Page 39 of Hell and Hexes
“I’ve got some communications to take to heaven, then a few that need to go to the third circle. It can wait.” He leaned in nibble my earlobe. “They can wait forever for all I care.”
The guy had no work ethic, but honestly, this seemed to be the way all the denizens of hell acted. Lucien had pretty much ignored whatever duties he had until Hadur had given him shit for being a spoiled, entitled, lazy brat. And it’s not like I’d seen Hadur do anything since he got out of that summoning circle. Two hundred years trapped in there and you would think the guy would have a huge backlog of wars or something to get going on, but no. Instead, he was forging knives to sell at one of the hunting stores in town. And I was pretty sure Lucien’s recent bluster over his job was a load of bull and just busywork to make him look important. It seemed to me that hell pretty much just ran on its own without all this intervention, and I got the idea heaven was the same. So maybe those messages for Eshu reallycouldwait for a few hours. Or days.
But my work couldn’t. So, I kept pushing his hands away, gave him a quick kiss that almost convinced me to cancel my first appointment, then headed out to my office before I changed my mind.
I saw two clients, ate lunch, saw one more, then walked back to my house to get in my car and drive to the neutral zone Cassie had chosen for this meeting. It was outside the town wards at a McDonald’s by the mall. There were quite a few humans in line, ordering late lunches or drinks. I got a soda and went through the door into the kids’ area where clusters of tables and chairs surrounded a play structure with slides and padded platforms to climb on. A bored mom sat reading a book off to the side while two little girls shrieked and crawled through the tubes connecting the slides.
It was perfect. We were outside the safety of the town wards, so the werewolves would feel exposed. Add to that the fact that we were in a very public place, and in a room where children played, and the whole venue ensured the werewolves would be on their best behavior. Normally I’d think this was too much as I liked clients to have the freedom to express frustration and emotion, but with werewolves, frustration and emotion quickly led to flying fists and broken bottles as weapons. A children’s play area in a fast food restaurant would keep that all under control.
I walked around the room, putting the button charms at each of the four corners. I could feel their energy, their power, reaching out to fill the room and beyond. It made me smile to think that these were a combination of both Eshu and me, a reminder of how very well we seemed to mesh together.
I liked him. I more than liked him. I liked him in my bed, in my life, in my house. I liked him at Sunday family dinner, and my game, and just lounging around. He made me happy.
Done with the charms, I headed back to the table I’d picked out for us and arranged the chairs, sitting down with my soda and my notebooks. I’d just gotten organized when Dallas and Clinton entered the room, bringing so much tension with them that the mother looked up from her book and sent them a wary glance.
I’ll admit it was incredibly amusing to see the werewolves sitting on the too-small, brightly colored, plastic chairs. They each had a bag with burgers and fries and a drink in hand—all to look like they belonged here in the McDonald’s, if not in the kids’ play area. Werewolves loved eating just as much as they loved winning stuff in raffles, so both Dallas and Clinton pulled the food out of the bags the moment they sat down.
“Damn it, I said no pickles,” Clinton grumbled as he picked them off his burger and set them aside.
“You did. I heard you.” Dallas inspected his own sandwich. “She got mine right at least. No pickles. No onions.”
“Humans.” Clinton sighed and reassembled his sandwich sans pickles. “This kinda thing is the reason I don’t like to go outside the wards. I’m gonna end up with indigestion from those things.”
“Better get used to things outside the wards, because you’re soon gonna be living here… or be dead,” Dallas replied.
“Excellent segue into the topic at hand,” I jumped in before Clinton could reply and escalate the situation. “You guys eat while I sum things up and go over some rules, then we’ll start the discussion.”
I went over the usual—no interrupting, everyone has a chance to respond in turn. By the time I’d summed up the situation, the werewolves were done with their late lunch and sipping their sodas.
“Clinton, I want you to go first. I want you to say whatyouwant in terms of your pack. Your ideal situation.”
He took a long slurp of his soda and sat back. “I want a pack with different rules than what Dallas has. I want enough territory on Heartbreak Mountain for us to live and farm and hunt. I want my pack members to be able to come and go, to visit their friends and family in Dallas’s compound.”
I turned to the other werewolf. “And you, Dallas?”
“I want him dead and in the ground,” he shot back.
I held up a hand for Clinton to remain silent and spoke to Dallas. “Really? Your son? The man you raised from a pup, who you watched grow? Your strong, assertive, take-no-shit son? You truly want him dead?”
Clinton wasn’t a model son by human terms. Dallas had had to bail him out of the Accident jail any number of times for getting into fights in town, but as much as he’d complained, the werewolf alpha had been proud of his son’s rabble-rousing ways. Werewolves liked troublemakers, as long as they were making trouble outside the pack. I knew that Dallas loved and admired his son, and that it would pain him terribly to see him dead. And I was counting on that to help him to bend a little, just a little, and compromise here today.
Dallas glared over at his son. “You shoulda challenged me. That’s how it’s done. That’s how we always do it. Then I would be respecting you and not dealing with the embarrassment of my only pup being a cowardly traitor.Andbeing accused of being weak and soft because I didn’t go take you out that first week and nip this in the bud.”
“I’da been dead if I’da challenged you,” Clinton shot back. “You’re stronger than me. Even on your deathbed you’ll probably be stronger than me. My goal wasn’t to end up bleeding out on the ground, it was to lead, to make a place where things were different for werewolves who wanted a different sort of pack, not to die by your hands for nothing.”
“At least that way your death would have had meaning,” Dallas growled. “It would have been honorable, according to our traditions. Now you’ll die a coward and a traitor. That’s not what I wanted for you. That’s not what I wanted for my son.”
“You might kill me, and you might kill my pack, but the damage has been done and there’s no going back,” Clinton snapped. “Twenty wolves risked their lives to go with me rather than continue to follow you, and there’s plenty more in your pack that are on the fence. Kill me and my pack and maybe you’ll get peace for another year or two, but things are going to change whether you want them to or not, old man.”
The two little girls in the play equipment squealed with laughter over something. The door suddenly opened and in poured a dozen children, all wearing party hats and shouting as they tore off their shoes, threw them at the cubby, and raced for the slides. Three adults followed them in, carrying boxes of cupcakes and handfuls of presents.
What. The. Heck. Cassie had told me she’d ensured there wouldn’t be any parties going on during our meeting. The manager had said they wouldn’t be able to reserve the room because it had to be available to patrons, but that there were no scheduled parties, and that this day and time usually found the play area empty or with only one or two kids.
I eyed the luck charms in the corners, thinking that two weeks ago, this sort of thing wouldn’t have happened.
The loud chaos of the excited kids did break the tension, though. The werewolves shifted in their ridiculously small seats, eyeing the partygoers nervously. It was a reminder that here, outside the wards, they were vulnerable and subject to human laws that wouldn’t take their culture into consideration when deciding the fate of what humans saw as monsters.
“Dallas, I’m going to ask again—in an ideal world, what would you want? If you could turn back time, have things different, wave a magic wand over the whole situation, what would you want? Because I doubt it’s your son dead.”
