Mary didn’t react.
“I have a pack, Mary,” he said. “We’d be happy to have you join it, if you don’t have anyone else. And since you’re here with Deacon and his family, I don’t think you do.”
She looked back to him, her lip trembling.
“In Colorado. You can go to school there, and we can take care of you. Most importantly,” he growled, “we can keep you safe. I promise.”
Mary got up shakily from the swing. She was tall for her age, he could tell, but still had the baby face of immaturity. Sixteen or not, she was still a child, through and through. But, things like this, they made children grow up fast. If they didn’t, they didn’t survive them. She looked him straight in the eye, those dark eyes searching his, checking to see if he was lying.
“You know I’m telling the truth,” he said. “There’ll be forests, other shifters to run with.”
At first, he wasn’t sure if she’d take him up on the offer. Maybe she was done with her own kind. Maybe she wasn’t. He didn’t know for sure.
Until, of course, she surprised him by throwing her arms around his neck and hugging me tight. “Thank you,” she whispered in his ear.
At first he stiffened up, unsure of how to react, of how Deacon would react to it all. But, then he wrapped an arm around her, returned the embrace. Eventually, she broke away and took her spot back on the swing.
They didn’t talk for the rest of the ten or fifteen minutes on the swings. Well, Mary Waynescott didn’t. But Peter did. When he’d said everything he could, he went back up to the porch, to see Deacon’s confused face coming back out of the house.
“Get through to her?” Deacon asked.
Peter nodded solemnly. “There’s going to be a woman coming down,” he said, tomorrow or the next day. “It’s her great aunt, on her mother’s side, a little red-haired older woman that goes by Gen. She’ll be signing the paperwork to take custody of her, and have all the documentation ready.”
A look of shock came over the police supervisor’s face. “Her great aunt? How did you . . .” He trailed off as he realized what Peter was actually telling him, before nodding. “Think you can help her, then? Give her a family?”
Peter looked back at the lonesome girl on the Portage family’s swing set. The poor shifter who’d lost her family, lost her pack. He nodded as he took a drink of beer. “We’re going to try, Deacon. We’re going to try.”