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I kept glancing at Duncan’s forehead as I drove us through the foothills outside of Monroe and into the woodlands around my Mom’s cabin. I’d picked up my truck from the shop, and it once again had both fenders and was running agreeably. Its passenger was less agreeable.

“The gouge isn’t that deep, is it?” Duncan hid his scar with the heel of his palm. “Rue’s needle was the size of a feeding tube, but the mark it left should heal quickly.”

“It’s fine. I’m admiring your profile.”

“You’re eyeing my scar like it’s a viper that’ll leap out at you.”

“I can’t help it. It concerns me. It’s not glowing, the way it did when the device was trying to summon you, but it seems…”

Duncan sighed and dropped his hand. “Like an angry red welt, I know. Despite being largely oblivious to my looks and not having a touch of vanity, I do occasionally peek at myself in the mirror.”

“Oblivious to your looks? Didn’t you tell me you trim yourself assiduously to make sure your naked body is appealing to anyone who looks at it?”

“I prefer a tidy mien because I must look at it.”

“But without even a touch of vanity.”

“Precisely.”

“Did Rue have any ideas?”

Did she have a cure for his curse? No. If she’d discovered anything, Duncan would have said so when I’d picked him up that morning—or he would have knocked on my door the night before. Still, I couldn’t help but hope.

“Not that she mentioned, but she was hmm ing and uhmm ing when I left her apartment near midnight. She did smugly inform me, after she took her samples, that she could use the genetic material to clone me and create a Duncan of her own. I wasn’t that amused.”

“I’m sure she won’t do that.”

“Because it would be morally reprehensible to create a clone without someone’s permission?”

“Well, maybe, but mostly she’s pretty old to raise a test-tube baby.”

“So is Abrams, but that hasn’t stopped him,” Duncan said grimly.

“Did you ever learn the kid’s name?”

“Lykos.”

“Doesn’t that just mean wolf?”

“In Greek, yes. Abrams was never that original when it came to names.” He waved at his chest, reminding me that Duncan was a name he’d adopted. His original name, presumably also granted by Abrams, had been Drakon, the Greek for dragon.

“Did you get to speak to him?” I asked. “Lykos?”

“Not as much as you did, I think.”

“I only told him that Abrams and Radomir were bad guys, chocolate was worth trading medallions for, and that he’d rather have a salami log than pick a fight with me.”

“Those are more in-depth conversations than I’ve had with him. The couple of times our paths crossed, I mostly grunted at him.”

“Were you a wolf or bipedfuris on those occasions?”

“Less often than you’d think, given that degree of articulation.”

I glanced at him as I navigated the truck off the paved road and onto the meandering dirt route that led through the trees toward the cabin.

“I didn’t know what to say,” Duncan admitted. “I’m not even sure… Is he more like my son? Or my brother? Oh, logically I know we’re siblings—identical twins, I suppose—but the age difference makes it confusing.”

“The weird sci-fi cloning makes it confusing.”

He laughed softly. “That too.”

“Maybe just befriend him, if you can. We should try to get him away from those guys. Being raised in a laboratory can’t be healthy.”

“I survived it,” Duncan said dryly.

“You had access to a library.”

“That did help.”

An oncoming SUV with Logan’s Real Estate on the side forced me to navigate to the edge of the road, my truck’s tire dipping into a deep pothole. The frame creaked in protest. The poor vehicle. It had endured a lot this winter.

The last time we’d driven up here, I’d noticed a for-sale sign on a property down the road from my mom’s.

Since then, a clear case containing flyers had been added.

Fresh bite holes in the wood post suggested that some of my relatives were taking umbrage at the prospective sale, probably because it was undeveloped land full of trees, and their hunts took them across it often.

Surprisingly, Mom stood in the driveway when we arrived, Lorenzo at her side. Her arms were folded across her chest as she glowered toward the road. His expression was more pensive.

I rolled down the window and pulled to a stop in front of them. “When Lorenzo said you’d be here when we arrived, I didn’t expect you to greet us at the head of the driveway.”

“We’re scowling fearsomely to drive away that presumptuous real estate agent,” Mom said.

I glanced back, remembering the SUV but nothing remarkable about the driver.

“Did you show him your canines? Your lupines ?” I asked. “That always helps.”

“Lorenzo did.”

“As your mother commanded.” He inclined his head. “I am, of course, here to protect her.”

“To mundane outsiders, he’s more fearsome than the magical alarms.” Mom tilted her head toward the ferns between the trees along the winding gravel driveway.

Having felt how effective those magical security devices could be, I curled my lip in that direction. I would rather face Lorenzo.

They stepped to the side so we could drive up to the cabin and park. I offered a ride in the truck bed—in his wolf form, Lorenzo had hopped back there before—but maybe Mom was past the age of wanting to clamber over tailgates. Holding hands, they walked up the driveway after we passed.

“What did the real estate agent want?” I asked when we all stood on the porch.

Mom’s gaze drifted to the medallion under Duncan’s shirt, but she nodded, looking satisfied that he wore it, not annoyed that he’d asked to borrow it.

She’d offered him a place in the pack, and maybe she believed that he would accept it, and the medallion would soon hang again on the neck of a male Snohomish Savager.

“To see our land.” Mom waved at her cabin but also the surrounding forest.

I didn’t know how many acres came with the property.

It wasn’t the home I’d grown up in, which had burned to the ground in a fire, and I’d never poked around in the county records to find out where Mom’s land ended and other parcels began.

Werewolves weren’t ones to erect fences.

Someone had mentioned that the property abutted state land to the rear, but I didn’t know if the gully with the magical cave lay within her borders or not.

“Does he want to list it?” I asked.

Mom’s lips rippled. “He said it is listed and that he has interested clients.”

“Uh, I assume you didn’t do that.”

“I most certainly did not. This land has belonged to the pack for generations.” Mom said the pack but touched her chest. Presumably, it belonged to her.

Others in the family had nearby properties, and when the pack was in wolf form, they tended to come and go on their hunts without worrying about who owned what.

“I’ve talked to Renata, and she’s going to check on it. ”

That was Jasmine’s mom, and I nodded since she was in the real estate business. She would be able to get to the bottom of the problem.

“Apparently,” Lorenzo said, “it’s not that uncommon for crooks to list land they don’t own in the hope that they’ll be able to make a quick cash deal with someone willing to skip going through a title agency.

That’s usually raw land, not a parcel with a home on it, but…

” He waved around the area, as if to say the rural location made it susceptible.

“A competent agent,” Mom said, “would do some research to make sure someone has the right to sell a property before listing it.”

“Hm.” I couldn’t help but wonder if Radomir and Abrams were behind this, scheming to sell Mom’s property out from under her.

That seemed like a lot of work— criminal work—just to get her medallion, but they were posing as buyers for Sylvan Serenity, so who knew what ends they would go to in order to disrupt our lives and get what they wanted.

“Renata said she knows what to do to get the listing removed, and that I don’t need to personally show up at the office of the real estate agent who put it up.” Mom lifted her hand, fingers curled to emulate claws digging someone’s eyes out.

“You sound disappointed that you don’t need to do that,” Lorenzo said.

“No, I’m too tired to want to drive around and threaten people.” She sighed. Sadly.

My throat tightened in sympathy.

“Perhaps that’s the part that’s disappointing to you,” he murmured, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

“I do miss having vigor.” Mom looked from Duncan to me.

My sympathy waned as I had the feeling she would use that as a segue to ask if we were frolicking between the sheets to make young werewolf pups.

“We have a problem, Mom,” I blurted, hoping to forestall that discussion. “Duncan might be dying.”

His eyebrows arched. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so blunt.

From the way Mom’s lips twisted, I expected her to say something like, Join the club .

“What happened?” she asked instead, perhaps remembering that she wanted him to father offspring with me. That would be hard for him to accomplish if he was dead.

I summarized the night of the battle, reluctantly admitting that I’d been the one to destroy the control device.

She’d been the one to suggest I do that—well, we’d discussed stealing it—but I didn’t try to put any blame on her.

I’d had an inkling that destroying it wouldn’t end well, but I’d been the one to snap it in half with my own jaws.

“The medallion protected you from its control?” Mom asked Duncan when I finished.

“It did.” He rested his hand on it. “I didn’t know that would happen when I went looking for it. I’d hoped to help Luna and your family by finding it and returning it to you.”

“Assuming you could break Radomir’s control and not return it to him ?” I asked.

“You know that was my desire.”

“Yeah, but he was also the reason you were hunting for it in the first place.”

“Something I’ve not denied.” Duncan bowed to me, though he glanced at Lorenzo, who smiled slightly.

“Women may forgive you your transgressions,” Lorenzo said, “but they’ll never forget them.”