“He’s messin’ with you, Faythe,” Owen said, laughter shining bright in his dark eyes as he shifted on the couch beneath my calves.

Vic shook his head, brown waves flying. “I’m dead serious.”

“So where are they now?” Parker drained his new shot, apparently for the hell of it.

Vic shrugged. “‘Survival of the fittest’ turned out not to refer to them.

Werewolves had no stealth, and little common sense. The damn fools started howling every time they got excited, like a pup pissing himself over table scraps. Got themselves mistaken for real wolves and hunted to extinction more than a hundred years ago, before humans ever had a chance to figure out that some of their bedtime stories were true.”

On screen, Karen White had abandoned bravery for a brief bout of common sense, locking herself into the relative safety of her bungalow.

In the guesthouse, skeptical silence descended.

“Yeah, right!” Ethan scoffed, as usual, the first to voice an opinion.

“I’m not kidding,” Vic said. “Ask your dad.”

“Speak of the devil…” Owen said, twisting to glance at the front window. Light flashed across his face, bathing the room in the glow of my father’s headlights as his car pulled into its customary parking spot, alongside the main house.

“Last one to the barn unloads the body!” Ethan cried, and the guys leapt into action. Ethan turned off the TV, and Parker began screwing caps on bottles at random. Vic vaulted from his recliner, kicking the footrest into place. Owen gathered a handful of shot glasses and dumped them on the kitchen island, unwilling to leave a mess in a house he didn’t actually occupy.

I stood as the guys scurried around the living room, but Marc pulled me back onto the couch next to him. The gold specks in his irises sparkled with mischief. His hand slid up my rib cage, thumb brushing the low swel of my breast.

Ethan thumped across the floor toward the door without sparing us a glance. Parker was at his heels.

Marc leaned in, his gaze focused on my neck. I tilted my head back to oblige him. His lips trailed from just below my ear to the base of my throat. My hands reached for him automatically, finding their way beneath his shirt, playing across the ridges and valleys of his stomach.

“I’m not unloading that body,” I whispered as his teeth grazed my collarbone.

“You won’t have to.” He leaned in for a kiss, and my lips parted, welcoming him. He pulled me back onto his lap so that I straddled him, my mouth still on his. My fingers trailed up his arm to his neck. I pulled him closer, tilting his head to better accommodate my tongue.

Marc groaned into my mouth. His thumb brushed my nipple and I gasped.

Glass shattered behind me, and the sharp scent of whiskey rolled across the room. Pulling away from Marc, I twisted on his lap to see Jace standing in a puddle, the broken bottle at his feet. His eyes were fixed on me. On us.

Shit. I’d thought he was already gone. “Jace…?”

“I’m fine,” he snapped, snatching a dish towel from the counter. He dropped it on the pool of Johnnie Walker and stomped across the kitchen for a broom.

I got up to help him, but Marc put a hand on my shoulder and shook his head, watching Jace in frustration and obvious sympathy. He was right. Offering to help Jace would only have further embarrassed him. So we left Jace to his mess and crossed the western field well behind the others, heading for the big, red, prairie-style barn dominating the landscape.

After a couple of minutes the guesthouse door slammed at our backs and we heard Jace walking behind us. He made no attempt to catch up, and we refrained from looking back out of common courtesy. Jace would be okay. He always was. And I would make a more concerted effort not to flaunt our relationship in front of him.

We caught up with everyone else as they stood gathered in front of the barn, waiting, their collective mood sobered by the task at hand.

When my father saw us, he nodded and stepped toward the entrance.

Old, rusty hinges squealed as he pulled open the huge double barn doors centered beneath the gable of the steeply pitched roof. A waft of air rushed out to meet us, oppressively hot, though the temperature outside had already begun to drop from melt-you-where-you-stand to almost-tolerable.

The interior of our picturesque old barn was just as quaint as the exterior. Empty stal s stretched down the left and right sides, leaving a wide, empty space in the center, running the entire length of the building. The dirt floor was scattered with loose, fragrant hay, as was the loft overhead. On either side of the doors, wooden ladders led to the loft, where several bales stil sat, left over from the year before. In a couple of months, both levels of the barn would be stacked full of hay bales, until my father sold them to the neighboring ranches, which, unlike ours, kept animals.

My father’s van sat in the center aisle, looking out of place in a barn built nearly a century earlier. Dented, with peeling blue paint and spots of rust sprinkled like a scattering of red freckles, the van had seen lots of action in its fourteen years, and had carried more than its fair share of bodies.

Our Alpha herded everyone inside, then closed the doors, shutting us in with the heat. And with the dead stray. “Okay, Parker, let’s take a look.”

I glanced at my father as he spoke, and blinked in wry amusement.

There he stood, sweating into a three-piece suit, his dress shoes dusty from the dirty floor, asking to see a cadaver Parker had brought home from New Orleans. Life couldn’t get much weirder. Surely.