Page 18 of Were-Geeks Save a Kitten

Yordan gasped. “No! No, we don’t! That always makes it worse!”

The Scot sucked in a breath and nodded. “You’re right,” he muttered. So he carefully scratched out the word “We” and replaced it with “I.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Yordan grumbled, though it was too late. The Scot was already well on his way to repeating the same mistake that had created Wulf, Inc.’s special habit of insanity. Apparently, “Never Make Fairy Deals” actually meant “We Always Make Fairy Deals When We’re Desperate.”

“It’s my risk alone,” McNabb grumbled.

“I’m sure that’s exactly what Coffee thought. And Nero. And Bruce.” He continued listing off the wolves he knew who had made simple, clean, desperate fairy deals and ended up nearly destroying the world several times over.

But it didn’t matter because Gamfay was answering.

Prove you’re worth my time first.

“Fuck you,” Yordan answered just as McNabb scrawled.

How?

Collect the rest of my debts. Then we can wager on Dwayne’s continued existence.

Yordan’s breath caught. “He’s alive?”

Apparently the fairy didn’t need the words to be written out because he answered.

He isn’t dead.

Which didn’t necessarily mean he was alive either, but it was a glimmer of hope. And that was all Yordan needed. He snatched the book from McNabb’s hand. The Scotsman was way too important to Wulf, Inc. to risk himself. Whereas Yordan could get screwed over by a fairy deal and no one would care.

Deal, he wrote. Then he signed his own name to it and felt the weight of the magic settle on his shoulders. Only to have The Scot grab his hand.

“Are you fucking crazy?” he demanded.

No. Just desperate. Just really fucking desperate for a reason he couldn’t even name.

“Uh-uh,” McNabb said as he snatched the journal back. “As your superior officer, this lands on me.” Then he scrawled his own name at the bottom and went to draw a big, dark line through Yordan’s name.

Except, true to the fact of all fairies being assholes, the pen abruptly stopped working. Both their names were now writ big and bold right at the bottom of the page.

“Fuck,” McNabb muttered. “That’s not what I intended at all.”

Which was what always happened whenever some idiot made a fairy deal.

Chapter 8

Werewolf Captain America?

Kit groaned when he saw both their names in bold letters at the bottom of the page. He’d meant to spare Yordan this task. He knew how close Yordan and Coffee were. Hadn’t he just walked in on the guy sobbing out grief that had been churning inside him for nearly two years? It was not Yordan’s task to fix Coffee’s screw-up. It was Kit’s as head of all the combat packs.

But now, they were both tied into this disaster, and they had better start working on it now.

Fortunately, he knew just the person to help. If he ever needed something to be handled super quick, he called on Pee. Her name was actually Serena Chin. She was a Chinese werewolf whose magic somehow made her work at twice normal human speed. And that was on a slow day. She’d picked the name Speedy Gonzales, which her friends shortened to Pee because packmates could be obnoxious.

He grabbed his cell phone and typed his first email to her. The second went company-wide, saying that any debts to Coffee were now held by a fairy. All forfeits must be dispatched immediately to Pee or suffer the consequences. He didn’t bother to spell out the threat. Everyone knew that fairies could be real assholes.

Serena was in the room before he hit send on the second email. Her eyes were bright, her expression calm. One might even call her inscrutable if it weren’t for her mouth that perpetually quirked into a half smile. As if she knew something funny but wasn’t going to share. Which she probably did. Also, because she was busy, not inscrutable.

He shoved the diary at her without a word. Yordan was already going through the spiral notebooks. They had to figure out who owed what and get all debts resolved ASAP.

It took Pee all of two minutes before she looked up and said, “You two are idiots.”