Wild Side (Dark Side Series: Book 2)

Interlude II: Splish Splash

Calico Finn was afraid to check her mail.

She wasn't afraid of the endless stream of grocery flyers and home improvement magazines (in fact, she'd gotten considerably fewer local advertisements for lawn mowing, plowing, and house painting, let alone the significant drop in door-to-door sales). They got a lot of mail at the house. Such was life for a presently stay-at-home pack leader of 21st century werewolves, several of whom lived in the house and many of which were employed by her late brother's moderately successful Harley Motorcycle dealership.

The former art thief had pawned much of the two-wheel operations management onto the sharpest of underlings, though pickings were a bit slim these days and 'sharp' didn't necessarily describe all the tools left in the box. Sale of the dealership, much as it pained her to admit, was a likely option. If it weren't for the memories, she would've nixed it from her revenue flow as easily as flicking a crumb from her lap.

They didn't need the money.

She was the bread winner of the family, its guardian, its caretaker, its teeth.

Calico Finn kicked open her car door and trudged toward the mailbox in a pair of heels that cost more than a month's rent in a reasonably sized Manhattan flat. Nothing.

She glanced up the driveway, past the Mercedes and three bikes parked ahead of her. Three small boxes sat stacked beside her door—which Evita had decorated with faux leaves and a pretty harvest wreath. A strained rubberband held a stack of envelopes and flyers on the tallest box.

She snagged the packet, took one look at the toy catalog curled around the envelopes, then flung it down the stairs.

Calico Finn was not the alpha her brother was.

Had been.

Shit. Fuck. She had to stop thinking 'was.' The grace period on grief had run out long ago.

Had been, had been, had been.

Stephen was kind, and gentle, and a hell of a lot smarter when it came to running a pack. He was the brains and she was the brawn, he'd always joke with her late at night, perched on his desk looking over the finances to the family business while she was busy laying out plans for the next grab.

Stephen was good at bringing out the best in people, and even better at above-the-board, nothing-to-see-here business. He didn't like Cal's penchant for heists.

But he never said no. Her escapades hauled in a lot of money for the pack. There wasn't a single member wanting for food or shelter underneath her.

But she didn't know how to make everyone feel equally adored like he did. Shit sandwiches at a banquet. He had. Had had had.

 Calico had favorites. Calico spent more time with some and less time with others. Calico acted in the best interest of her pack and their survival. Problem was, she was fierce and she was ferociously devoted to any of her pack in trouble, but she tended to forget about everyone who fell into the category of, "it's just a sneeze, not pneumonia, Allan."

When the devil chased Stephen through the woods, their ancestral woods, the woods they had always felt safe inside, Cal was left without her guiding light. She pulled strings; she had no idea how to really maintain them. So she kept pulling and pulling and pulling and sometimes greasing or knotting the lines, and eventually they wore thin and snapped.

Nearly a third of the pack had scattered over the course of two years, broken into distant fragments, started fresh, away from their roots, away from the trouble that had cursed them since the day Cal took the neighbor into the pack.