Jambalaya calling, I resisted the urge to sit and waited for the others to do so. When they had, I cleared my throat. "You're all probably starving. I understand completely. The problem is, we need to have a conversation while we eat. Can we do that?"
A bunch of nodding took place. If anyone didn't agree, I missed it. I popped lid off the pot and quickly served the kids, blowing on it and stirring four little bowls to make sure they didn't burn their mouths. Tommy took care of himself, though Gabe was the one who ladled his dinner out for him.
The one empty chair at the table reminded me why I wasn't eating with the rest of them.
"We have a problem," I said, simple and clear.
Gabe shook his head. "It isn't much of a problem if she's left. Last sighting by the crows was at High Branch and they've been following Alashia's flight everywhere."
"If they've been following her everywhere, why didn't they warn us?"
It was Xav who spoke up. "Maybe there was an illusion. Dragons are pretty damned good at magic, Sadie. And they're tricky shifters. All she had to do was go blend into a crowd as a human for a while, then use a spell to send herself elsewhere."
"Can they do that?" Lillian asked. "I've dated dragons in the past. I've never seen them do that."
He rolled his eyes. "Yeah, you were so trustworthy back then that he definitely revealed all the secrets of his flight to you." As Lillian glared at him, Xav continued. "I've heard a lot of rumors about what they can and can't do. I'd be willing to believe most anything I hear. They're really smart. They're really strong. And they've got a lot over us if they're in their animal form."
"Not in dragon form?" I frowned.
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "Who knows? As humans, I'd expect them to be able to tap into their powers. And most of them don't really like their human forms. Not the ones I've known. You'd be hard put to get her to shapeshift."
My mind ran that over a few times. But what if we could? If we could force her into human shape, could we keep her from shifting back? What if we pinned her down somewhere and handed her over to the government? Rumor had it that terrible things waited for people like us, but I'd noticed something.
The government hadn't made a public statement. And they'd had major machinery waiting nearby when the Nightflight kicked things off. Worse, they'd stuck around and kept prowling the streets, looking for a reason to investigate. It was all over the news. It wasn't as if people's houses were being invaded for poor reasons, or that major weaponry was rolling through small town America, but it didn't sit right with me.
Being a werewolf had been a confusing situation to begin with. I'd gotten used to it, even maybe as much as looked forward to running through the woods on my paws. Had I run into a situation like this when I'd been human? Gosh, I'd have been scared out of my mind.
I couldn't imagine what the plain humans were going through when they saw the things of legends in the skies.
"If it's possible, if we could get her stuck, that might be enough to get her and the rest of her flight somewhere else. Maybe we could even entrap them in that fairy land?"
Jeremiah shuddered. "Blackstalk Keep isn't somewhere you send someone. Doesn't matter what they've done to you."
"Why?" I said, finally taking my seat. We had the beginnings of a plan and that pot was calling to me.
The unicorn thought for a bit before he spoke. "It's wrong to send people into a place like that. You ever seen The Princess Bride?"
"Yeah, of course."
"You know that scene where they suck the life out of Westley with that weird machine?"
That took me a moment. I hadn't seen the movie for years, though I was about to change that after dinner. "With the little black suction cups on the sides of his head?"
"That. It's like that, except it's something that you don't realize. You sit down and suddenly you're too exhausted to move. You rest for a little while only to wake up with grey hairs. You try and you don't understand until someone tells you. And usually? When you get it? You're too weak to get out of there, too tired and too sick to escape."
Well, put that way I understood why he didn't want to do it to anyone, even a dragoness that was terrifying innocent humans. I slipped my spoon into my mouth and savored all that heat. When winter hit, that stuff was going to be worth its weight in gold. "What if someone were to lure Eskal and his flight out of the- you called them the Blackstalk Keep?"
"I called it the Blackstalk Keep, yes. It's a domain in a pocket of space and time. It's not actually of our plain."
Yeah, I didn't follow that. I looked back at Gabe and raised my brows. He swallowed what he'd just taken a bite of. "Like alternate reality, but linked up to ours."
"Okay. That still doesn't make much sense, but I kind of get the idea. Sort of like how they do it in comic books?" I asked.
I was met by a thousand confused looks until I saw Leo nodding out of the corner of my vision. "A lot like multi-verse theory. I don't know a lot about the fairies, but they tend to be like our next-door neighbors."
"We're leaving someone out of this," Gabe finally said.
My heart dropped. "I know, but it's not like he's up for any of this. You wanna go talk to him about it tonight? We can make the attempt, I guess, but without prior notice I don't know if Doctor Ioane would be up for all of us showing up. It's one thing to go in the midst of an emergency, it's another to just pop in and ask to see your mate."
"I can do that so long as no one will miss me," he said, giving me a guilt-tripping look.
My lips curved into a smile. "Never in a million years. Go talk to Hudson. See what he thinks, if he's lucid. Tell him we love him. As for the rest of us, who was that bear you were all talking about? Aberdeen?"
"Aberdeen was a decent guy until one of his people went rabid-" Jeremiah started.
I nodded. "Right. Him. What if we offered him amnesty? What if we were willing to take all of his people out of the Blackstalk Keep and bring them home where they belong?"
"A shifter relocation program with forgiveness for past mistakes?" Xavion asked, tilting his head to one side.
"Exactly that. For a price. He helps us get to the Nightflight. And he helps us take them down."
Chapter Ten
Gabe
My stomach still warm from dinner, I headed out into the coldest night yet; though there would be far colder to come. We'd be well into the autumn by the time Hudson was going to be home and that didn't sit right with me.
It wasn't as if I didn't trust Sadie. I loved her with all my heart, but she was out of her depth. There were too many alphas that weren't going to listen to an omega, no matter how rational and sound her logic was. There were too many omegas who would seek to put her down and tell her to listen to the alphas. In shifter communities around the world, Tommy would outrank her and he was just a kid.
The car grumbled to life, complaining about going out so late, and I spun a three-point turn to head out into the dark, alone.
But my cousin needed to know what was going on. And I needed to have a frank discussion with his caregivers. I didn't want Hudson to come back and put Sadie down.
I just didn't want to risk Sadie in a leadership position. If she'd already been taken down once by a dragon's alpha presence, what would happen when it came to blows? My mind wandered as I drove, sighing over everything. She was our mate and a mom. She was a hell of an impressive Fontaine Feeds employee and organizer. I was proud of her, I swear it, but if Hudson hadn't been able to hold off a pissed-off dragon, she wouldn't either.
Mind you, I wasn't so sure that any of us could if we were alone in the battle. But I supposed that's why Sadie was rallying the troops and trying to get everyone organized. She saw the opportunity; she knew what was likely to happen. I just couldn't believe that she really understood the depth of it all. Humanity was already hunting the dragons. What happened if they showed up on our doorstep next?
Humans, as a whole, didn't take well to surprises. Neither did I. Safety
, security, the quiet life? That's what I wanted, but I didn't seem to be getting there any time soon. No, instead I was bound to watch my mate suffer under the eye of alphas because she was too stubborn to quit, and because I was too stupid to stop her.
Grinding my teeth so hard my jaw ached, I pulled into the vet's office and walked up to the front door. "Open the door or I'll huff and puff and blow it in."
"Hilarious," Ioane sighed as he answered. "Your pack mate isn't well tonight. He can't keep food down, even when it's tubed to him. I-" He looked around behind me and flicked his tongue over one of his eyes. "Where are the rest?"
I shook my head. "Just me tonight. What do you mean, he isn't well? You don't bother to give us an update and you greet me at the door with-"
No, I shoved past him. Hudson would be fine. He was my cousin, practically my brother in every sense of the word. I stalked back to the kennels but was greeted with a shepherd in its place. I walked down the line and found only dogs, no wolves. Ioane walked past the open door and into a treatment room, where one of his nurses cursed under her breath. I followed him.
Hudson, still a wolf and thin as a string, lay flat on the table. His eyes were glassy and tired. I cupped my hands underneath his head, but he didn't recognize me. "What's happening?"
"The wolf is not made for care like this. He needs a hospital," Ioane snapped, picking up the end of the tube and connecting it to a syringe.
Slowly, they forced the dark goop into the tube and down it went. After it, he flushed it with water. Hudson shuddered, kept it down for a moment, then a trickle of it poured from the side of his muzzle. There was no retching, no flailing, simply total rejection of the stuff they were trying to shove into him. I pinched the tube closed and pushed the bottom of his snout up, but there was a gurgle in his guts and he rejected it into his throat.
Ioane pushed me out of the way as a torrent of fluid came up from my cousin, splattering across the floor. "The medication doesn't work. Nothing is working. You have two choices, Gabriel. Let him die here, or take him to a human hospital. Don't you people have pills to change him back?"
The fucking Pact. My cousin lay dying and his doctor was still worried about it. Fury burned through me but I crushed it down. "I don't know if he's strong enough to deal with that. Why can't you fix him? You've always patched us up, ever since Xav-"
"Xavion was a different situation. This is massive trauma that is not responding to the medication I have available to me. Exploratory surgery has found nothing. Your cousin is crashing and the humans have the only hospitals in this worthless world."
I was never without the pills to turn us back into humans. There was so much stress that it was likely someone was going to break out into their fur around the normies, eventually, and cause all sorts of problems. I fingered the bottle in my pocket and looked back at Ioane. "Do you think he can keep the pill down long enough?"
"I can crush it, force it down his throat in the tube. He's been keeping down water, for the most part. I think he's just losing gut motility. And with that comes death, Gabriel. He's not going to make it here."
There was regret in the gecko's voice, but steel behind it. We had only two choices: risk taking Hudson to a human hospital, where I had no doubt that his improvement would be well documented, or let him die on a veterinarian's table. I ran my fingers back through my hair and watched my cousin's unsteady breaths. Tension grew in me like a yarn being knitted. My teeth sharpened and I let out a breath.
I thrust the pills at Ioane. "Be gentle with him. He's the only Hudson we've got. And we love him."
"I would do nothing else," the gecko promised me. "War is coming. We need a leader."
We had a leader. I left without saying as much, but one person had been trying to unite those of us who were left. One person, an omega, had been trying to speak sense to the rest of us. It wasn't working yet, but that's because she didn't have alphas backing her up publicly. That had to change.
Outside, the night was alive with sounds and scents. Prey wandered through the area, uninterested or not at all threatened by the presence of an apex predator like myself. Did they smell Hudson within, did they know what we were? I wished I could ask some of the prey shifters I knew, but they always got irritable about it. Timmy, one of Jeremiah's herd members, had threatened to crack a bottle of whiskey over my head one night.
By Her Light, that seemed like a thousand years ago. I rubbed my face and pulled my phone from my pocket. The phoenixes had chosen a side, as had Alashia's flight. But there were others, so many others that I could speak with. Ioane and the other small lizard shifters we knew would probably throw in. They'd be perfect for running messages and taking care of spy stuff. The corvids had stayed and I assumed they would remain as well. I knew where the Magnolia Hills herd of unicorns stood, because they were at my house right this second.
The Bloodfang pride worried me. I ran my finger over Darien's number but didn't tap it. The tiger was a good man, but he hadn't contacted me. Was he waiting to speak with Sadie directly? Hudson? The cats were aloof at best, but sometimes they waited to see which way the world bounced before declaring their alliance.
Not that we'd had this sort of conflict for a long, long time. But it was still worth noting their hesitation.
I pressed the button. The phone rang eight times before someone picked up, a woman's voice drowsy with sleep and sex. "Hello?"
"Maria?"
"Gabe?"
Oh, that was awkward. I cleared my throat. "Hey so, how're you?"
"You filthy fucker I-"
There were curses in the background. I turned pink, though I knew no one saw me nor could they hear the conversation. What a day for an ex to get involved with another Pact member. After a moment, Darien chuckled across the phone. "At least I know what you saw in her. It's late, Fontaine. What is it?"
"You treating her well?" I asked, unable to keep from it. I had never been in love with her, but I still cared.
Darien yawned. "Course I am. She's a whole armful of sweet. This the call I'm expecting? About your mate and everything else going on?"
"Might be."
Something fizzed on the other end. Either he was doing drugs or he'd just thrown an Alka-Seltzer in a cup and it was even odds as to which one it was. "I expected it from Leo. Maybe Xav. Not you. How's Hudson? How's Sadie dealing with that shit over in High Branch?"
"They got the animals out and no people were hurt. She can replace anything else. Leo and Xav are busy," I told him, excusing the fact that they were probably busy licking whipped cream off Sadie's belly and making her squirm. Ah, jealousy. "We need to know where you stand, man. If you're not going to back us, if you're going to head over with the dragons. What's up?"
"Haven't talked to the pride much yet," he admitted. "It's a fuckin mess whatever we do. From the look of it, your mate's not responsible for it. Just that big bitch of a dragon. You interested in some kind of terms or a meet up, maybe? There's a diner open not far from our place."
I rubbed my temples. Fuck. "I'm over here with Huds at Ioane's clinic. He might be dying. We've gotta get him to a hospital before I could meet you somewhere."
"You give me twenty minutes, I'll be at your front door."
That surprised me. I raised a brow at the phone and hit the button for a video call. Darien allowed it. The big cat was human form, his outline barely visible in his room, his eyes feline and dark green. I frowned at him. "You sure you're up for a drive like that? Last I knew, your night vision got trashed by-"
"If I offer something like that, I'm not doing it for my health. You want me there, I'll be there. We stand together with shit like this."
I nodded after a second. "If you don't mind coming, I'd appreciate it."
"Twenty minutes."
Darien hung up and I sat down on the steps into the clinic, stretching my legs out and thinking it through. Maybe he'd had that laser eye surgery stuff done since he'd been hurt, but I didn't think that laser therapy would remove shards
of silver. I looked back at the clinic and realized all I could do was wait. If we were going to move Hudson, he couldn't do it until he'd completely shifted.
In the state my cousin was in, that might take a while.
I hadn't smoked in years, but I kept a cigarette or two on me all the same. It was a perfect reminder of what I'd been and how much strength I was capable of. But in that dark night, with so much wrong, I pulled one of the cigarettes out and popped the filter end into my mouth.
I didn't light it, but its weight and the feel of my lips around it was a comfort. They say that former nicotine junkies like me tend to chew our fingernails and the tops of pens while we're thinking because we're used to something between our lips. In a world where pens are almost never used in business, except when signing contracts, and my fingernails had to be spotless? Yeah, that wasn't going to work.
Puppy Problems: A Reverse Harem Werewolf Romance (Her Secret Menagerie Book 3) Page 9