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I groaned and hung my head.Fuck.
Marcella cozied up to the table and started to sniff each of the little puzzle pieces. She sorted them into three stacks, with one stack being much larger than the other, and one being only a few pieces. The smallest one was all the sketches of swamp-dreams. Then the slightly larger one was sketches of the necklace on a pillar or some other display, and then the singular sketch of a wolf shaking coins from his coat.
“Sterling.” I pointed out the wolf drawing. “She had several dreams of a wolf-of-silver who shook silver coins from his coat. But that’s the only drawing she ever did of him.”
We sorted through the ones that had no smell, and they shared no resemblance to the ones that did.
MaryAnne came to join us. She pulled at the swamp-dreams and arranged them in a line. “Were you also in a swamp for your dreams?”
“No, the first time I was in a strange, long hallway like…” I looked at the drawings. “Like that, actually… and in the second, a ruined shack.”
MaryAnne bent over the swamp-dream sketches. “There’s a skyline in two of these.”
“What? There is?” Mom had always been in the swamp at night—but in two of them, there appeared to be a distance skyline distinct from the light of the stars, in the distance. Very small and remote, but it was the direction my mother had been headed in.
Marcella indulged in an exasperated temple rub.
“Do you want to come?” Obviously, I was headed off to Florida. There couldn’t be that many thrift shops, pawn shops, tourist-traps, abandoned shacks, and small roadsideview of the three-eyed gatorattractions and museums.
Florida was also relatively easy for a wolf to get into, out of, and move around in. There were no registered packs in the Deep South or Florida, and only one registered pack in the Texas panhandle. Any wolves we bumped intomightbe trouble, but the garden-variety sort of trouble, and not the oh-shit-I-stumbled-into-it-again sort of trouble.
Marcella rolled her neck on her shoulders and let out a long, slow breath. “No. My calendar is full and if I am absent for any length of time, it will invite questions. But I don’t want you to go alone. That is too dangerous.”
“I can take Hamid,” I offered.
“We’ll have Hamid coordinate your travel.” Marcella rolled her neck one final time and looked back at the necklace drawings. She picked one up, then the one with the wolf-of-silver-coins. “We’ll send Sterling. I’ll tell Demetrius to have Sterling leave tonight.”
My heart wentboing!
“Luna,” MaryAnne said. “Searle will have a kitten.”
Searle would, in fact, have a whole damn litter.
“Perhaps send Searle instead?” MaryAnne suggested.
Marcella flicked the silver-coin-wolf drawing. “Searle will be noticed, and this clue says Sterling should be involved.”
MaryAnne grimaced. “Searle won’t be happy.”
“That sounds like a Searle problem,” I muttered.
Marcella nodded. “Agreed. I’m sympathetic to Searle’s emotional plight, but the wolf needs to keep in mind his future with you isn’t promised or set in stone at this point. He needs to be reasonably pragmatic and make space.”
It was the kindest thing Marcella had ever said to me.
“Besides,” Marcella said thoughtfully, “it will give you a chance to get pregnant.”
MaryAnne coughed and I wheezed.
“Not that your chances are very good, but natural is natural, versus frozen alternatives,” Marcella said.
“But silver. And I’ve been shifting—” I shut up because whoops, I’d just confessed to having shifted within the last few weeks after having been explicitly ordered tonotshift.
“I know. You think I don’t know? I know.”
MaryAnne looked at me likestupid, you thought she didn’t know?
“Shifting isn’t idiot proof. Ask Sarah about that,” Marcella added wryly. “And since you’re recovering from silver,andseparated from your mate, that can actually do very strange things to our ovulation patterns.”
