, smiling when the blaze caught the bottom edge of the particle board. With the lit cigarette still in hand, I set it off to the side, just out of reach of the fire, but close enough for it to appear to be the source of the flames.

As the edges of the door became charred, my brother yelled, “Smoke!” Before the women even knew what the hell was happening, he ran around the corner and I switched places with him.

Slipping out of my coat, I slammed it against the flames like I was trying to beat the fire out, but my shearling coat caught on fire too.

My one regret was the women’s fear. Their terror wasn’t my intention, and their screams of fright were real, so I stopped playing the hero and leaped over the fire to help them scramble over the counter to safety before I followed them.

I caught my brother’s eye, and saw he’d shifted and was running off to the woods. With him gone and the attendants thinking I was my brother, I dragged the women back as the flames tore through the cheap door and caught onto the rest of the painted particleboard that made up the stall.

Within seconds, someone appeared with a fire extinguisher, but even though the small blaze was quickly destroyed, I knew the combination of the leaves and my coat would scorch the grass, shielding the bloodstain from untrained eyes.

“Thank you for saving us,” one of the stall workers whispered, staring up at me with big blue eyes. She batted her lashes, making me want to laugh at the flirtatious move, before the other woman cuddled into me.

“You’re more than welcome,” I replied, but I wasn’t interested in the doe eyes she was shooting my way.

Austin liked to tumble anything in a skirt, but I didn’t.

Untangling myself from their clutches, I waited on the town’s one fire engine to appear, saw the sheriff bustling through the crowd that gathered in the aftermath, and disappeared through the throngs of people.

They recognized me, but most of them were pack, and if they did register who I was, they knew to ignore me.

Everyone ignored us.

That was what fear did to people.

What they didn’t, couldn’t understand, they didn’t trust.

Austin and I had long since come to terms with that fate when we were younger and excluded from every aspect of pack life for the simple fact that we were twins. Only Eli had ever stood up for us, only he’d ever had our backs.

It was why we were loyal to him.

Not the pack, never them. But Eli? He’d hold our loyalty until the day we died, even if that day came sooner rather than later because of the shit he had us doing.

When I rounded the crowd until I was at the back of the candy stall once more, I watched the one permanent firefighter poke through the mess I’d made with a stick. When he found the tiny butt of a cigarette, I saw him shake his head in irritation.

Knowing he credited that for the fire, I moved to the shadows, shifted too, then rushed off to find my twin.

He wasn’t far away, and as a pair, we dashed through the woods to the back of the carnival where the carnies lived in trailers.

Austin went one way, and I went the other, each of us seeking the unusual apple pie scent we’d discovered earlier.

It wasn’t much to go on, but over the stench of blood, we didn’t have much else on our side.

There was a ton of crap everywhere at the back, and I used that to my advantage. The fire hazard of all the boxes would have the council clamping down on the organizers, and to be fair, it was warranted. They didn’t give a damn about public safety—who on Earth used particle board to build stalls? Any health and safety inspector would have a field day when they were assigned to the carnival.

Then, I registered the likelihood of that ever happening—they’d just move on first. Faster than a squall until they were away from us, in another county, Mother, maybe another state.