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Hannah was just an angry newcomer who did everything she could to stay at arm’s-length from the action.
    “I believe that is for you to learn on your own.”
    “You’ve got to give me a little more than that. You can’t just—”
    When the door behind her creaked open, Hannah held her breath until she was certain the newcomer didn’t have a Cougar’s energy. She wasn’t ready to deal with Sean again, arguing with Hank was going to leave her impotently angry, and Mason and his big energy always managed to make her feel insignificant without even trying.
    Cinnamon rolls, green tea, and Foye.
That scent belonged to Miles.
    Miles wrapped her arms around Hannah’s neck and gave her a squeeze. “You did it. Have I told you lately how wonderful you are?”
    Hannah wanted to believe that. Miles always knew the right thing to say, but Hannah knew what a big pain in the ass she was. “Now what?”
    “I don’t know the answer to that, but you’ve made a lot of people happy. The Foyes need Sean as much as Ellery and I need you.”
    “You two have been doing okay without me.” They didn’t need her. They had the guys now, and inscrutable as they were, Mason and Hank were a hell of a lot easier to make sense of than Hannah.
    “Don’t do that. You know it’s not true.”
    “Okay.” Hannah didn’t have the energy to argue. She’d always been the most argumentative one the group—the most defensive. Lately, she’d come to realize it was probably because she had the lowest self-esteem. Her perceptions about how people felt about her were probably skewed, but she could only go by what she knew.
    Change took some doing.
    “It’s going to rain, I believe,” Lola said. “That will probably move the glaring meeting indoors. Before that happens, I want to implore you to go on a mission for me.”
    “Who?” Hannah asked.
    “You.” Miles gave her another squeeze. “I’m the one who let her know you’d reemerged from the basement. She came right over. Mason thought it’d be a good idea to give you something bigger to do.”
    “I already have something to do. I need to track down Ralphie and—”
    “
Pah
. That can wait, or someone else can do that. I need you to do this.” Lola flipped through the pages of her notepad, and stopped at one near the middle. She ripped it out carefully and pushed it across the table.
    Hannah turned it in the right direction to read the address neatly printed on it. “What is this place supposed to be?”
    “Of Mason’s many problems, the most pressing are what?”
    “Um …” Hannah furrowed her brow and mentally ordered all the loose ends her alpha was constantly trying to tie off. “Closing the hellmouth.”
    There was a hole to hell on the Double B ranch. The Foyes had been chasing demons back into it since it’d opened a year ago.
    “Scratch that one,” Miles said. “Ellery’s got that under control. She and her in-laws might get it closed off in the next couple of weeks.”
    Thank the lord, we can all get some rest.
“Okay, then number two would be tracking down the Sheehans.” Obviously, Hannah had a vested interested in doing that herself. She couldn’t take out her revenge on Ralphie—after all, he was still a minor—but she sure as shit could make his big brother hurt.
    “I already told you to drop that one,” Lola said.
    For now.
“All right. Then next would be forming some kind of treaty with the Coyotes so they’ll stay out of private Cougar territory and stop attacking us unprovoked. Number four would be figuring out whether those strange shifters infiltrating the Coyotes were working for the Coyotes to annoy Mason, or if they were working on their own to some other end.”
    They’d encountered the shifters at a glaring meeting the prior month. Unlike Cougars, Coyotes, Wolves, and other animal shifters, they didn’t share a brain with a creature half. They could shift on demand into whatever shapes suited their purposes, and that made them the