9. Jalen
JALEN
Ahot shower and my own closet put me halfway back together. My room is exactly the mess I left, and I’ve never been gladder to see my piles. The shirt with the bullet holes goes in my trash, and I dress in clean everything before I head up to face my brother.
Malachi’s office is what my room would be if I were a tidier dragon.
It takes up a whole corner of the top floor, with its own glass wall and the town laid out small and bright below it.
Bookshelves stand in ranks along one side.
His desk is a slab of dark wood with nothing on it but the work in front of him, and past the leather sofa and the wall screen, a pool table sits at the far end with space left over.
He’s going through a stack of paperwork when I come in. He doesn’t say hello. He picks his phone up off the desk and tosses it to me.
I catch it and look at the screen.
It’s a press photo with a caption under it: STILLWATER SOLUTIONS CHIEF EXECUTIVE, D. HALE. The woman in it is young and polished, braids over one shoulder, and her eyes are a blue that doesn’t happen to people.
I’ve never stood in a room with the witch. But I keep every description this valley ever gave me, plus one blurry picture from a festival booth, and I know this face.
“Delilah,” I say.
“Chief executive,” Malachi says. He leans back in his chair. “The whole company is hers.”
Heat climbs my back. I set the phone down on his desk before I crack it in my hand.
“I knew it.” I brace both hands on the wood. “The damn witch is Zuri’s boss. Well. Ex-boss. She’s not going back to that sleazy company.”
“Think back.” Malachi squares his paperwork stack. “Did you have any interaction with her that Delilah could have seen?”
“I scoped the lobby for a way in later, and I bumped into her there. Straight into her, middle of the floor.” I run the scene back in my head, and this time I run it with the cameras in it.
“I caught her lunch out of the air. We stood in frame together having a whole moment. And I got nothing off her at the time. Her scent was blanked. I didn’t know what she was to me until that night. ”
Malachi straightens in his chair. “So the witch’s cameras have a dragon touching her employee the day before the woman disappears.”
“Worse than that.” I push off the desk. “Every soul in this valley knows my face. She doesn’t need to run a search. I’m the loudest man in Shadow Wolf Creek.”
He absorbs that without comment.
“Tell me Shadow Suds again,” he says. “Properly this time. Dates, product, people.”
So I walk him through it. Derrick’s crews clean with a solution that comes off a store shelf, and something in the formula blocks the fated scent.
Tolin and Imani proved that without meaning to.
Ronan warned Derrick afterward, Derrick quit ordering the stuff, and the leftover cases sat in his back room until the ghouls broke in.
They hauled off most of the stock and left a few busted cases behind.
I spent a whole night nose-down in what they left, and that’s where I chased the label to a factory in Millbrook. The factory belongs to Stillwater.
Malachi writes something on a legal pad and boxes it.
I sneeze into my elbow again, and this time it comes with a mood. I’m sick of this, all the way down to my dragon.
“What does the witch want with your Zuri?” Malachi asks.
“That’s the hole in my notebook.” I drop onto the arm of his sofa. “I don’t know.”
“She does.” He taps his pen against the pad. “That woman shut her mouth in my garage like a vault door. Make her comfortable. Comfortable people talk.”
“Comfortable, I can do.” I rub my nose. “Medical center in the morning, for this and her cheek. Then I’ll walk her through town. The Creek can do the charming for me.”
He nods and goes back to his paperwork. I’m almost to the door when his pen stops.
“Oh. And Jay,” he says.
I stop and turn around.
“Congratulations, brother.” He says it without looking up from the page. “She’s beautiful.”
I smile all the way down to my floor.
I stop smiling when I reach her room. The double doors stand open, and the bed is empty. Her tote is gone.
“Zuri?” I step in and find the room empty.
“Shit.” I pull a long breath through my sore nose and find burnt caramel on the air. The trail leads down the hall to my own door.
I push it open and step in.
She turns around in the middle of my paper drifts with her face crumpled up. “Your room is a mess.”
I grin and pull the door shut behind me. “It’s not a mess to me. I know where everything is.”
Then I cross to my podcast table and straighten it anyway.
“Well, you’re a journalist for sure,” she says, turning in place to take in the full disaster. “There’s no doubting that.”
She bends down and reaches for the nearest stack.
I cross the room fast enough to make her gasp and catch her hand above the papers. “Don’t clean up after me.”
I walk her to my unmade bed and sit her down on it. She pulls her tote off her shoulder and sets it beside her, and I drop to my knees and gather the floor myself.
“You know the legends about dragons?” I stack Chronicles as I go. “How we hoard?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I heard that.”
“My brothers hoard treasure. Malachi does it with money, stocks and trades and land. Dorian’s is real estate and machines, things he can put his hands on.” I glance up at her from the floor. “But me? I hoard information.”
Her legs hang off the edge of my bed, and I want them across my lap. I want more than that, and she’s sitting on it. I groan low and get back to stacking papers.
“That room is too big,” she says from the bed. “I don’t want to be alone.”
I stand up. “Then stay here with me. I don’t mind it at all.”
She groans and drags her tote into her lap. Then she opens it and pulls out a folder. She holds it out to me.
“I think this is why they’re after me,” she says.
I stare at the folder in her hand. Then I ease it from her fingers and open it.
The letterhead is Stillwater’s. The heading reads PROJECT UNMATCHED, and under it, FATED SCENT SUPPRESSION, PHASE THREE.
I read the heading again, since the first pass doesn’t feel real.
I read it and see a weapon. Suppressing the fated scent is the product. Someone built an entire line whose only job is to keep mates from finding each other. It’s on phase three, and phases one and two are already out in the world.
Heat rises through my hands. I make myself hold the folder loose before I scorch the only copy.
“And then there’s this.” She digs back into her tote and comes out with a small white pump bottle. “Something’s off about it. It has no smell at all. Not like soap, not like anything.”
I take the bottle, and she rolls her eyes at me.
She pulls her knees up onto my bed and talks, and for once in my life I don’t interrupt.
“Renee and I got pulled off our regular work to shred confidential files. Guards in the room, no manifest, everything rushed.” She runs her thumb along the seam of her tote.
“It was shady, and I got curious, and I took one folder off the cart when no one was looking. At home I read it. And then I couldn’t unread it. ”
She squares her shoulders before the next part.
“I had planned to find you—“ She catches it. “Well. A journalist. Someone from Shadow Wolf Creek who’d know what to do with it. I still don’t understand why Millbrook hates y’all this much.”
The heat in my chest rolls warm all the same.
And there it is, the why Malachi wanted.
They’re hunting the woman who reached into their shredder and walked out with proof.
The timing stacks in my head: I walked their lobby, and the next morning their files went into the teeth.
They started destroying evidence the day after a dragon came through their front door, and my mate beat them to one folder on pure nerve.
Then I bring the bottle up to my nose, and under the nothing there’s a note I know.
It’s the smell of the Settling, the gargoyles’ own crowd-magic, baked faint into a bottle of hand soap.
The warning tingle fires up behind my nose, and I turn my head and sneeze smoke at my own floor.
I blame whatever I’m coming down with and wave the air clear.
This is why the lobby gave me a blank.
“You used this?” I ask her.
She nods. “Yes. Just a few times. But it’s weird.”
I set the folder and the soap on my desk, and then I come back and sit on the edge of the bed beside her.
“The woman running Stillwater is not a woman,” I say. “She’s a witch named Delilah. She’s worked this valley for years, cons and trades and worse, and now she’s doing it from inside a company, wearing a human name. Della Hale.”
“You mean my boss?” She comes up off the bed. “Ms. Hale?”
“The same. And she’s carried a beef against Shadow Wolf Creek for a long time. My best guess is that all of this, the products, the phases, is her way of getting back at us shifters.”
Her eyes go wide. “My boss is a witch.”
I tilt my head at her. “Was she wearing contacts or something? Because there is no world where you sat in that office believing a Black woman with eyes that blue was just out here being normal.”
She sits back down on the bed. “Damn,” she says. “You messy.”
Baby, you have no idea.
I smirk at her. “Why, thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment. The town calls me Messy Jay.”
She glares at me.