CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY NINE

“You go first,” Jasper snaps at the other shifter who has just burst into our motel room.

“Why me? You go first.”

“I don’t care who goes first,” I shout, “just as long as one of you tells me what’s actually going on here.”

“Fine,” Jasper sighs, sitting down on the other bed, refusing to look at me or the other shifter. “That’s Zach Whismore. He’s my cousin.”

“Though you wouldn’t know it,” Zach grumbles, “based on the fact that you ran off and abandoned the family.”

“I did what I had to do,” Jasper snaps. “I was trying to protect you.”

Zach snorts. “Some protection you offered, running around in California being a mercenary. Do you know how many more of us have been killed since you disappeared?”

Color rises in Jasper’s cheeks again, and he clenches his fists against the motel bedsheets. “What makes you think me sticking around would have stopped any of that?”

“Well now we’ll never know,” Zach huffs.

“Okay, okay,” I say. “I hate to interrupt whatever weird fam