Page 16 of Were-Geeks Save a Kitten

No one thinks you’re a fuckup, least of all me.

McNabb was his boss’s boss. If this had been a simple dressing down by a superior, then Yordan could handle it. It wasn’t the first time the higher-ups had wanted to chew his ass out for one thing or another. But The Scot was a different kind of higher-up.

Apparently, The Scot cared.

No one thinks you’re a fuckup, least of all me.

Yordan shouldn’t need that kind of reassurance. It shouldn’t slide into his gut and make him want to roll belly up, but it did. Not just because of the words but because McNabb had said it.

It was his eyes that clinched the deal. To feel the man’s focused attention was like a strobe light aimed straight at his soul. Yordan wanted it. Damn it, he craved it. But it also left him feeling exposed and so vulnerable that he wanted to run. He knew he had skills above the usual meathead, but damn it, he’d also screwed up. He was much better at pointing out the flaws in other people’s plans than crafting the plan in the first place.

All those thoughts ran through his head while he stood there locking gazes with The Scot. His heart lurched, his lips tingled, and his cock thickened until it was a distracting throb.

He watched the man’s eyes widen as the biological message got through. He saw his nostrils flare as he swallowed. Just how big was The Scot’s dick? Inquiring minds wanted to know. And hands and mouths and ...

He slammed the cage door on all those thoughts so loud he felt the clang. Discipline! Order! It was the only way to survive, and damn it, thinking about banging your boss’s boss was not the way to a successful career. And given that Yordan was nothing without Wulf, Inc., he was not in a position to toy with any of the thoughts that were spinning in his brain. Or suggested by his dick.

And yet, he wasn’t the first one to look away. The Scot suddenly seemed awkward as he lifted the stack of spiral-bound notebooks up between them and tried to speak.

“I’ll read—” His voice came out rusty enough that he had to clear his throat. “Um, these. You—”

“The diary. Yeah. Right.”

Back to business. He should feel relieved. It was what he wanted, right? No.

He dropped down onto Coffee’s unmade bed and tried to focus his thoughts. Fairy deals could have world-ending consequences, right? So he had to get to work. He opened the journal and immediately saw a child’s immature handwriting, complete with jerky words and bad spelling. The first sentence was, This is my birthday dairy.

Yordan forced himself to focus, skimming with increasing speed as he settled into the mind of twelve-year-old Dwayne. Apparently, Dwayne was a spaz—his own word, though the jerky handwriting bore that out. Born to a family of natural werewolves, he was the only one who’d failed to shift. It hadn’t been a problem until his twelfth birthday when his younger brother had his first shift, which was proof positive that poor Dwayne was a retard—again, his word.

His mother, a therapist for paranormals, suggested that whenever Dwayne felt too emotional to handle things, he should write things down in this dairy [sic], and it would help him deal with his feelings. So, the boy did—in huge, emotional swaths of words—before going silent again for weeks. Yordan skimmed through fury at a missed monster truck rally, several fights with his brother the werewolf dick (young Dwayne was not good with clever nicknames), and then the absolute despair when his younger sister went puppy at a sleepover with her best friend.

It legitimately looked like Dwayne was a mundane in a family deeply embedded in werewolf culture. This was a difficult position for any kid, but lots of people found their way. Hell, half of Wulf’s support staff were mundanes who knew about their world without being able to shift. The other half were older werewolves who just didn’t feel like getting feisty anymore.

So young Dwayne went about his own rocky path to acceptance of being less doggy than the rest of his friends and family. Until one day he met a fairy. And not just any kind of fae, but one who apparently loved gambling. Gamfae, according to the really-not-that-clever-with-nicknames Dwayne.

This was where Yordan slowed down his skimming. There was no indication of how the two met. Either one could have sought the other out. But suddenly, young Dwayne was working out the details of a fairy bet. Like everyone else, the kid knew that fairies were tricky creatures, but this one bet seemed like a no-brainer. A simple either-or.

According to the bet, Gamfay (he changed the spelling of the name for some unknown reason) bet that Dwayne would shift in a week’s time; Dwayne bet he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, then the fairy would make the kid into a werewolf.

From Dwayne’s perspective, it was a win-win. No matter what happened, he got to go furry.

Great, but what did the fairy get if the kid shifted on his own? Meaning, what happened if the fairy won the bet?

The now-fifteen Dwayne wasn’t so focused on that information, but he finally got there. If Gamfay won the bet, he got an acolyte. (Dwayne had needed to look up the word. Good thing, because Yordan wasn’t so sure about it either. It meant an assistant or follower.) What it meant in reality was that if Dwayne shifted naturally, he would lose the bet and become a Gamfay slave on Earth.

Yordan shuddered. That didn’t sound good at all, but the young Dwayne didn’t think it was so bad.

Gamfay’s driving addiction was gambling. He’d bet on anything and everything. Didn’t care if he won or lost; he just liked the bet. And he really loved watching mortals gamble. So as Gamfay’s Earth acolyte, Dwayne would make bets with his friends, his family, with everyone and everything. One a day, every day, with allowances for illness.

And then on Dwayne’s death, all outstanding bets would revert to Gamfay. Anything that wasn’t settled fell under fairy terms, which basically meant the fairy got to screw with you until the debt was paid.

Well, shit. No wonder Yordan’s life had been chaos for the last eighteen months. He’d had an outstanding cash debt with Coffee, which then reverted to Gamfay. Was that why he’d been an asshole? He’d have to think about that more later. Right now, the important thing was that his debt was paid. Yordan kept reading, his mind spinning out scenarios even as young Dwayne was caught. The kid took the bet and lost. Not because he made a bad bet. He did not shift naturally the way the rest of his family did. Nope. Dwayne got bit by a lycanthrope an hour before the end of the bet, and poof, he became a werewolf with all the instabilities of lycanthropy.

Yippee. Two years later, Dwayne bit Yordan, and they both ended up in Wulf.

So now they knew the specifics of the fairy bet. Thankfully, Dwayne had been meticulous in recording the bargain with Gamfay. What he hadn’t been was clear on the exact name of the fairy. And names were really, really, really important, especially if one wanted to end the angsty teenager stupidity.

The Scot looked up from his reading. “Got an answer?” he rasped.