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“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.
“Yup. Fairy deal. Got a fairy name in your books?”
“No. Just a detailed list of outstanding debts.”
“All of which shifted to Gamfay on Coffee’s death.”
“Gamfay?”
“Nickname. Don’t ask. It’s dumb.”
The Scot nodded. “So how is that a Get out of Dead Free card?”
Good question. Yordan held up the diary. “This covers the initial terms between Gamfay and teenage Dwayne. It doesn’t say anything about keeping him from dying.”
Without a word of discussion, the two of them switched notebooks. Yordan got five spiral notebooks (the ones The Scot hadn’t looked at yet). And the boss’s boss got the diary. Ten minutes later, McNabb sighed.
“What?”
“What happens if Coffee misses on his acolyte promise?”
