“I cannot promise anything yet,” I answered Aiden. “I have to talk to Adam.”
Before he could remind me that I’d given him sanctuary in the first place without talking to Adam, a door opened, and Christy burst into the kitchen. Tears slid down her pretty face, and she furiously wiped them away. She met my eyes, raised her chin, and said, “He is a bastard.”
Adam stalked in after her, temper in every muscle of his body. “Where’s Darryl?” he asked the room in general.
“Outside,” Zee told him. “Perimeter duty.” He must have been listening to what had gone on in the kitchen before he came down.
Adam opened the back door, and said, “Darryl, I have a job for you.”
Christy crossed her arms under her chest and glared at me. “This is your fault,” she said. She uncrossed her arms and wiped her eyes again, with special attention to not smearing her mascara.
I made a neutral sound.
Adam gave a look to Christy, who bit her lip and turned her head away.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t. Darryl?”
The big man slid into the kitchen. “Yes?”
“I need you to take Christy to her apartment and let her pack. Tomorrow, at six in the morning, she’s getting on a plane. You’ll be on it with her. She’ll change airplanes in Seattle for a flight to the Bahamas. You have the choice of waiting four hours for your return flight, which is paid for, or renting a car at the pack’s expense and driving home.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“There was a note pinned to her door this morning,” Adam said. He reached into his back pocket and withdrew an envelope that he’d folded in half.
It was thick paper, the kind that comes with invitations to weddings or graduations. I took out the card inside. It was inscribed by hand by someone with incredibly good penmanship.
It read:
Dear Christina Hauptman,
Please give the attached message to your husband.
I grimaced at the “your husband” part. Christy had thrown Adam away, and she didn’t get him back. I raised the card to my nose. It smelled of Adam, Christy, and very faintly of the ocean and something . . .
“The Fideal,” I said. The Fideal had attacked me, once. I’d run to the pack, and they had driven him off. Cantrip would have classified him as a boogie monster—a creature used to frighten children into being good or staying safe in their beds. That was one way to look at it. I looked upon him and his ilk as a fae analog of the human pedophile, but the fae version usually ate its prey.
Adam nodded. “I smelled him, too.”
“There’s another note?” I asked, putting the first on the table so that everyone could look.
Adam pulled it out of his front pocket and gave it to me. Like the first, it carried the Fideal’s scent. I pulled the card out.
The fae hadn’t bothered with a polite address here, though the fancy paper and the elegant writing were the same.
Adam Hauptman:
Your coyote said that you intend to protect your territory—we can make that promise cost you dearly even unto your last breath. We can bring war and destruction to your territory until not one stone stands upon another, until there is no soul left to cry over your dead.
But we are willing to bargain. You have something we want. Call this number if you are interested in what we have to say.
Like the other note, this one was unsigned.
I frowned. “They don’t say what we have. Do they mean Zee, Aiden, or Tad? Or maybe something entirely different, like the walking stick?”
“Yes,” said Zee. “Or maybe no. They may want you to tell them what you have—or they may not be in agreement.” He sighed. “Getting all the fae to point in the same direction is like herding cats. And once you accomplish that—they are still more likely to stab the person next to them instead of the enemy they face. This might not even be from someone who can bargain for the fae as a whole. It seems . . . more secretive than the Gray Lords usually manage.”
Darryl looked at Adam. “I’ll tell work I’m on vacation for the week.”
“I want to stay here,” Christy said. “I only have two weeks to pack before moving to Oregon. I can’t afford to spend a week in the Bahamas.”
“Here is dangerous for you,” Darryl said, tucking his hand gently under Christy’s elbow. “They’ve already picked you out as a target. You need to be out of town, somewhere you aren’t going to be easy to get to. Auriele and I will help you pack when you get back.”
“Adam and the pack can keep me safe if I moved back in here,” she said. “In the Bahamas, I’ll be all by myself.”
“Adam is going to be hard put to keep himself alive,” I told her, though she was an idiot if she didn’t know it. “The whole of the fae host on the reservation is about to drop on our heads. That’s what this note is all about. And we are out of room in this house.”
She looked at Adam. “Why are they after you?”
What had they been talking about that she didn’t know that? I wondered. Then I saw the temper in Adam’s face, and realized that she knew good and well it was my fault. She just wanted everyone to hear it again.
“Because,” Zee said grimly, before I could admit my guilt to the world, again, “they have friends who are fae, and they are dangerous friends to have. If I were younger, I might apologize.”
“In this case,” Darryl said, “it is smart for you to go and have a free vacation in an island paradise that Adam is paying for.” He tugged her out of the room and talked her out of the house.