Page 85 of Sincerely, Secretary of Doom

Dranian appeared beside Cress with a bothered brow. “So, they will take that fox back with them?” he asked in a low, grumbly voice.

“I doubt it,” Cress replied. “If the fox planned to cooperate with the Dark Corner, he would have stayed here with his fellow Shadow Fairies. I imagine he’ll run off for good, likely never to come near us again now that we took two of his sacred lives.”

Dranian lifted his head high. “He stole my arm. I will make it my life’s mission to hunt him down and make him pay,” he proclaimed to all listening.

Shayne, Cress, and even horrid Freida rolled their eyes a little.

“I don’t care if we made a bargain with those fools,” Cress said, eyeing the army of Shadows marching openly down the street, turning human heads. News vans had already rolled up, and a few reporters with terror-stricken faces were bravely trying to approach the Shadow Fairies. “We are going to guard our café and our humans with our lives until the moment they’re gone,” Cress finished.

39

Mor Trisencor and the Merry Batch of Muffins

There’d only been a split second to make a decision when Mor had finally spotted Luc, raging like a whirlwind in the heights of the city’s buildings with Violet in his grip. Mor knew he could not take them both.

As Mor spied on Violet puttering around in his kitchen and tossing flour and sugar into a bowl, he knew he’d made the right choice. He left her to her baking and went to the office, inhaling the thick scent of ink, stock paper, and article ideas. The folktale book he’d borrowed from the library—the one with the white nine tailed fox on the cover—rested peacefully on his desk. He stared at the fox painting for a long while before he picked it up.

“You’ve been luring in human females and stealing their secrets? For what, Luc?! What do you need human secrets for?”

Mor’s own enraged questions burned through his mind as he flipped the book open, looking for a particular story. The sound of ruffling pages filled the office until he came to a tale about a lonely female fox who stole one thousand secrets and transformed herself into a human so she could hide among the humans forever. Mor read the first few lines, then flipped the pages to skip ahead. A detailed painting of a fox offering her ruby to the sky filled a partially torn page. Her pure white hair was partway through turning nut-brown like a human’s; her reward for her one thousand secrets collected.

Mor slapped the book shut.

He rubbed his temples and leaned back against the desk.

Was Luc trying to become a human? But why? Mor tapped a finger along the book’s cover, taking in the silence of the room and the few articles Violet had left pegged to the walls.

“Do you know how long it took for me to convince the commanders to let me come here? How much talking, how much luring, how much baiting and convincing before I had the commanders wrapped around my finger at last?”

Luc had claimed he didn’t come to the human realm for Mor. And for the first time, Mor started to believe him.

“Queensbane,” he muttered, dropping the book back onto the desk. “Queens—bane.”

Luc was attempting to escape from the Shadow Army.

Mor had always wondered why in the name of the sky deities Luc had never killed him back in the Army when he’d had so many chances. And why the fox didn’t even stop Mor the day Mor trashed the cave and escaped when all that time Mor had been losing in his nightly fights against Luc. Luc had the skill to stop and kill Mor during his escape, yet he never lifted a finger.

But it wasn’t just that incident. Mor had to rethink every memory he had with the nine tailed fox. The one of Luc appearing at the nightly fights and challenging all the highest-ranking war fairies so no one remembered to challenge Mor anymore. The ones of Luc refusing to use the enhancement of his fox bead every time Mor challenged him to a fight. The one of Luc kicking him aside to take the punishment from Prince Reval alone for failing the troll mission…

Mor could hardly believe he hadn’t seen it. Could hardly imagine it to be true—that Luc Zelsor had possibly been protecting Mor since the beginning.

And Mor had tried to kill Luc when they’d crossed paths here. No wonder Luc wanted Violet and everyone Mor loved to suffer.

And perhaps…

Perhaps Mor deserved to suffer. But Violet didn’t—Violet didn’t deserve another day of torture in her whole human life.

Cress seemed to think Luc had run far away and was too afraid to lose more of his lives to approach the High Court of the Coffee Bean again. But if there was one thing Mor knew about nine tailed foxes, it was that they found it extremely difficult to let things go.

Violet stayed up all faeborn night baking those wretched muffins. It drove Mor crazy at first. The interns had fallen asleep with their faces pressed to the countertop by midnight; the male human’s arm was flung over the length of the counter. Mor came back every few minutes to check and see if Violet wasfinallyfinished with her baking masterpiece, but she never was.

Also, it bothered him a little that she was enchanted by him—compelled to want to be near him, to adore everything about him, to praise him like he was one of the sky deities themselves—and she hadn’t even come desperately running through the cathedral to find himonce. It was nearly insulting. The enchanted kiss had been strong; he’d felt it. Violet must have had the willpower of a stubborn wild steed.

He’d finally given up and gone to take a shower.

Once clean, Mor sauntered into the kitchen, eyeing the four bowls of abandoned ingredients on the counter from where Violet had started mixing flour before giving up and starting over.

“You must be having a difficult time trying to stay away from me,” he guessed, putting as much sympathy into his voice as he could while he took in how much she’d trashed his kitchen. He’d likely be the one to have to clean it.

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