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“There’s a downside,” Yordan warned.
Wasn’t there always? “What?”
“When it runs out, it’ll hit you like a ton of bricks.”
“Great.”
“Tell me what’s in Torch Lake, besides the usual?”
“You ever meet Marsha?” She was named after the famous Brady Bunch kid because she’d spent her puppy year caught between two obsessive wolves who had eventually killed each other. Not every werewolf was stable, and she’d gotten the attention of two bad ones.
“The weirdly smart one?”
Kit chuckled. Marsha saw patterns others missed and usually tried to point them out. When she’d first started training, she’d come up with the strangest conspiracy theory bullshit based on random evidence. Most of the time, her ideas had been totally wrong, but as she’d matured, she’d honed that skill. She’d learned to do research—and not the ten minutes on Google kind. And she’d gotten a ton of experience. Her last alpha had warned Kit to never ignore her. Never take her on blind faith either, but take her concerns seriously.
So what had he done? He’d ignored her. Or rather, he’d put her concerns on his list. Way, way, way down at the bottom of the list.
“Marsha told me that her missions were getting more dangerous. Always worse than expected. Always a bit weirder too, and the issue was accelerating.”
Yordan nodded. “That’s probably because of the black hole of death in Wisconsin. It should be easing off now.”
“That’s what I said.”
Yordan frowned. “But you took her off combat and set her on a training run to Torch Lake just to prove her wrong?”
Kit nodded, pleased that Yordan understood what he wasn’t saying. Torch Lake had a lake monster created by a camp counselor and immortalized into song by a folk singer. It was also on a nexus of energy lines, which meant that every few years, the Torch Lake monster manifested. All that energy going into scaring little kids created exactly what they feared.
It wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it was the perfect training ground for new recruits. Entice the serpent creature out of the water, then kill it. Everyone came out covered in slime, but victorious.
“Why is this bad?” Yordan pressed. “What did she bet?”
“It wasn’t a bet. It was a curse phrased as a bet.”
They’d made it to the helipad in record time. Their gear was just being tossed in the back, and they both pulled on helmets and strapped in like the pros they were. And if Kit snuck a peek at Yordan’s ripple of muscles, broad shoulders, and tight ass, then who was to blame him? He couldn’t be all panic all the time.
Two minutes later, they were in the air. Kit had started flying helicopters when he was a boy in Scotland. Putting this one into the air was a sweet joy, even if the thing was a little rickety and desperately needed a few dozen replacement parts. That was why it was the only one available. The others were already deployed.
Meanwhile, Yordan brought him back to business. “What was the curse?”
“That Marsha would face increasingly hard monsters until she admitted to Coffee that he was cute.”
Yordan groaned. “She’d never say that.”
“Exactly. She bet him that he didn’t have the strength of will to make a curse stick. Which we now know he did because Coffee was backed by fairy magic.”
“So, Marsha’s taken a bunch of puppies up north to fight—”
“The Torch Lake monster.”
“Do we know which monster it is?”
“Nope.” The Torch Lake monster had two manifestations—a huge, slimy, lizard dragon or a huge, slimy, panther dragon. The difference was in the face and sometimes in how the creature attacked. The lizard spewed scalding water out of its mouth. The panther used claws to trap before biting off the victim’s head. It was all part of the fun of monster manifestations.
Yordan’s fingers tapped nervously on his thigh. He was either thinking hard or a nervous flyer. Or both.
“How good are the puppies?”
Kit shot a look of mea culpa at Yordan. “They’re new geeks. This was supposed to be their one and only mission before setting up in research and development.”
