Every Sunset Forever (2 page)

It took a year, but eventually she spoke, telling him one night in the barest hint of a whispered voice that she didn’t know what her name was.  His pack had easily adopted her, the women fawning over her as she thrived in a safe environment, the men all behaving like overprotective fathers.  Mack was constantly touched by their support.

The pack came together to suggest names for her.  She sat on the floor of his family room while the pack called out suggestions.  Eventually, she stood and walked over to him and whispered in his ear that she was hungry.  Hannah, mate of his beta, Luther, said, “She always whispers.  That’s what you should call her.  Whisper.”

Mack liked it.  The name seemed to fit the quiet little girl.  “Would you like that to be your name, Sweetling?  Can we call you Whisper?”

“Yes,” she whispered.  The pack cheered, and several women took her into the kitchen for a snack.

He continued to work with DCFS and local law enforcement to try to find out where she came from.  Secretly he wished she would stay with him forever, that she would let him adopt her and become her father, but he never spoke those words to her.  It wasn’t until she was almost ten that she asked if he would be her dad, and he adopted her legally.  He adopted two more young shifters who had nowhere else to go, and Whisper became the center of their lives as well.

The only snag in things came when she shifted into a hyena at age sixteen.  They’d been right in believing her to be older than the two years that the DCFS claimed her to be, because it was only twelve years later that she shifted and most shifters took their beast forms sometime in their sixteenth year.  While they’d used the date she was brought to him as her birthday, they now knew approximately how old she was.  Being a hyena, it opened up the possibility of her finally finding where she came from.

To his surprise, she wasn’t interested in finding out about hyenas.  She claimed to be a wolf at heart, even if she didn’t look like one when she shifted, and he didn’t push her.  When she became an adult, he offered to help her find and contact were-hyena groups, but she refused.  He was glad she felt at home in the pack and that she considered him and her adopted brothers her real family, but a part of him wondered if she’d missed out not growing up around other hyenas.  As she liked to remind him, it was her life, and she could damn well never talk to another hyena if she didn’t want to.  If he didn’t know any better, he would have said that she’d inherited Elise’s stubbornness.

He never regretted opening his front door that night in June.  He knew he wasn’t perfect, but he loved her and the boys as if they were his flesh-and-blood children.  He didn’t think a child could ask for much more than that.

Chapter 1

Whisper Callahan sat at the side of the bar while her father, Mack, filled a pitcher with draft beer and set it on the counter.  After accepting payment from the customer, he turned his attention back to her.

It was hard as hell having a whole conversation with a bartender.  Too many interruptions.

“You were saying, Sweetling?” Mack said.

“That I don’t know why you want me to go to the get-together in Pennsylvania.”  She twirled the narrow red straw around in her tumbler, the ice swirling in the amber-tinted liquid of her Crown & Seven.

“Because it’s important for you to explore your roots before you decide to settle.”  His large, weathered hands rested on the marred surface of the cherry bar.  “And it’s called a
gathering
.  All the unmated hyenas go to them.”

She lifted the straw and chewed on the end for a moment.  “Why do you think I’d be settling if I stayed here with the pack?”  She had been taken in as a toddler by Mack and joined the wolf pack when she was sixteen.  They’d never cared that she was a hyena.  She didn’t know why she’d been abandoned, but she really didn’t want anything to do with hyenas, no matter how good her father’s intentions were.

Mack shook his head.  “Honestly, Whisper.  What are you afraid of?”

Old worries tugged the corners of her lips down.  “They didn’t want me then, why would they want me now?”

“You don’t know that, honey.  The police were never able to find anyone related to you. It doesn’t mean that they’re not out there somewhere, wondering about you.  All the police knew was that you weren’t related to the woman they found you with.  They never figured out how you came to be with her or where you came from.  Your whole past is a mystery up until you came to my front door.”

Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them away.  A bar was no place for a meltdown.

As if sensing her emotions, her adopted brothers Kross and Kayne moved to either side of her.  Kross, who towered over her five-six frame by a solid foot, leaned on one muscular arm and laid his big hand on her back.  “Whatcha sad for, Mouse?”

Mack answered, “She’s upset because I want her to go up to Pennsylvania to the
gathering
and meet other hyenas.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Kayne asked, stealing a swig of her drink and settling on the other side of her.

“Yeah.  We go to the multiple-pack parties to hook up.  Why wouldn’t you want to meet hyenas?” Kross asked.

She didn’t want to get into this because the root of the problem was bigger than the fact that she was a hyena.  It wasn’t about
that
.  It was about the fact that no one had ever come looking for her.  Social Services had shown up at Mack’s door when Whisper was four.  Twenty-one years later, she’d never had anyone try to contact her.

Taking a slow, deep breath, she placed her palms on the cool bar top and let the air from her lungs out slowly.  “Can we not talk about this now?”

Mack shrugged.  “Suit yourself, Whisper, but you’re going if I have to make Hekyll and Jekyll drag you up there themselves.”

Kayne barked out a laugh.  “When have you ever made Mouse do anything she didn’t want to do?”

Mack narrowed his eyes at Kayne, and her brother abruptly stopped laughing.  Turning his gray eyes to her slowly, Mack said, “This is about connecting with your own kind.  If you don’t know where you came from, how can you really know who you are?  I’m not telling you to go up there and marry the first hyena you meet.  I’m just telling you that there’s nothing wrong with finding out about your own people and then making an informed decision.  If you go up there and decide that you’re better off without any hyenas in your life, then at least you went.  You don’t want to spend the rest of your life wondering
what if
.”

She really hated it when he was right, which was most of the time.  “Okay, Dad.  If Kross and Kayne will go with me for moral support.”

Kross and Kayne agreed immediately to go, and she had never doubted that they would.  Kross and Kayne were adopted by Mack the same as her, and she couldn’t imagine any two guys being better brothers than they were.  Her fiercest supporters.

“Now, enough of this emotional bullshit.  Go play your set before I have to hire a new house band.”

Kross and Kayne saluted and grabbed Whisper under both arms.  They hauled her through the bar while she laughed and then lifted her onto the stage.  Their band, Silver Moon, had been playing together since they were young kids.  Mack had been told by one of the she-wolves that music lessons were good for kids, so he had enrolled all of them in after-school classes.  Whisper had taken to piano immediately, Kayne to drums, and Kross to guitar.  Before long, they’d figured out they could sing, too, and that Whisper had a real talent for writing lyrics while Kayne could write music.  Two more wolves from the pack, Tyler and Rik, had joined up in high school, and they’d been playing at the bar for years now, even before it was really legal for her to be there.

As the band tuned up, she rolled her neck and flexed her fingers, casting her eyes across the bar.  She found her best friends Bliss and Angel sitting at a table and waved.  Bliss and Whisper had known each other since grade school.  Bliss was one of those rare wolves that had two shifting wolf parents but never shifted herself.  She was the only pack member who was a full-blooded wolf but couldn’t shift, and because Whisper was the only pack member who wasn’t a wolf, they had gravitated to each other to commiserate in their oddness.  Angel had joined the pack a few years ago.  She was human, but her step-dad was a wolf, which was why they were part of the pack.

Her mind wandered to the
gathering
, and she mentally grimaced.  Mack had tried in vain to get her to contact hyena groups on the East Coast in the past.  Yes, she was curious about her people, but she was more afraid of finding out that what she’d believed to be the truth was an actual fact: That she’d never been wanted in the first place and had been tossed aside like so much trash.  Mack, Kross, and Kayne were her family.  It didn’t matter to her that she sometimes felt like an odd duck out hunting with the pack because of her beast, because they made her feel loved and wanted.  No amount of hyena camaraderie in the form of a big party was going to make her want to be part of whatever hyenas called themselves when they got together.  She was part of her father’s wolf pack, and nothing in the universe was going to change that.

Kayne whistled at her, and she turned to look at him.  “There’s nothing wrong with checking it out, Mouse.  But if you absolutely don’t want to go, then Kross and I will help you get into the Witness Protection Program so that Mack can’t find you and drive you to the
gathering
himself.”

She smiled.  Kayne always knew how to make her feel better.  “You sure you want to come?”

The drumsticks twirled in his fingers.  “Why not?  We get out of work for the week and get to go on a road trip.”

“I was thinking about asking Bliss and Angel to come along.”

Kross snarled, “Bliss is not allowed to be in charge of the radio.”

Bliss had a serious love of all things country, and Whisper’s brothers were die-hard rock fans.  The last time they’d taken a trip and Bliss had come along, she commandeered the radio and tortured her brothers with twangy country tunes until they complained their ears were bleeding.

Whisper put her hand on her heart.  “I promise to do my best to keep her country-loving hands off the radio.”

She heard Kross grumble under his breath, and she smiled.  Whatever came from the
gathering
, she knew that she would have a good time with her brothers and her best friends.  If she tried really hard, she might even decide to have an open mind about meeting hyenas.  She nodded at Kayne, and he counted off and started the song.  She shoved the worries of what she might face when she went to the
gathering
away into the far corners of her mind, and lost herself in the music.

* * * * *

Angel sat on Whisper’s bed the night before they were scheduled to leave for Pennsylvania, watching her pack.  Her long, blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders, and if she’d had on something other than an old heavy metal t-shirt and ripped jeans, she might have actually looked like an angel.

“I’m bummed you can’t go,” Whisper said, peering inside her toiletries bag and making sure she had all she needed.  Bliss was coming, but Angel, a receptionist at a veterinarian’s office, couldn’t get off work.

Angel grimaced.  “I know.  I wish I could.  The other receptionist is off on maternity leave, and they can’t get anyone else to fill in for a week just because I was invited to go hang out in the woods in Pennsylvania.  I’m sure you guys are going to have a blast, and I’m going to be stuck here.”

Whisper smiled sadly.  “What if I promise to try not to have any fun?”

Angel laughed.  “That
would
make me feel better.”

From the hallway, Kayne called, “Mouse, have you seen my car keys?”

She thought for a moment and called back, “I took them out of your jeans’ pocket when I did laundry this morning, check on the washer.”

“Thanks.”

She turned her attention back to her friend and began to fold a sweater.  It was still warm for early November, but the
gathering
was at a campground in the mountains in Pennsylvania, and she knew that it would most likely be colder there.  As her adopted Grandma Francis used to say, it was better to have a sweater and not need it, then to need one and not have it.

Angel leaned back on her elbows on the bed, her legs dangling off the edge.  “It’s probably better that I don’t go anyway.”

Whisper looked at her.  “Why would you say that?”

Angel’s pretty face darkened.  “Any kids that I have will never be able to shift.”

“So?”

“So?  No shifter in his right mind would pick me as a mate.  I should probably stop trying to date shifters and just go human.”

Whisper opened her mouth to tell her that she was being ridiculous, but judging from Angel’s face, she knew the argument would fall on deaf ears.  When Angel joined the pack with her parents four years ago, Mack had assured them that he didn’t care that Angel and her mom were human.  Angel’s parents had both been human, so she was understandably human.  Her father died when she was a teenager, and her mother remarried a werewolf, which allowed the entire family acceptance in the pack.  A lot of single males in the pack had dated Angel – she was very pretty, after all, and sweet and funny – but no one dated her seriously.  Eventually it became clear that the males didn’t consider her mate material.  Her brothers had never dated Angel because they had a rule about not dating her friends, but they told Whisper that when males started to think of mating and family, they tended to want their kids to shift.

Whisper said, “So none of the males in the pack are your mate.  It doesn’t mean that your mate isn’t out there somewhere.  Maybe he’s a wolf or maybe he’s human, but just because he’s not in the pack doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s not a wolf.”

Angel opened her mouth as if she might protest, but then just shut it and shrugged.  It was a sore topic with Angel, and Whisper didn’t want to get into an argument with her.  She and her two friends were quite the trio.  A hyena, a non-shifting werewolf, and a human.

Whisper’s phone buzzed, and she lifted it from the bed and read the screen.  Making a face, she tossed the phone back down and went back to arranging her hiking boots into the suitcase.

Angel’s brow rose.  “Gregor?”

Whisper nodded.  Gregor was a wolf who’d been chasing after Whisper since high school.  He was mildly attractive, but he said stupid things like
I’m willing to overlook the fact you aren’t a wolf
and
it would be smart of you to take me as a mate before you get old and saggy and no one wants you
.

“I’ve told him I’m not interested, but he’s gotten more insistent since I decided to go to the
gathering
.”

“At least you have a male that’s interested in you.”

“Do you really want Gregor?  He’s so slimy he glides when he walks.”  Whisper shivered.

Angel grimaced.  “No, not really.”  She stood, stretched, and hugged Whisper.  “I need to get home and thaw something for dinner.  Have fun, and I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“I’m not looking for anything but to get Mack off my back about my heritage,” she reminded her friend, who was heading towards the bedroom door.

Angel looked over her shoulder.  “If you say so.”

Putting in the last item, she zippered her suitcase and tugged it off the bed, using the extended handle to wheel it out the bedroom door.  She left the suitcase near the front door for her brothers to load up.  The three of them lived together in a three-bedroom apartment over the bar.  Kross and Kayne had moved in first, after high school, and when Whisper graduated she moved in, too.  The bar was in the center of the pack’s territory, and Mack’s home was behind it, nestled in the woods that surrounded the bar.

Beyton was a heavily wooded town near the Mullica River.  It was a small town with several wolf-run businesses including the bar where Whisper worked on the weekend singing and the music store where she gave piano lessons.  She loved Beyton and thought of it as home.