Of Wolf and Peace (Providence Paranormal College Book 3)

by D. R. Perry

  “The ocean.” I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “The float. Selkies.” I stared down at the gnome. “Fine. You take Maddie and get out of here. Do your thing.”

  Gee Nome giggled, clapping their hands as they hopped from one foot to the other. Then, they snapped their fingers. They and Maddie vanished with a louder pop than before.

  “I wonder what a Gnome needs an Umbral magus for, anyway.” Blaine scratched his head. “Especially one powerful enough to Vanish a full-grown person.”

  “They weren't that powerful before.” Henry shook his head.

  “Guess he leveled up, then.” Blaine sighed. “Anyway, we need to decide what to ask the ex-Spite. Let’s write some ideas down.” He got paper and a pen from the desk on the other side of the room, then brought it back to the bar and sat.

  We worked on ideas for about an hour when Lynn sent a text. I turned on the TV, then used the remote to navigate away from all the streaming services and get to the Internet browser. The files Lynn had sent would be easier to share on the big screen. I selected the first one.

  “Huh.” Henry stepped forward, pointing to the date. “I remember hearing rumors about this. A Kelpie died with no relatives who could take the pelt. Why are all those spots blacked out?”

  “Redacted records.” I selected the next one, showing Henry more of the same. “Either someone in this case is still around, or someone pulled major strings to keep it covered.”

  “It says over there that the pelt got sent to an appropriate custodian for storage.” Henry scratched his head. “That sounds familiar.”

  “It should, Memory Man.” Blaine sighed, practically collapsing into the easy chair behind him. “The Queen said that about my mom.”

  “So this isn’t your mom’s first Kelpie pelt rodeo, huh?” I punched Blaine’s shoulder. “Come on, man. It’s actually a good thing you have an idea. Otherwise, all this black magic marker redaction crap would just be a dead end.”

  “No, it’s not good. And it really is just an idea until I can check the hoard inventory.” Blaine leaned his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands.

  “Wait. Let me look at the rest of the files Lynn sent.” Henry held his hand out for the remote. I gave it to him. He scrolled through. “Okay, look. This one here, it’s out of place. There’s a missing page.”

  “Well, Lynn says she sent them all.”

  “Figures. She’s thorough.” Henry nodded. “But the missing page can only be the form that tells who has a claim on the item and where it is. Since that’s gone, someone influential must have covered this up.”

  “Leaping Luna!” A surge of hope flooded my heart. “That means there’s another pelt out there. If we had another church-key, we could switch them.”

  “So not only do you want me to check the hoard inventory, you want me to steal from it?” Blaine froze, the tension in his muscles making him look almost like a statue. “From my own mother?”

  “Well, if this was your mate, wouldn’t you do it?”

  “That’s kind of my point, Josh. She isn’t my mate. She’s yours.” His narrowed eyes gleamed with some hard emotion. “You want a switcheroo, you do it.”

  “Look, we still don’t even know if the pelt’s there.” Henry’s levelheadedness came to the rescue again. “We also don’t know if that’s what the Queen’s going to want. We need to call the Sprite, and Blaine needs to check the inventory before we even know what’s probable. Why not start there?”

  “Makes sense.” I held out my right hand at Blaine. “I promise not to ask you to actually take anything from the hoard. But I have another idea. Just check the inventory while I talk to the Queen’s angry ex-servant.”

  “Fine. I need a hardwired Internet connection, though.”

  “Sure, no problem.” I showed him the modem, and he plugged in.

  Henry murmured something under his breath. A few moments later, a short, lanky figure crawled out from under the pool table. Unlike most others of its kind, this Sprite had lines around their eyes and extra hollowness below the cheekbones. The biggest difference was their wings. The bones were there, but only tattered remnants hung where bright windows should have been.

  “The Son of Dennis wishes to ask his final question?” The Sprite peered up at me, then glanced at Henry and nodded.

  “Yes. You know how the Queen has Nox. She’s going to put her on trial, and she’s going to be guilty.”

  “I know. I also know the Tanuki is her solicitor.”

  “Yup. So, in light of all that, what’s the Queen going to sentence Nox with?”

  “An enchantment of equal importance to the one she broke.” The Sprite sighed, shaking their head. “For a Kelpie, that would mean she must surrender a pelt. She’s lucky she’s not Psychic or human. Otherwise, it’d be her life.”

  “I can’t believe Ichiro couldn’t get the charges dropped or negotiate something else.”

  “The Queen doesn’t drop charges.”

  “Nox is my mate. I have to do whatever I can to save her.”

  “She will be saved. She will walk away from the trial alive.”

  “No, she’ll only be half-alive without that pelt.”

  “Alive all the same,” the Sprite fluttered one hand at their ruined wings.

  “I understand.” I sighed. “But that’s not good enough for me.”

  “Wait. The lemon-lime soda said something interesting.” Blaine looked over his shoulder. “The Queen will demand a pelt. Not Nox’s, specifically. You don’t have to do anything secret about switching it. It’d be totally in the rules to give her a different one. The Queen couldn’t complain. And yeah, the one from the form is in the hoard all right. All I have to do is convince my mom to hand that one over instead of Nox’s. She hates how the Queen orders her around. I bet she’d help just to stick it to her.”

  “Hey now, wait a minute.” Henry shook his head. “There’s one thing we didn’t think about in all this. What about the actual owners of that other pelt? Are they around somewhere? I mean, we can’t tell from all these redacted documents.”

  “If giving the pelt to the Queen would save Maddie, would you do it?”

  “Not if that meant some other family would lose what’s rightfully theirs. Maddie wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing. Do you think Nox would?”

  I sighed, at an impasse. I looked from Henry, the angel on my shoulder, to devilish Blaine. Both sets of eyes pleaded with me to do what each considered the right thing. I tapped one foot on the indoor-outdoor carpeting, unable to decide. I reached into my pocket, intending to just flip a coin and let luck decide. My phone buzzed. I flipped it over to find a message from a number I’d never seen before. I opened it.

  Need help? ~K The end of the message was a string of emoji I couldn’t decipher.

  “What’s this say?” I handed the phone to Blaine because Henry had a snowball’s chance in Hell of translating that.

  “Huh.” Blaine smirked. “Is this K person a Psychic or something? Dog, bat, fire, an airplane and a castle on one line. After that, fangs, paper, a white house, an angel, and a raccoon.” He handed the phone back. “They’d better be Psychic, or I’ll think your basement’s bugged.”

  “Nope, Tanuki.” I pulled the quarter I no longer had to use from my pocket. “I was just about to flip this to decide things. Luck.”

  “Well, that explains a lot.” Henry nodded. “All this was fallout from that lucky float. Blaine found it. I touched it, Nox used it. Your friend K must have been at the Temple tonight. I say we follow her instructions.”

  “Even though she’s telling Blaine and me to head over to Newport and you to meet her about a paper?”

  “I trusted Luck before, and it turned out for me. I’ll trust it again.” Henry let his arms drop to his sides, though his forehead was still all furrowed. “If she’s got proof the family attached to that other pelt is all gone, no one can object to us letting the Queen have it.”

  “Look, man, if w
e had more time I’d wait until you verified it.” I shook my head. “But Tanuki know what they’re doing. If she says we have to work on things at the same time, then that’s how we should play it.”

  “But aren’t Tanuki supposed to be kinda shady?” Blaine raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I really want to see my mom get off her designer couch and actually do something for a change, but is this particular gal one we should trust?”

  “You know the lawyer representing Nox?” Henry waited until Blaine nodded. “She’s his daughter. Annoying, but I think she genuinely wants to help.”

  “If it’s good enough for the dead guy, it’s good enough for me.”

  “That’s undead to you, Trogdor.” Henry gave Blaine a sideways look. Then, they both chuckled. “Okay, let’s get out of here. Where am I supposed to meet this Tanuki?”

  “Her dad’s house.” I scrawled an address on a napkin, knowing how navigating by smartphones was a bitch for vampires. “That’s what the house and the angel meant. It’s on Angell Street. Let’s head out.”

  Henry took the napkin and followed Blaine and me out the door that led to the side of the house. The vampire amped up his speed with blood, heading around the house and out of sight in a breath. Blaine and I walked at a more sedate pace toward the expanse of grass at the back of my family’s property.

  “Is this enough room?” I eyed the space. We used to play soccer on it back when Derek and Beth were still in High School. I had no idea how big Blaine was in dragon form.

  “It’ll do.” He puffed out a smoke ring. “You’d better get in front of me, though.”

  I stepped around and turned my back. Instead of the expected rustle of fabric to indicate he’d disrobed, I heard a series of rips and pops. The rich ass bastard had just shredded his clothes shifting. I could have afforded that myself, but never did unless it was a huge emergency. The Harcourts sure seemed to have brought Blaine up with weird priorities.

  I turned around to see a red and orange scaled reptilian face staring back at me with red eyes and vertical pupils. He jerked one thumb-like claw at a spot on his neck. Pretty obvious he wanted me to get up there and hang on all the way to Newport. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of freezing, but when I climbed on, I was surprised to find his leathery skin hot to the touch, like someone with a high fever. I remembered something from class about dragon shifters not actually being reptiles, more like echidna and the platypus. Before I could recall it all, Blaine leapt into the air.

  It was easy enough for me while he ascended. That seemed to take forever and felt like gravity had a hand pressing down on my back. During the descent, the wind tried to knock me off like I was on the ropes at a Royal Rumble. I felt movement behind me as Blaine tilted his wings. We coasted, and the wind resistance got more tolerable. Still, by the time we landed, my nails were blunted, my shoulders stiff, and my knuckles white.

  The outside of the Harcourt mansion was white marble, all lit up with floodlights. Blaine had landed near a gazebo. I turned when he shifted, waiting until I heard a hollow thunk of wood followed by rustling fabric. When I turned around, he was fully dressed and already striding across the lawn to the house. I shrugged and followed, ignoring the rudeness. At least it wasn’t like I’d need directions or anything. The mansion was obvious.

  The entrance was even more ostentatious than the one at my house. Everything was huge, of course. Blaine could have gotten in without shifting if he’d really wanted to, though everyone in the house would have heard him coming. As it was, I made more noise than him, the soles of my combat boots a hollow counterpoint to the soft sound of his bare feet.

  I swallowed, increasing my pace to catch up with him. I reached one hand out to his shoulder, about to stop him and call things off. Nox wouldn’t be okay with what we were doing. Making a magical pelt, pieces of some other family’s ancestors, pay the price for her own actions was something she might not want to do. I couldn’t think of any reason the Sidhe Queen would want an Unseelie magical item unless she intended to destroy it. Nox wouldn’t stand by and let that happen.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Blaine increased his pace, escaping my imminent grasp, “about a man and a woman very much in love.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just shut up and listen, Beowulf.” Blaine sighed. “Fine, I’ll give you the purple-proseless version. The Queen and the King had a hard time making babies, so they adopted mortals to carry pieces of their power, passed down through generations by blood or trinket. That was where Selkies and Kelpies came from, along with a few other things long since extinct.

  "But some mortals got powers of their own. The Queen governed with a strict hand and swift punishments. The King tested with guidelines and reinforcement. They fought, cut their kingdom in half. The King got custody of all the children who carried his magic, likewise for the Queen. But the grandchildren didn’t always choose the same way, except the Selkies and the Kelpies.”

  “Okay, so that’s why a Redcap or a Sidhe or a Goblin can choose courts and a Kelpie’s always Unseelie.”

  “Yup. The pelts can’t switch sides because the power’s not genetic.” Blaine sighed. “But all Faerie creatures are like kids to the monarchs, so she’d never destroy a Kelpie pelt. She’d just keep it.”

  “So this is more like a custody battle in a messy divorce than offering up a lamb to the slaughter?”

  “Exactly.” Blaine turned his head, raising an eyebrow. “Feel better?”

  “Almost.” I tapped the phone clipped to my belt. “I wish they’d find something and text.”

  “Look, nothing in this world is perfect.” Blaine stopped, so I did, too. We faced each other in front of a door that could have been the side of a barn. “You find one perfect situation, everything else goes to hell so you don’t take it for granted. Happened to Bobby and Lynn, Henry and Maddie. It’s your turn, dog-man. Don’t screw it up by failing to take a risk.”

  “But what if what I’m risking is Nox hating my guts?” I blinked a few times, clenching my jaw.

  “Is the goal to get her to love you? Because I think you’ve got that covered. You’re trying to keep her soul intact.” It was Blaine’s turn to blink. His eyes went red and reptilian, then faded back to their normal color. “At least, you’d better be.”

  “The Hell do you mean by that?”

  “Do you care about her, or what she thinks of you?” Blaine’s shoulders quivered slightly. I noticed he’d been clenching his fists. “Because you sound more like a dragon shifter than Alpha of the first pack to have a vampire alliance in umpteen years.”

  I glared, looking him right in the eye. Neither of us blinked. I reached out with my right arm, pushing against the door next to us. It opened a crack which for that door was enough space for us to walk in side by side.

  “Let’s go in there and tell your mom how awesome it’ll be to stick it to the man with a switcheroo.”

  All the tension went out of Blaine’s face, shoulders, and hands. He closed his eyes. Instead of relief, he looked exhausted. Worse than that, he reminded me of the time I’d seen a guy up on the Pell Bridge, surrounded by EMTs and Firefighters trying to stop him from jumping. I felt a tug at my sleeve. The Sprite with the tattered wings stood there, peering at Blaine. It looked up at me, then nodded. I understood.

  “You went in here all gung ho, and you knew.” I shook my head. “You’re going to put your mother up to this and put yourself right in the way of the Extramagus. No wonder you got so pissed when I hesitated.”

  “I can handle a puny mortal, Beowulf.” The small noise he made wasn’t exactly a snort. There wasn’t even a trace of smoke around him. “I bet even Extramagi are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”

  “Thank you.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Shut up and let’s do this already.” Blaine turned, disappearing past the doorway. I followed him, struck once again by how my seemingly haphazard pack kept turning out to actually be made of some seriously impressive people.

&
nbsp; Chapter Sixteen

  Nox

  The stone looked pastel blue in the morning light. It reminded me of veins under pale skin. I breathed in the dewy air, the scent and feel of the nearby pond in my lungs and on my skin. None of that would do me any good without my pelt, but the humidity gave me some small measure of comfort. I shivered, sharpening the dull ache of the wounds on the backs of my legs.

  Something warm and soft moved away from my back. At the same time, three soft hoots came from somewhere above. I looked up into the eaves of the Temple to Music. Instead of pigeons as I expected, something white and shaped like a small barrel perched. I rubbed my eyes, and when I blinked again, it was gone. I glanced down to see a huge fluffy cat with tufted ears like a lynx’s. Except this was no lynx. Its fur was black and glossier than most long-haired felines. It blinked bottle-green eyes at me.

  “There’s no way you’re—” The cat hissed, cutting off the name I’d been about to say. The tip of its tail flicked. It padded up beside me, bumping its head against my right front pocket. It sat, leveling a stare at the church-key in my pocket and then at the door to the electrical panel behind me. I glanced around. The Sprite guarding me was all the way down the steps, admiring the oncoming dawn. I’d never seen him shifted before, but I knew without a doubt that this was Tony, telling me to use the key and escape.

  “No way,” I whispered. “I won’t run and hide for the rest of my life.”

  Tony’s cat ears flicked, and he blinked. A flutter of wings and a single soft hoot came from the eaves again. Olivia? When Tony looked up and flicked his tail at me, I figured I was right.

  “It’s nice of you to visit and all, but the guard will be back soon.” I waved the backs of my hands at them. “Now shoo.”

  They barely made any noise leaving. I wondered whose idea that had been, but it didn’t matter. If the Queen had thought I’d use the third church-key, she’d have taken it from me. I’d agreed to imprisonment and the trial, and I wouldn’t go back on my word. I didn’t want to be punished, but if that was what happened, at least it was for something I’d done. People on trial in the mortal courts weren’t always so lucky. I shuddered, thinking about Professor Brodsky. If the court couldn’t find evidence he’d been mind-controlled, he could be executed for killing two vampires and attempting to murder a third. I hoped he didn’t lose, and that the right criminal would be brought to justice.