Page 45 of Have a Bear-y Little Christmas

“Yes, love?”

“I think it’s really cool that you’re introducing Jeannie and Max to the shifter world. I think they’ll be good about it.”

Oh my god.

OH.

MY.

GOD.

“Yeah, I’m sure they will be,” I said quickly, trying to shut down my body’s visceral reaction. I had fucked up. I’d been so caught up with everything that I had well and trulyfucked the hell up.“But let’s just not go out and tell them, okay? We’re really supposed to be keeping ourselves a secret, remember?”

“Yeah, I know. I just figured...”

“It’s okay, don’t you worry about it, Addy. I’ll take care of it. You go to sleep now, all right?”

“Okies dokies,” she said in a perfect imitation of Eva and settled back under the covers. I closed the door behind me. Onthe inside, I was panicking. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of something so incredibly obvious and important.

I’d really stuck my foot in it.

Almost ready

I stared at the text, my heart beating about a million miles a second. It had been a hot minute since my anxiety had spiked so much. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been when Zara’s health had started really winding down, but it didn’t feel great to be reminded of that.

Thanks so much

I texted back, ever so grateful that my cousin had arrived at our ancestral lands early so he could set up a Face-time call with the elders who were already there. Otherwise I’d be conference calling them, and that sounded like a legitimate nightmare.

I sat there, cooking in my own worries for a while, until another text came through.

Get ready

I braced myself, my tablet set up in front of me on the desk. As soon as the call came through, I hit the green button to accept and found myself looking at one of the large sitting rooms of the main cabin. Five different elders were there. I recognized my great-great-great uncle Baptiste, my great-great-great-great aunt Annette, my great grandmother-in-law Angelique, and two others I wasn’t sure exactly how we were related, but I called them Auntie Hortense and Cuz Amédé.

“Ah,sak pase!” Cuz said, waving toward the camera. As the youngest of our elders at just around seventy, he was the most technologically literate. “I hear ya wanted t’invite someone unusual to ourfais do-do?”

The elders of our clan used more of the Creole language than I did, and their accents were also far thicker than mine.

“Yes, actually. I, uh, I might have gotten a bit carried away and invited a human to our jamboree,” I said, feeling sheepish at the stupid blunder. Although we didn’t follow the same strict pack structures that wolf shifters did, we still had designations, and as an alpha it was my responsibility to present myself as relatively put-together—even if it felt like I was one hair away from a crash-out on the inside. How the hell was I going to disinvite Jeannie and Max after they’d been so happy to be invited? And not to play into stereotypes, but as an alpha, it affronted my very nature to even think about denying them the downright bevvy of food that would be available, especially when I knew Max was trying to gain weight.

“Now, why d’ya go an’ do something like that,sha?This human, theyzanmi ou?”

“Yes, she’s definitely my friend,” I answered. “But it’s more than that.”

“Pi plis?”

“Yes’m. You see, she ain’t got anybody else, and her little boy? He just got over being real sick.”

“How sick?” an older voice came from off-screen, and a few moments later,VovoGabriela followed it.

“Cancer sick.”

She clicked her tongue, going to sit down next to her wife, Great Auntie Hortense. “Cancer?Ka ten di boi.”

Although I wasn’t as familiar with the dialect of Portuguese Creole as Zara’s side of the family used as I was with my more Haitian and French one, I still knew exactly what she meant.

“Yeah. It’s not good. I know it’s probably impossible, but do you think there’s any way we could still allow them to come? I’ll spend the entire time running interference to make sure she doesn’t see anything she isn’t supposed to. And her son, he gets tired so easily and needs to rest a lot, so he’ll probably either be sleeping a lot or hanging out with adults. When he’s running around with the kids, they’ll probably be having too much fun just playing to let anything slip they shouldn’t.”