CHAPTER NINE || HUNTER #2
“Okay,” he said a moment later, turning back to me. His eyes were glassy and his voice was a little unsteady. “Thanks, Hunter. Apology accepted.”
Lee stepped onto the sidewalk, fully joining us. After giving me a long, disbelieving look, he said, “We should go home.”
* * *
Back at Daniel’s cabin, the warlock made straight for his desk.
“We still need to figure out what’s happening with the pack,” he said, already pulling journals toward him.
“With the sympathetic manifestations, I mean. These magical surges… Hell, Reed almost—” He broke off, his eyes widening.
As if it had just occurred to him how close he’d come to death. Yet again. “Anyway. We need answers.”
I wanted to protest. For the love of all things holy, he’d just collapsed two hours ago from overexerting himself and he needed rest. But I stopped myself.
Because Daniel needed to work. It was how he processed things. It was how he convinced himself he had value. Taking that away from him right now would do more harm than good. Besides, he probably wouldn’t listen to me if I tried to stop him. He’d already made that plenty clear.
Instead of arguing with him, I said, “How about a trade?”
Daniel looked up from his notes, suspicion flashing in his dark eyes. “What kind of trade?”
“One hour of research. Then we stop, get some takeout, and then watch a few hours of mindless TV. Our cabin actually has one.”
Lee shot me another strange, searching look, before he nodded his agreement and turned back to Daniel. “You know what? I could cook, actually. I’m not too shabby in the kitchen.”
Daniel stared at us blankly, as if we’d both sprouted gossamer fairy wings and fluffy pink tutus.
“You need to make time for rest,” Lee continued. And his lips twitched when he added, “Otherwise, you’re not going to be very useful to the pack.”
Oh, Lee, you clever bastard. Apparently, he and I were in full agreement about Daniel’s tendency to overexert himself and why.
Daniel’s suspicion deepened as he looked from me to Lee and then back again. “Are you two managing me?”
“Yes, we are,” Lee said, with a perfectly straight face.
“But it’s for your own good,” I added. “And you’ll learn to love it.”
Daniel frowned at us, clearly torn between annoyance and something much softer that he was trying very hard not to show.
“Fine. One hour. But I retain control of the remote for the rest of the night. And both of you are helping for the entire hour. And we’re all doing a research marathon tomorrow.
Those are my terms, take them or leave them. ”
Lee and I looked at each other for confirmation, then I nodded at the warlock. “Deal. One hour. Full remote privileges. Extra research tomorrow.”
I set a timer on my phone and held it up so Daniel could see it. He glowered back at me.
Then, for exactly one hour, we focused on research.
The three of us crammed into Daniel’s tiny cabin, with Lee and me passing books back and forth on the couch, marking pages with sticky notes next to passages that might be relevant, and Daniel at his desk, occasionally talking himself through tricky sections of the text he was translating.
It was surprisingly functional. I was already getting way too used to the three of us in one room. It didn’t just feel normal, it felt right. Like old times.
Daniel lapped us both, probably. After all, his mind moved way faster than either of ours when it came to magical theory. But Lee seemed to be holding his own. He occasionally asked Daniel precise questions and Daniel answered them, sounding halfway startled that my twin was engaging so deeply.
And I—well, mostly I read and kept quiet.
Because the texts were so dry and stuffy, literally smelling of mildew and mothballs, I went slowly and methodically, flagging anything with sticky notes that seemed like it might be even remotely relevant to sympathetic manifestations.
If I couldn’t match Lee and Daniel’s intellect, I could at least be thorough.
We didn’t turn up much. The book I’d been looking through—handed to me by Lee—had been yet another journal written by the same alchemy-obsessed warlock from approximately a million years ago whose work I’d been reading last night.
Though, whereas yesterday’s volume had been mostly theory, it seemed he’d graduated to putting his theories into practice.
The book was filled with pages upon pages of spells to transform various objects from one state of being to another.
There were even a few spells meant to merge spooky, arcane-sounding elements together with ordinary objects in order to create powerful magical artifacts.
And whoever that particular warlock was, he hadn’t skimped on the tiny handwriting, the rarefied arcane vocabulary, the strange symbols, or the complex diagrams.
Maybe being absolutely maddening was a universal warlock trait.
With my head pounding and my eyes feeling like they were about to start bleeding at any moment, I stacked my discarded book into the haphazard stack next to the couch, just as the timer on my phone went off.
I looked up at Daniel. “Ready to stop?”
He shot Lee and me a furtive look. “No.”
“Too bad,” Lee replied, grinning at him. “Because your hour is up.”
Daniel made a noise of protest that neither of us acknowledged.
* * *
Daniel’s pantry was a crime scene. Lee opened every cabinet in the kitchen, his expression growing increasingly horrified. Stale crackers. A can of soup. Half a bag of rice, covered in a layer of dust. A jar of peanut butter that may or may not have been older than the cabin itself.
“Do you ever eat?” Lee asked, turning to Daniel with genuine alarm.
“I have bread, too.” Daniel’s cheeks went pink. “I—um—I forget sometimes. When I’m working.”
“He forgets to eat,” Lee said to me, as if reporting on an international war crime.
I stared at the mostly bare cabinets, the single forlorn can of soup at the back of the shelf, all the evidence of a man who had been living like a ghost in his own home. It made the back of my throat burn.
He’d been here for two years, alone in this cabin, eating canned soup and crackers when he even remembered to eat at all.
And he’d spent practically every waking moment busting his ass to cast spells on demand for the pack.
That is, when he wasn’t buried in research.
He took care of us, but who was taking care of him?
“We’re doing dinner in our cabin,” I said, more firmly than I’d intended. “We’ve actually got food. We were heading there anyway.”
Daniel looked as though he wanted to protest but couldn’t come up with a valid reason to argue with me.
Instead, he let us frog-march him out of his tiny cabin and across the commune.
His gait was tight and his shoulders carried far more tension than they should have, as if he was being led to the gallows instead of to the cabin Lee and I shared.
I glared at his back, but it wasn’t him I was angry with. Because we’d given him every reason to feel that way. I had given him every reason to feel that way.
Lee took over the kitchen the moment we walked in.
He was a good cook. Better than me, certainly, who could barely manage eggs without a fire extinguisher on standby.
Within twenty minutes, the smell of garlic and onions filled the cabin and something that might have been a marinara sauce was simmering on the stove.
Daniel and I ended up on the couch.
The TV Lee and I owned was thrifted and massive, from before flatscreens were a thing, but it worked.
We even had a couple of streaming services Lee had jury-rigged onto it.
Naturally, the pack shared passwords. Daniel claimed the remote with a possessiveness that told me television was a rare luxury in his monastic little cabin.
I made a mental note to make sure we got him a TV before this was all said and done.
“If you put on a nature documentary, I’m leaving,” I told him, mostly to cover up the fact that I was kind of loving the intent way he was flipping through the programs. He was letting himself take up a little space, after all.
“It’s your cabin.”
“Your point?”
“I was going to put on a cooking competition.”
“That’s even worse.”
“I’m picking the show. A deal’s a deal.”
“That was when I didn’t think you’d pick something terrible.”
Daniel turned to look at me, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, his smile reached his eyes. “I’ve kept my end of the bargain. You don’t get to renegotiate the terms of our arrangement just because they don’t benefit you, Hunter.”