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“Then we better get to work.”
CHAPTER 6
Deal? What Deal? Did Someone Make a Deal?
Kit felt his gut clench in panic. Fairy deals were slippery, ticking time bombs, and if Coffee really had died with a deal in place, any number of existence-ending disasters could be now on the horizon. Most people made expedient deals. Get me out of this problem, and I’ll give you my firstborn child. Those were personal disasters. Not so fun, but really not his problem. But a get-out-of-dead deal was something bigger. It was long-standing, and it messed with reality. Coffee would have had to give up something big in return. Like the nuclear codes kind of big. No, not like that. Fairies always wanted something weird. Turn people into donkeys weird or spin straw into gold.
Wait, he was mixing stories. He took a deep breath and tried to focus. What kind of fairy deal could Coffee have made? Best guess came down to—save me from death, and I’ll be your servant.
Given that Coffee was privy to a lot of Wulf, Inc. secrets, that could mean havoc on the organization. And it could explain all the weird disasters going on around HQ. Maybe.
Bottom line, they had to find out the details. But Coffee’s room was a disorganized mess of clutter and dust. Five minutes of searching told him that they needed a systematic search.
He looked at Yordan and realized the man was calmly moving in an organized pattern through Coffee’s desk area. It was reassuring, really, and it helped Kit clear his emotions away enough to breathe. Or he did until Yordan looked up at him.
“You’re panicked.”
“No. Maybe. Well, yes. I’m thinking about all the possibilities. Some of them are—”
“Horrifying. I know. But the only way to get more information is to find it.” Yordan clenched his hands into fists. “What the fuck was he thinking?”
“Now who’s panicking?” Kit shot back. It helped to banter a bit. “But randomly going through this disaster area will take hours. We’ll have to do it, but there has to be a better way. You knew him better than I did. Where would Coffee keep something important?”
“The man was a random collection of impulses and trivia. Look around. This was as organized as he got.”
Both their gazes landed on Yordan’s stack of bills. It was the one clear place in the entire room. They both had the same thought as they stepped closer to it.
“Why did you put the money there?” Kit asked.
“It’s where people paid their debts. Always. He had a ritual where they had to—”
“Come to his room to settle their bets. I remember.”
Yordan’s gaze cut to him. “You had a running bet with him, too?”
“Not a running one. Just one, but…” Oh God. It couldn’t be.
Kit felt the blood drain from his face. Holy shit, could that be the source of his problem? All this time, it was a fucking bet with a dead man?
Yordan caught his elbow as he swayed. It was just the contact he needed to find his focus again. But damn it, panic was half a breath away.
“You had a bet,” Yordan confirmed. “Did you pay it off?”
“It wasn’t that kind of bet.”
“It was always that kind of bet.”
Yes, it was. And it explained Kit’s horrifying, debilitating problem. The one that had begun days after Coffee had died. God, he was such an idiot for not thinking of that before. But damn it, who remembered drunken bets?
Meanwhile, Yordan shot him a look that promised to poke deeper into that little problem. Wow, that was going to be painful. But for the moment, Kit was able to distract him.
“If this is the only clean place in the room, then it stands to reason that—”
“He’d keep whatever was vital right here,” Yordan said as he began opening drawers on the dresser. It was the usual collection of underwear, sweats, and novelty T-shirts from every random place Coffee had ever been in. And he’d been in a lot.
“This is just his T-shirt collection,” Kit said. That was the man’s favorite bet with new puppies. How many novelty tees are in my dresser? True or false, I have a tee shirt from a dive bar named Titty Galore Gives Blue Balls. (True.) There was an endless supply of humor surrounding his T-shirts, and he never failed to bring them up with new puppies.
“I know, I know,” Yordan muttered as he systematically searched through the drawers. He pressed into the back and the top, looking for secret compartments or hidden folders. Nada. “It wasn’t that he was chaotic, you know,” he said. “He was a creative thinker, always coming up with random facts and the like.”
