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“Oh… shit…” I almost dropped my phone.
They lined up.
The lines of the drawings, like the shadows under objects or the plains of grass or walls of rooms, all very crudely lined up like the needles of a compass pointing toFlorida.
Which was the wrong direction for a compass to point, but thatwasn’tthe point.
Was this necklace actually real and was it inFloridaand was I supposed to gofind the damn thing?
Sniff This
Another hour of quick research with Sterling gave me a few other potential swamplands to investigate—the Pantol in South America, the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, some swamp in Louisiana, another in Iran. Getting to any of those would have been some combination of stupidly dangerous and extremely difficult. But it was easy to wander over to werewolf-free Florida, head to the Everglades, and poke around a bit. My chances of bumping into another wolf? Pretty slim. No witnesses. No trouble.
Lots of bugs.
The Everglades was big. And wet. And dangerous because snakes and bugs and gators and Gaia knew what else. Where the hell would I even begin? Did I take Marcella along and see ifherversion of the Gift could sniff this thing out?
And more importantly: what did the bloody thingdo?
I’d learned my lesson about chasing my mother’s dreams and clues across the continent. Those scrolls were a fat lot of what-the-fuck-am-I-supposed-to-do-with-this. This necklace also might be ait’s really pretty, but what does it doscenario.
And I had plenty of jewelry.
I ran my hands over my face.
The door buzzerbzz’d.
I grabbed my phone, hit airplane mode, and shoved it into the strap of my bra under my left arm. MaryAnne came down and around the steps.
“What are you doing?” she asked, eyes narrowing.
“Working.” I pointed at the neatly ordered paperwork I’d pushed around and placed on her desk. “Ready for you.”
Her eyes narrowed a bit more. “What did you just hide?”
“MaryAnne, if I’d just hidden something, it was because Ididn’twant you to know about it. Why would Itellyou?” There were perks to being the insolent, ill-bred Summer of AmberHowl. Mainly, and chiefly, the endless entertainment of meeting the greater pack’s low expectations.
She huffed. “I know you know how to be polite and proper to a fault.”
But I wasn’tatfault, so polite and proper weren’t happening. “And I know you conveniently ‘lost’ a certain mating registration, which remains lost and unconfirmed to this day.”
Now she glared at me. “It wasn’t in the packet.”
“So you lost itoryou forgot to confirm the most basic part of a brideprice demand?” The paperwork, at this point, didn’treallymatter, but I was going to grind MaryAnne’s snout into it all the same. Especially since the lack of paperwork could come back to bite me in the ass in all sorts of fun and entertaining ways if Demetrius and Marcella decided to double cross me come July. It was a point of leverage, and Ireallydidn’t trust they weren’t holding onto it for a reason.
Perhaps Sterling and I were both wrong.Wehadn’t been the rook.AmberHowlhad been the rook. As in the swindler.
MaryAnne headed to her desk and declined to answer. Silence: the last resort of the annoyed werewolf. Keep barking if you liked, but nobody thought you were worth listening to.
I went back to Gaia’s Worst Scavenger Hunt. “MaryAnne, you ever hear of a necklace? In a fairytale or such?”
She scrunched up her face in a frown. “Like a collar?”
“No, a pendant.”
“Earrings, collars, torques, tail rings, yes. A pendant?”
“Like a crystal spear. Like what a human would buy from one of those mystic token scams at the back of a tabloid.”
