“I was trying to help her,” I said. “In my dream. I was trying to help her, but I had no feet.”
Curran reached over. His warm fingers closed over my hand. He squeezed my fingers gently.
“I remember the way Aunt B snarled just before Hibla took her head off. I can replay that snarl in my head over and over. I was a hundred and fifty feet above them. I couldn’t have heard it.”
“Is that the first time you had the dream?”
“No. I should’ve done . . . more.”
“I love you,” he said. “But even if I didn’t, I would still tell you the same thing. There was nothing you could’ve done. Does it help?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you talk to anybody besides me?”
“No.”
“You should talk to someone. The Pack has twelve therapists on our payroll.”
Right. “I’m fine,” I told him. “I just don’t want any of them to die.”
“Any of whom?”
“Clan Bouda.”
He squeezed my fingers again. “Baby, you can’t wrap them in bubble wrap. They’d rip through it and go for your throat. They’re their own people. Ascanio has two alphas and two betas, and a mother, who is, by the way, a licensed Pack therapist. Talk to Martina. It will help. Talking about it always helps.”
“I’ll think about it.”
He kissed my fingers. “If Derek came to you with this, what would you say?”
“I’d tell him to talk to someone and that the Pack has twelve licensed therapists on the payroll.”
I knew exactly what would help. I needed to kill Hibla. After the castle, when we had boarded our ship, half-dead and barely standing, I was too tired to see anything. But Derek had watched the pier and he saw Hibla run up it, her sword bare. She had survived and she watched us leave. Killing her wouldn’t bring Aunt B back, but it needed to be done. I wanted to send a message. If you killed someone I cared about, I would find you and make you pay for it. It didn’t matter where you ran or how well you hid, I would punish you and I would make it so brutal that nobody else would dare to hurt anyone close to me again. I made Jim look for Hibla, but so far we had nothing. For all I knew, she had stayed back in Europe and I would never see her again.
“You don’t have to go alone,” he said. “If you decide to go and you need me, I’ll come with you. I’ll go in with you or I’ll wait by the door until you’re done.”
“Thank you,” I told him, and meant it.
We fell quiet.
“I have to leave in the morning,” Curran said.
He said “I,” not “we.” “Why?”
“Do you remember Gene Monroe?”
I nodded. Gene Monroe’s family owned the Silver Mountain Mine, near Nantahala Gorge. It was one of the primary sources of silver for the southeast. Gene claimed that his family traced its roots all the way to the Melungeons, Spanish Moors who had settled in the area centuries ago trying to escape the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition. Given that some members of his family turned into Iberian wolves, his claim had some credit. Gene was isolationist by nature and difficult to deal with. He ran a small shapeshifter group and although his neighbors had joined the Pack a long time ago, Gene had held out.
“Is he giving us trouble?”
“Not exactly. Apparently once a year the men of their pack gather together and go off into the mountains on a hog hunt. Family and close friends only.”
“You’re been invited?” I guessed.
“Yep.”
“Do they know you hate hunts?”
“I might have neglected to mention it.” Curran turned the wheel to the right, avoiding a pothole the size of a tire filled with luminescent purple goo of unknown origin. “He wants the panacea.”
I hadn’t quite appreciated the extent of Curran’s diplomatic scheming until I watched him work with panacea. The first thing he did upon arriving home from that trip was to pass a law that no shapeshifter at risk of loupism would be denied panacea within the Pack’s territory. As a result, shapeshifter families from all over the country began settling on the border of the Pack’s territory, forming a buffer between us and the outside world. Some waited for formal admission to the Pack. Some simply wanted a short trip across the border if their child began showing signs of loupism. If trouble came, they would fight for the Pack, because we were their only hope. Meanwhile Curran used panacea as both a club and a carrot, plotting, bribing, and dealing to stabilize the Pack and strengthen our defenses. A war was coming and we were doing all we could to prepare.
Thinking about the panacea and the war made me think of my father. I stomped on that thought before it ruined my evening. “So Gene wants the panacea. What do you want?”
“I want him to be choosier about the buyers for his silver. He’s been trading with the Midwest.”
“Roland?” My father’s name rolled off my tongue. So much for not thinking about the bastard.
“His agents.”
Silver was poison to shapeshifters. If my father started buying it in large quantities, he was coming our way and he wouldn’t be bearing gifts. He viewed shapeshifters as a threat. Me, he hated. He’d tried to kill me in the womb, but my mother ran away and sacrificed herself so I could live. My stepfather hid me and over the years honed me into a weapon against my father. I was raised for one purpose: to murder Roland. Unfortunately, my father was a living legend and killing him would be difficult. I’d need a few armored divisions and nuclear support.
Curran grimaced. “Gene won’t like me dictating his business. But I know for a fact that two of his grandchildren went loup at birth, so he will want to deal. That’s what the invitation is about.”
He had to go. Anything that weakened Roland was good for us. Still, I felt uneasy. Ever since the overseas trip, I’d been acutely aware that we’d been living on borrowed time. We didn’t know if Hugh d’Ambray was dead or alive. Personally, dead worked for me, but either way my days of hiding in plain sight were over. Roland would come to investigate who nuked his warlord, sooner rather than later. Every day without him was a gift.
“How long will you be gone?” I asked.
“A day to get there, two days for the hunt, and a day back. I’ll be back by Friday.”
I did some quick calculations. Besides the Pack, Atlanta housed several supernatural factions, of which the People were the most dangerous to us. The People answered to Roland, which was why I’d been doing my best to avoid them. In the past, the Pack and the People nearly drowned Atlanta in a supernatural war over a misunderstanding. Now we met every month at a local restaurant to resolve our conflicts before they spiraled out of control, a meeting imaginatively titled “the Conclave.” Because simply calling it a “monthly get-together” didn’t make everybody feel special enough.
“Leaving tomorrow and coming back on Friday means you’ll be missing the Conclave this Wednesday.” And that meant as the Beast Lord’s Consort, I’d have to lead the Pack’s side of the discussion. I’d rather stab myself with a rusty fork.
He looked at me. “Really? Is the Conclave this week? That’s crazy how it worked out.”
I rolled my eyes.
Curran grinned. He liked sitting through the Conclave meetings about as much as I did.
“It’s been quiet,” he said.
He was right. Today was December third. This was the time the individual clans of the Pack had their year-end meetings. The hunting season was still in full swing and most of the younger, excitable shapeshifters were out of the city chasing after deer and feral hogs and having fun rather than picking fights with the People’s journeymen.
“Jim says over a third of our people are out,” I said. “It’s making him paranoid.”
Curran looked at me. “Making?”
“More than usual.”
Jim was always paranoid, but on our trip to get the panacea, Hugh d’Ambray let it slip that he had a mole on the Pack’s Council. Since that moment Jim’s paranoia level had shot into the stratosphere. He swept the entire Keep for bugs. His people sniffed every square inch of the Council room. He interviewed everyone over and over, until the alphas threatened violence to get it to stop, and when he couldn’t interview them anymore, he tried to have them followed. We almost had a riot. Each individual clan had its own meeting place, and Jim would’ve liked nothing more than to turn them inside out, but nobody would let him in. It was almost Christmas and we still had no idea who was feeding Hugh d’Ambray information. Jim took it personally and it was driving him up the wall.
“When everyone goes hunting, Jim complains about reduced strength,” Curran said. “When everyone comes back for Christmas dinner, he’ll complain that there are too many people and he has to have extra manpower to keep track of them.”
“True.”
Curran shrugged. “The holidays are coming. Nobody wants to fight before Christmas. The People will bitch and moan at us about some minor stuff, then we will bitch and moan at them about some minor stuff, then everybody will eat, drink, and go home. Just don’t kick any of the Masters of the Dead in the face and we’ll be fine.”
“Don’t worry, Your Furriness. I can hold the fort until Friday.”
He paused. A serious note slipped into his voice. “Just stay safe.”
“What could happen to me? With you gone, Jim will go into overdrive, which means I’ll be surrounded by trigger-happy spree killers and guarded like the Hope Diamond. You’re the one leaving to go into the woods with some people we barely know. Are you taking anyone with you?”
“Mahon, Raphael, and Colin Mather,” Curran said.
Alphas of Clan Heavy, Clan Bouda, and Clan Jackal. Nice.
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
With that backup, he could wipe out a small army. “Give my best to Gene. And please let him know that if you don’t come back to me safe and sound, I have no problems mobilizing our shapeshifter horde and invading North Carolina.” And if Gene did anything to hurt him, he would live just long enough to deeply regret it.
The Beast Lord grinned at me. “I doubt it will come to that.”
We drove in silence. I liked sitting next to him. The night outside the car was vast and cold, and he sat warm next to me. If something nasty crossed our path, he’d get out of the car and take it apart. Not that I couldn’t do it myself, but knowing he would be there with me made all the difference in the world. Three years ago, on a night like this I would have been driving my old car home alone, praying it didn’t die a noble death in some snow drift. When I rolled up to the house, it would be dark. My heat would be off to save money, my bed would be cold, and if I wanted to tell someone about my day, I’d have to talk to my sword and pretend it listened. Slayer was an excellent weapon, but it never laughed at my jokes.
“You still haven’t told me what you want for Christmas,” Curran said.
“Time,” I said. “For you and me.” I was so tired living in the glass bowl of the Keep.
“Check the glove compartment?” he asked.
I opened it and pulled out a piece of paper. Cordially invited . . . thank you for your reservation . . . “Is this . . . ?”
“The Black Bear Lodge,” he said.
Two weeks earlier we’d had to go to Jackson County, North Carolina, to remove a loose troll from campus. The Appalachians had a large shapeshifter population and many of their kids went to Western Carolina University. We had stayed at Black Bear Lodge, a newly built timber lodge with good food and cozy rooms with huge fireplaces. We’d spent two glorious days there, hunting the troll, drinking wine in the evening, and making love in a giant soft bed. I wanted to stay so much it almost hurt.