“Just long enough for Cyrus to take the bait?” She nodded again, as if something had been confirmed. “If he deserved being given that package, then he did, and while I can’t say it surprises me, it makes my heart heavy to know he was involved with those thieves. But I’m grateful Officer Kowalski stepped in and didn’t let Cyrus bring that package home for the children to see.”

“We weren’t going to let him leave the Courtyard with the package,” Vlad said quietly. “We wouldn’t have let his mate and young see the meat. Selling it to him was punishment and warning for that Cyrus. Kowalski had no authority here to arrest that Cyrus and take him, and the package, to the police station. But we let him do it.”

“Just shows you’re all learning to pull as a team.” Miss Twyla gave Simon a hard look—the same kind of look a nanny would give an erring pup. But a nanny might add a paw-whack or a nip to the look. “You talk it out with Miss Meg and set things right.”

She walked to the back of the store. A moment later they heard the door open and close.

Still feeling cornered, Simon glared at Vlad. “You didn’t help.”

“You weren’t being scolded for eating a human; you were being scolded for upsetting Meg, which I haven’t done.”

“It’s not the same for you,” Simon muttered.

Vlad stared at him. “You weren’t bothered by this when we killed those intruders and the Wolves were tearing into the flesh. You weren’t bothered by it when you bit through the hand and elbow and gave the inked meat to Boone to wrap up for that Cyrus. You were fine with all of it until you went home and saw Meg sleeping—and weren’t sure you would be welcome.” Vlad looked away. “Miss Twyla is right. You need to find out if this changes things between you and Meg.”

Seeing the truth in Vlad’s words, Simon nodded and went back to working on the display in order to avoid finding out for just a little while longer.

• • •

Meg stood at one end of the Green Complex’s kitchen garden and stared at the woven baskets filled with zucchini. “Is this normal?”

“Even for zucchini, this is a bumper crop.” Ruth wiped sweat off her forehead with one hand and pressed the other hand to her lower back as she straightened up.

“Nadine said she’ll take some to make zucchini bread for A Little Bite,” Merri Lee said. She held out two modest-size zucchini. “You should take these, Meg.”

Meg sighed but she took them. Eating foods that were in season was all well and good, but she now understood about having too much of a good thing.

“You don’t have to eat them tonight,” Merri Lee said. “They’ll keep for a day or two.”

Goody. A no-zucchini meal. Of course, she wasn’t sure what they would eat—or if she’d be eating alone.

Then she saw the Wolf moving toward her. Simon, with his dark coat shot with lighter gray hairs. It had been a while since she’d had that odd sense of not being able to see him clearly when he moved, as if she were seeing an overlapping image of something even larger poking through a Wolf suit, making the outline indistinct. Maybe a little of his true form, whatever it was, showed through when he was stressed, like when he was in human form and things shifted involuntarily because he was angry or upset.

Did anyone else experience this when they looked at the Others? Or did seeing the visions of prophecy skew the way she saw the mundane world? If you could call any of the terra indigene mundane.

Ruth and Merri Lee looked around and spotted Simon.

“We should go,” Ruth said.

“You don’t have to,” Meg said quickly.

Merri Lee picked up one of the baskets. “Yes, we do. You’re not always going to agree or get along, but you’re going to be unhappy until you talk it out.”

“I could just conk him on the head with a big zucchini.”

Laughing, Ruth picked up the other basket. “Something every woman has imagined doing to a man at one time or another.”

She watched her friends put the woven baskets into the wire baskets on the front of their bicycles. She watched them ride away. Then she looked at Simon, who had edged closer to the garden as Merri Lee and Ruth moved farther away.

“We need to talk,” she told him.

She didn’t hurry back to the Green Complex. Simon walked beside her, not stopping to sniff anything to find out who had been nearby today. That was so unusual it made her wonder if he was unhappy too.

Unlocking his front door, she let him into his apartment, then went up to her own place to put the zucchini in the fridge and pour two glasses of cold water. A minute later, he opened the kitchen door and sat down at the table.

What to say? How to start?

“They were bad humans.” Simon’s voice was rough, but his amber eyes didn’t have the flickers of red that indicated anger.

Meg took a sip of water. “It was wrong of them to steal the meat from our butcher shop, same as if they had stolen from a human shop.”

“Yes.”

Of course, it would have been smarter for those men to steal from a human shop. The police would have arrested them instead of eating them. “How many were there?”

“Four.”

She didn’t know all the Wolves personally, but between the ones who looked after the puppies and the Wolfgard Complex and the ones who, like Simon and Nathan, worked in more visible parts of the Courtyard, she had a fairly good idea of how many Wolves lived in Lakeside.