Eric's Edge by Holley Trent Page A

but she was going to be as gentle as she could be for the sakes of those kids.
    Nina’s bottom lip quivered. “Who wants to kill us?”
    “No one, honey.”
    “Maria,” Eric warned.
    She rolled her eyes and took Nina’s hands. “Here’s the thing. Your alpha right now—Gene—he’s not careful. If he thinks you’re going to stop him from getting something that he wants, he won’t think twice about hurting you. He might think that hurting you is a good way to get back at your mommy or to make your cousin Bryan angry.”
    Nina dragged her shirtsleeve across her runny nose, and Maria decided it was a good thing the shirt was going into the trash. She grabbed a paper towel from the counter and handed it to Nina.
    Gabe came out of the bathroom with the bag and dropped what seemed to be the contents of his pockets onto the kitchenette table. He handed the bag to his sister and pushed the shirt closer to her. “Go on.”
    Nina, still sniffling, took the T-shirt and the bag and trudged to the bathroom.
    Dispirited, Maria sorted through the stuff from Gabe’s pockets. The wallet, she discarded—figuring she’d be the one to trash it and not Mr. No-exceptions behind the steering wheel. She put everything from inside, including a couple of pictures of who she guessed was Keely, into a plastic zipper bag, and handed it to Gabe.
    Kneeling, Maria pulled his backpack closer and unzipped all the pockets. There wasn’t much in there, besides—surprisingly—a few changes of underwear and socks in the front pocket, and a bunch of school papers inside the main section.
    Maria held up the socks. “Did you put these in here?”
    Brow furrowed, Gabe shook his head. “No. I never put anything in that pocket. They’re mine, though. I’m pretty sure of it.”
    On a whim, Maria checked Nina’s bag, too.
    There were a few pairs of socks, the same number of underwear, and a couple of girls’ undershirts.
    “Could they have been in here all along?” she asked Gabe.
    “No. We only got those bags when we came up here. Marty took us from home so fast that we didn’t have time to take anything with us.”
    “Huh.”
    “Don’t toss that yet, Maria,” Eric said.
    Duh . She rolled her eyes at him, not that he could see the act with her back turned to the mirror.
    She put all the underthings on the table and pulled out the rest of the stuff in the bags.
    When Nina returned to the sofa and buckled in again, Gabe put his skinny little arm around her and hugged.
    Poor kids.
    It was a damned shame that he thought he had to be Nina’s protector when he wasn’t very much older. At least she had someone to look out for her and protect her moods, though. Maria hadn’t had that as a kid.
    Maria quickly sorted through the notebooks and binders. The binders had canvas covers that were suspiciously bumpy in a couple of places, and not wanting to risk the disfigurements being due to anything but wear and tear, she discarded the notebooks, but kept the papers from inside.
    The papers, she sorted through quickly, scanning for anything with personal information that would need to be handled more carefully.
    She paused at one of Gabe’s science worksheets. It had a low grade and was supposed to have been signed, but it never was. On the back was some scrawling in a handwriting that wasn’t Gabe’s. It looked like random letters and numbers written out on lines like regular text, but insensible.
    She held it up to Gabe. “What is this?”
    He furrowed his brow again. “I dunno. That looks like Marty’s handwriting.”
    “Huh.” She put the paper aside and had a hunch that if she kept looking, she’d find more of that mysterious writing.
    She found one more sheet at the very back of Gabe’s writing journal and another inside Nina’s homework planner—written on the reverse side of a flyer advertising a school fundraiser.
    Setting those three papers aside, she had the kids dump everything else into the bag.
    Eric pulled into a