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“To the death. While watching me be with someone else.”
“Are you being obtuse deliberately?Youwent through the fire. I got a look at you with Searle, and yesterday confirmed it. You got the really bad end of that deal.” Garrett leaned his elbow on the table. “Sterling? Don’t let the high stakes and dramatic circumstances color your estimation of how mundane the mission was. The worst he had to do was jerk off in a shared toilet. Mission was a straight-forward fight to the death, pre-arranged time and place, time to prepare, not even hostile territory. Doesn’t merit more than a beer and agood job, this is what you signed up for, punch in, punch out.”
“Sounds like you’ve done it before.”
“Sure. It’s a neat and tidy way to get out of a situation when you can get the other side to agree to it. Not so tidy when you don’t die.Thatcan get a little exciting.”
Right. Alittle. Hopefully Garrett hadn’t ruled out the possibility we may yet have something more exciting on the horizon. “So, whatwouldimpress you?”
Cerys sighed as Garrett had his answer at the ready. “The ultimate challenge:fatherhood.”
Cerys laughed, and I groaned and put my head down on the table. “Garrett. Not again.”
“You need to stop,” Cerys told her husband, trying not to laugh and instead sound severe. Garrett leaned back, looked at his wife, and gestured to me with both hands, as if that explained his entire position.
“Butgrandbabies, Cerys,” Garrett said. “Don’t you want some to play with? Imagine. Pups that we can justhand back. It’s like eating the icing roses off a cake.”
“You eat icing roses?” Yuck. Icing wasfine, but the way so many cakes got heaped with more icing than cake, no thank you. It wascake with icing, noticing on cake.
“Have you been to the grocery stores where they make giant icing roses and sell them?” Garrett cupped his fingers to illustrate the horrifying size of the buttercream monstrosity that could be procured.
Cerys rolled her eyes and glared at him while telling me, “For his birthday, I make his cakes, and I cover them with roses. They’re more buttercream than cake. Inedible by any reasonable standards.”
Sterling set a cup of coffee in front of me, along with a plate of the eggs-from-a-bag and the acceptably crispy bacon, then set his own plate down before sitting next to me. “And his birthday is in a few weeks.”
“I know.” Cerys sighed while Garrett grinned. “What flavor do you want this year?”
“I have to pick? All the flavors. Just pile the roses on top of each other.”
She stabbed his forearm with her fork. He laughed it off. Then paused dramatically and said, “Ow?”
“I see where you get it from,” I told Sterling.
“I swear, Garrett,” Cerys was growling at him, jabbing the fork at him while he watched it with interest, then he picked up his own fork and jabbed at her fork and a fork-war commenced until Cerys threw bacon at him, tossed her head in the most lupine mannerism I’d ever seen from her, and growled to herself.
Garrett picked the bacon off his cheek and ate it.
Sterling turned one of the jelly containers over and smeared the blob over his toast. I picked at my eggs, trying to remember how to be hungry as the past few months slithered out of the box I’d kept it in. Hadn’t realized the box was so full.
“So, what are we doing next?” Garrett asked.
Sterling ate another piece of toast, stacked with some bacon, jelly, and eggs because efficiency. “If I don’t hear from the Elder Council by noon, we’re leaving. We all have better things to do than wait for whatever political screw job they’ll attempt next. They can do it from an inconvenient distance.”
If the SnowFang were really on their way, they’d have arrived hours earlier. Whatever they’d been summoned for, as much as I wanted to see them, I couldn’t allow them to be used as bait. Sterling and I were lone wolves now, not to mention politically complicated, and he now possessing a significant amount of very bloody, dark prestige he had ripped from other wolves the same way he’d given Alan’s spine a new alignment.
And that meant we were fat, easy targets. At best, we’d be tolerated and ignored, but given what I knew, and what he had done, the chances of we’d be allowed to quietly retreat into a nice, boring, human life were zero. We’d hung around because the AmberHowl had asked. It was time to cut bait.
But we hadn’t done so much and come so damn far to end up living on human islands just to survive. I wasnotgoing to accept a life of MoonDark and big cities just to survive, and Iwasn’tgiving that legacy to my children. Not when they were entitled to so much more. I wasn’t depriving them of what they deserved.
It was time to talk to EarthSpine. They’d gotten an invitation this year because of the situation with Anise, and half a dozen had made the long trip, including their Alpha. He still owed us that favor, and perhaps he would be interested in access to the Mortcombe fortune. That’d be a charming political twist of the knife right in the Elder Council’s ribs.
Sterling nudged me. “You’re scheming, pretty wolf.”
I took a bite of my eggs and tasted it this time. “I am. There’s someone I want to talk to before we leave.”
His hazel eyes gleamed like a sharp, polished blade. “What are we going to be discussing?”
“Going into business for ourselves and beating the Elder Council over the head with the Fifth Law. Interested?”
