5. Jalen
JALEN
Malachi is already packed when he opens his door. His bag sits zipped on a made bed, and the room already looks ready to rent again. The notary showed up this morning, the papers got signed, and there’s nothing left for my brother in Millbrook but the drive home.
“Car’s out front,” he says. “We can be home for dinner.”
I sneeze into my elbow instead of answering. Only a thin curl of smoke comes up with it, less than yesterday. Whatever I’m coming down with is wearing off.
Malachi sets the bag by the door and turns around. “You’ve been weird, man. Even for you. Are you going to tell me what’s going on or not?”
The heat in my chest has been aimed across town all day, and it’s getting less patient by the hour. I have to give him something, and this time it might as well be the truth.
“I caught a scent while I was scanning the town.” I stay in his doorway, where the exit is.
He pushes his sleeves up and pours himself a glass of water from the nightstand pitcher. “Make it quick, whatever it is.” He drinks half the glass. “One night away from Brandy already has me climbing these flowered walls. I don’t sleep right without my mate breathing next to me.”
“I used to file that kind of talk under dramatic.” I sit down on the edge of his stripped bed. “I understand it now.”
He frowns into the glass, working it. My brother runs numbers for a living, and this one adds up fast. His eyes go wide over the rim.
“Ohhh,” he says.
“Her name is Zuri.” Smoke curls off my ears on the Z.
It’s harder to say than it was to hear. Everything under my skin pulls toward the tree side of town, and I’m this close to leaving through the window instead of the door.
Malachi sets down the glass, and the grin that spreads across his face is pure brotherly revenge. “The best-informed man in the valley,” he says. “Scooped by his own nose.”
He lifts the water glass at me. “Where there’s smoke.”
“Yeah, I earned that.” I flex my hands to keep them still. “But this pull, Mal. I’ve had it since last night and it’s already running my whole body. I’m about to tear some shit up.”
Malachi puts both hands up. “Okay. Okay.” He sets the glass down and looks at me the way he looks at bad numbers. “Where is she?”
“The tree side of town.” I’m back on my feet and pacing. “She’s human. I followed her home last night and stood outside her building in the dark.”
Malachi nods along.
The room is too small for the pacing I need to do. Heat climbs my back, and my wings itch under my shirt.
“Sit down,” he says, and he steers me back onto the bed by my shoulder.
“The month I scented Brandy,” he says, “I bought the building she worked in.”
I sit up straight. “You did not.”
“Cash.” He leans against the dresser. “Fastest closing of my life. Then her elevator stalled with her in it, and I pried the doors apart in front of her whole office. Brandy still calls me elevator man when she wants to win an argument.”
I laugh, and it surprises both of us.
“What’s running through you right now is the same thing that had me buying real estate like a crazy man,” he says. “It doesn’t stay this loud. It settles, and you’ll carry it fine. You have my word.”
He puts his hand on the back of my neck, the grip he’s used on me since I was small enough to ride his back. My fire banks under it, the same as it always has.
“Thanks, Mal.” I mean it bigger than it sounds, and he’d wave it off if I said more.
He picks his bag up off the floor and swings it onto his shoulder. “Well.” He looks sideways at me. “I can’t take you home now. You wouldn’t leave without her anyway.”
“There’s something else.” This part I haven’t said out loud to anyone.
He stops with his hand on the doorknob and waits.
“Stillwater Solutions,” I say.
Malachi frowns. “The company the Creek contracts with. Cleaning, supplies, soaps.” He sets the bag back down. “What about them?”
I get up and push his door shut. “I’ve been investigating them since they picked up the Shadow Suds contract. Back around when the gargoyles moved to town.”
Malachi crosses his arms. “Why?”
“You remember when Tolin Ironwood found his mate.” I pace his room again. “She worked for Shadow Suds, the cleaning service. He stood next to that woman I don’t know how many times and couldn’t smell what she was to him.”
“Yes, I remember the couple.” His frown deepens. “I don’t follow.”
“There’s something in the cleaning solution.” I check the window latch before I say the next part. “It doesn’t just cover scent. It covers the one scent that matters.”
I walk him through the rest with the door shut: the robberies back home, the ghouls that ran them, and Delilah, the witch whose trail ended at a product label.
Malachi takes it in without a word. His water glass sits forgotten on the dresser.
“Zuri works in that building,” I say. “I bumped into her in their lobby yesterday and smelled nothing. After the workday wore off her, something told me to follow her, and when her scent finally came through, I knew.” I stop pacing and face him.
“They’re suppressing the fated scent, Mal.
On purpose, at scale. And I don’t understand why yet. ”
The temperature in the room climbs. My brother comes off the dresser with his arms uncrossing.
“You knew all of this,” he says, and the air over him wavers with heat, “and you didn’t tell me? You let this clan do business next door to it and said nothing to your Alpha?”
“I had a hunch, not a case.” I stay where I’m standing. “It didn’t start coming together until this week. That’s why I snuck off yesterday while you talked numbers. I wanted to see what I could find.”
I spread my hands. “I went in looking for a story. I found so much more.”
Malachi pinches the bridge of his nose and curses under his breath. “Damn you, Jalen. I need to get back to Brandy. My dragon is about to lose it being away from her this long.”
“So go,” I say. “Brandy needs you more than I do.”
“No.” He drops his hand and levels me with the full Alpha stare. “I’m not abandoning you when you need me the most. I never have, and I never will.”
I smile at my brother, and the heat in my chest banks down to something warm. Then I sneeze, and Malachi fans the smoke away with the guest binder off the dresser.
“First we approach your Zuri,” he says. “We talk to her. We tell her what’s going on.”
“And what about Stillwater?” I ask.
He pulls out his phone. “We have connects too. I’ll find out who’s running that place by the end of the week. In the meantime, your job is Zuri. She needs to understand who she is to you, and she needs to be comfortable while she learns it.”
“I’m going to watch her tonight.” I’m already moving for the door.
“Wait, we should—“ He looks up from his phone too late.
I take the back stairs. Behind the bed and breakfast, where the garden blocks the streetlight, my wings come out.
Burnt caramel still threads the air along the streets she walked home. I follow it across town at roof height and come down in the oak across from her building without a sound.
Her windows are dark behind the curtains. Everything in me leans toward that first-floor glass. I keep to my branch.
Then I see the car. An unmarked sedan sits at the curb up the block from her door, and two people sit inside it. The engine is off, and no one gets out. People park and go inside. These two face her building and stay.
They’re waiting on someone, and every window they’re facing is hers.
I bank my fire and memorize the backs of their heads.
The branch dips under new weight, and Malachi folds in beside me with his wings settling flat. “Don’t piss me off, Jay.”
I don’t turn around. “They’re already watching her.”
That buys me a stretch of silence. He follows my line of sight down to the sedan.
“Someone at Stillwater must know about you,” he says. “Have you been making yourself obvious?”
I sneeze into my shoulder, and smoke rolls out of my nose and off both ears. “I’m not trying.”
Malachi groans. “You’re getting that looked at when we get home.”
He straightens up on the branch. “I don’t want to do this. But we have no choice.”
“What?” I ask.
“We take Zuri back to Shadow Wolf Creek.” His grip tightens on the branch. “Against her will, if that’s what it comes to.”
I finally turn from the sedan. “You mean kidnap her?”
He tips his head at the car below us. “You want her to stay here and find out what those two are waiting on?”
“Mal, I’m fighting to keep my dragon down right now.” My hands ache where they grip the bark. “He wants to kill them.”
“Great,” he says. “Exactly what I thought.”
The wind moves the leaves around us and nothing else on the street.
Sleep well, Zuri. Tomorrow gets complicated.