“I’d appreciate that.”
“Go on, then. I’ll catch up.”
The moment Mel’s feet touched the grass in the square, Jana felt the change in him, as if he’d been bored before and now he wasn’t. She understood the feeling.
“We’re still walking,” she told him when she felt him gather himself for something a little more speedy. One ear swiveled back at the sound of her voice, but his attention was still on something ahead of them.
A moment later, Barb Debany and her blue-roan gelding, Rowan, cut across the square and jumped the little creek.
“They let you out of the corral,” Barb said, turning Rowan to walk beside Mel.
“Tobias Walker has a different opinion about how a person should learn,” Jana replied.
Barb admired Mel. “What happened to the bay?”
“Tobias had opinions about that too, and now I have a new riding partner. And it looks like Mel and Rowan are barn buddies.”
Barb laughed. “Didn’t think of it that way, but it sure looks like it.”
Now that they were riding together, the horses seemed content to keep to an active walk.
“You’re not wearing your six-gun,” Barb said when they turned at the end of the square. She waved at three children playing in the little garden next to the Universal Temple. They waved back.
“I left it at the office. Figured that was better than accidentally shooting me or the horse.”
“You’ll have to ride and carry when you’re officially on duty, right?”
“Right.” She’d worry about that later. Better yet, she’d ask Tobias about riding while wearing a gun.
“You girls out for an Earthday stroll, or are you out to ride?” Tobias asked as he rode up to join them.
“Rowan and I are cooling down from our ride,” Barb replied. “I was just keeping Jana company until you got here.” She grinned at Jana. “See you later.” Then she mouthed, Or not.
Feeling her face heat, Jana shortened the reins before Mel decided to follow his buddy.
“Warmed up now?” Tobias asked.
She nodded. She knew he meant the horse, but, yeah, she was feeling plenty warm right now. As the town’s only female—and human—deputy, she couldn’t afford to gain a reputation for being an easy ride, and she wasn’t sure if Tobias had caught Barb’s silent, teasing remark.
“Then let’s ride.”
For the next half hour, they jogged and loped and circled and changed directions. They stopped and backed up. Jana was pretty sure she wasn’t more than a passenger and Mel was following Tobias’s commands, but she learned how it felt to be on a horse that was moving over ground that wasn’t a corral. Finally they were circling the town square at a walk, giving the horses a long rein to stretch their necks.
Tobias smiled. “Pretty good for your first time out.”
“Mel did all the work.”
“You have all your gear? I noticed you weren’t riding with it in the corral.”
Jana frowned at him in puzzlement. “Gear?”
Tobias shook his head and sighed. “Well, it’s all farm folk and city folk who have come to town, so I guess it’s not surprising that no one told you what you should have out here.”
Jana’s eyes widened as he listed the things she should be carrying with her. “I’m riding a horse, not driving a car with an empty back seat.”
“You’d be surprised what you can fit into saddlebags.”
“And the rope?”
Tobias eyed her. “Do you know how to use a lasso?”
“As in, rope that cow?”
“Or that bank robber—unless he’s got a gun, which is likely. But you never know when you might need to throw a rope over something or someone.”
“Another skill I didn’t learn.”
“Hard to learn a skill without a teacher.”
“Are you offering to teach me?”
“I surely am. How about this afternoon? I’m in town today but need to get back to the ranch and put in some time there, especially since I’ve got some new hands to break in.”
“I have to be at this town council meeting early this afternoon, but I’m free after that.”
“Don’t get in trouble with your boss on account of me.”
Jana looked around. “Speaking of my boss, you had something to tell me?” After dealing with Virgil for the past couple of days, she needed all the information she could get.
Tobias looked away and said nothing until they rode past the sheriff’s office and were out of earshot—of anything she could see, anyway.
“Regular wolves have an alpha pair,” he said quietly. “They’re the ones who mate, and the pack works together to raise those pups. Can’t really afford to have more than one litter of pups to feed. But the terra indigene don’t follow the traits and behavior of the predators whose forms they absorb, not right down the line. With the Wolfgard, the dominant pair will mate and the pack will raise those pups. But the following year, if the dominant enforcer in the pack has a mate, they’ll be the ones who breed and the pack will help raise their pups.
“Virgil was the dominant enforcer in his pack and Kane was another enforcer. They had been out tracking something—prey or adversary, I don’t know which. But they weren’t with the rest of their pack when men in the Humans First and Last movement targeted the pack and killed all of them. Even the pups.” Tobias said nothing for a moment. “I have the feeling that Virgil isn’t proud of being able to shift to human form well enough to almost pass for human. But he was offered the job of being the dominant enforcer for this large mixed pack, and he accepted. That doesn’t mean he feels any tolerance for humans.”
“Do you think he had a mate?” Jana asked.
“I do. And I’m guessing some of the young who were killed were his.”
Sobered by what she’d just learned, Jana rode back to the livery stable. When she realized she had just enough time to run back to the sheriff’s office and take Rusty out for a piddle break before going to the council meeting, she accepted Tobias’s offer to unsaddle Mel. She’d need to learn how to do that for herself, as well as take care of her horse, but she had enough to deal with right now.
“I’ll swing by your office later this afternoon,” Tobias said.
“See you then.” Feeling lighthearted about seeing Tobias again, and vowing to try to be more understanding when she dealt with Virgil, she jogged to the office, took Rusty to the square for a few minutes, and then checked e-mails in case there was something she should report at the meeting.
* * *
* * *
Jesse walked into the meeting room with a box lined with a piddle pad in one hand and a puppy in the other. The daypack she usually carried weighed twice as much today because Tobias, damn and blast him, had talked her into this. She hadn’t had to lug this much stuff around since her boy was in diapers.
She looked down for just a moment as she set the box next to a chair. She looked up to find herself sandwiched between two Wolves in human form—if you didn’t count the furry, Wolf-shaped ears.
“What’s that?” Virgil said, his attention fixed on the gray puppy.
The puppy, who was either very brave or not too bright, yapped at him.
To Jesse’s surprise, Virgil grinned and held out a hand for the pup to sniff.
She said, “This is the new addition to my family.”
Virgil gave her a sharp, assessing look, but he didn’t comment about her choice of words.
Setting the puppy in the box, Jesse slipped the daypack off her shoulder and tucked it under her chair. The puppy whined and tried to climb out of the box. As she wondered about the wisdom of distracting the puppy with treats—and teaching the pup that bad behavior would be rewarded—Virgil settled the matter by sitting on the floor next to the box. He picked up the pup and said, “See? You’re mom is right there.” Then he cuddled the puppy against his chest and said nothing when those sharp puppy teeth gnawed his hand.
Jesse dug out one of the bone-shaped treats. “Let her gnaw on that instead of your thumb.”
He took it and smiled as the pup settled in his lap with her treat.
He had been a father once, Jesse thought. The certainty of it made her heart hurt as she watched Virgil with the pup. She glanced at Kane, who had taken the seat next to Virgil and was also focused on the pup. And he had been an uncle. Their family is gone now, casualties of war.
Jana Paniccia came in and sat beside her. “Didn’t have time to shower. Sorry.”
Virgil leaned forward to see past Jesse’s knees. “Why sorry? You smell like the horse who is not meat. That is good.”
Fortunately neither woman had to respond to that because the Sanguinati arrived along with two young Intuit men.
“I have called this meeting because a request was made to expand the boundaries of the town to include one of the two full-size grocery stores in Bennett,” Tolya said. “Fagen and Zeke will present their proposals for us to consider.”
Fagen talked about how he and the people working with him would take responsibility for finding the food-processing plants that had survived the war. He explained how his group would also collect food from the houses and warehouse it to stock any small neighborhood stores, as well as the general store located on the town square.
Jesse wasn’t sure the Sanguinati appreciated the charts, but Fagen had thought through what his group wanted to do.
“The collection of food and distributing it is what you’ve been doing since arriving in Bennett,” Tolya said. “How is this different?”
“When we first came to Bennett, we came for the adventure and because we believed helping you secure the town would earn humans the right to have a place in the town’s future,” Fagen said. “We worked for room and board and, basically, spending money. And we worked for the town council—or you, as the mayor. But not everyone works for you now. You’ve got doctors and lawyers and dentists, and that’s a good thing. But those people will charge for their services, so those of us who are staying need to earn our own living because you need to pay the folks who are actually working for the town, like you and the sheriff and his deputies. Like the people who are needed to collect garbage and maintain the streets in summer and winter.”
“We will consider what you have said,” Tolya said.
Zeke’s proposal was much the same as Fagen’s, only Zeke and his group wanted to be the salvage business that cleared out houses. More charts explained how each house would have careful documentation so that jewelry would be taken to Kelley Burch for assessment and private papers would be packed up for the lawyers to review in an attempt to find any heirs who might have lived elsewhere and survived. Zeke’s group had information about a few towns—most of those places being no more than a handful of buildings—that, most likely, had been resettled by terra indigene. Part of the salvage business would be to drive out to those places with a van packed with goods that the Others might find useful: human clothes, books, games, canned goods that could tide someone over if the hunting was lean.