20. Zuri
ZURI
Istand at the bottom of the stairs with my hands over my face. The whole family is looking at me. No one says anything, and that’s worse.
“Y’all are being weird,” Jalen says over my head to the whole room. “Quit it.”
Then he looks his oldest brother over. “And look at you. That tea’s working.”
I peek through my fingers and run my own check. Malachi’s color is back, deep brown a shade darker than my own. He’s standing straight. There’s no smoke on him anywhere. The tea works.
“Let’s not make our new sister feel uncomfortable,” Brandy says, mostly at Dorian.
Dorian opens his mouth again. He has a follow-up question. He huffs a little smoke instead and goes to the kitchen.
“Breakfast for everyone?” Malachi asks.
I take my hands off my face and nod at him. It’s the most dignity I can afford right now.
Brandy takes Jules’s arm, and I fall in beside the women. Behind us, Jalen and Malachi slow down and put their heads together, too low for me to hear.
I hear one word anyway. “National.”
Whatever they’re planning, I’ll get it out of him later.
Dorian gets to work at the stove. Malachi and Jalen pull chairs out for the women, and then Jalen picks me up and sets me in mine. Malachi does the same for Jules, then Brandy.
I’ve stopped fighting this kind of thing. It’s chairs now. Yesterday it was doors.
The brothers stay standing at the island while Dorian cooks behind it.
“I’ve got an idea how to stop the witch,” Jalen says.
“And I’ve found out why she keeps coming to Shadow Wolf Creek,” Malachi says.
I turn my head back and forth between them, and I grip the edge of my chair.
Dorian doesn’t care about any of it. He hums at the stove and tells no one in particular that these pancakes want brown butter. Beside me, Brandy and Jules have moved on to planning their next shopping trip.
I keep my focus on Jalen and Malachi.
“Oh, really?” Jalen says.
Malachi pulls out his phone, scratching at his nose with his free hand. He taps the screen and hands it over.
I lean to see. I lean too far. My chair tips, and Jalen catches me one-handed without even looking and pushes me back into my seat.
Then he slides the phone over to me.
“I’ve seen that amulet before,” he says.
The photo shows an amulet on a heavy chain.
The disc is dark hammered metal, about the size of a coffee lid, and the hammer marks run crooked.
No machine made this. In the middle sits a small red gem, flat and dull as dried blood.
Lines are carved around it, crossing each other in a pattern I’ve never seen.
I catch myself holding the phone by its edges.
Jalen reaches over and slips it out of my hands.
“It’s in the safe,” Malachi says. Then he smiles at me. “You haven’t seen the safe yet, have you?”
I look at Jalen. He grins, hands his brother the phone back, and pulls me up out of my chair, my hand folded in his.
“Want to see how we dragons live up to our name?” he says.
I nod. He steals a kiss off my lips and pulls me after Malachi.
Dorian calls something after us about pancakes getting cold. No one answers him.
We take the hallway down to the elevator, and Malachi presses the button for the fourth floor.
“There’s a fourth floor?” I’ve ridden this elevator before, and I don’t forget things. There was no fourth button.
I look at Jalen. He just smiles.
The doors open onto pitch black. The elevator light reaches in and quits a little way past the door. I stay right where I am.
Malachi walks straight into it without slowing. The lights come on for him, one long row after another, running away down the hall until the far end is too far to see.
There are no windows anywhere. The floor is dark and polished, and worked into it in lines of gold are dragons, wings out, tail to tail, the pattern repeating all the way down.
The walls are carved smooth and bare. The air is cool and still, and it smells faintly of metal and old smoke.
At the far end of all that long quiet stand two steel doors, taller than any door needs to be, built wide enough for wings.
Jalen squeezes my hand.
I make myself step out of the elevator.
Malachi steps up to the doors. He leans close to the seam and breathes out slow, and smoke curls off his lips into the crack. Thin vents along the frame pull the smoke in.
Deep in the steel, the locks start to turn.
Then the whole works slams back shut, and the slam comes up through the floor.
“What the hell,” Malachi says.
He plants a hand on the door and tries again, a longer breath this time. The locks grind partway and slam again, harder.
Jalen steps to his brother and sniffs at his shoulder. “You still smell off. The solution’s sitting in your scent. It’s faint, but the door wants a hundred percent of you.”
Malachi stares at his own vault with smoke rising off both ears.
I start lining things up. She sells soap that makes a person smell like nothing. Her cleaner made Roland’s mate smell wrong to him. And she keeps coming back to a valley where the biggest vault in it opens by scent.
“She’s trying to make a key,” I say.
Both dragons turn and look at me.
“The products,” I say. “That’s what they’re for. If they can make an Alpha read as a stranger at his own door, she’s halfway to walking through it.”
“There she is,” Jalen says, grinning at me.
Then he stops. He turns his whole body to face me, and there’s no play left anywhere on him.
“You,” he says.
I blink at him. “Huh?”
“Those ghouls in Millbrook. They were never after you because of what you stole.” He crosses to me and takes my shoulders in his hands. “They were after you because she knew who you were to me.”
I search his face. “What are you talking about?”
He and Malachi trade a long look over my head.
“You can open the safe, Zuri,” Malachi says. “Until we figure out what’s going on, you may need to. It’s tuned to the scent markers of this family and our mates. The system will know you’re his. His blood is still in your system.”
“Go ahead, baby,” Jalen says, and he turns me toward the doors with a hand at my back.
I step up to the seam. I don’t have any smoke, so I lean in close and breathe at it and feel ridiculous doing it.
The vents pull my breath in.
The locks turn over, one heavy sound after another, and this time nothing slams. The seam cracks with a push of cold air, and the doors open for me.
They swing wide, and gold light spills out over my feet.
I step through, and I quit thinking.
The vault is a shaft cut straight down through the mountain.
I walk out onto a metal gallery with a railing, and the railing is the only thing between me and floors of treasure.
Gold goes down in a tower, level after level of it, past lights strung on every tier, all the way down until the bottom is a guess.
I grip the rail and look down, and the height pulls at my stomach.
Every level below me glitters. Coins have drifted into dunes against the walls.
Whole chests sit open like someone got interrupted counting them.
Far down, deeper than the lights reach clean, a green shine blinks up at me when I move my head.
I kept a year of Stillwater’s records straight down to the last file. I look at this, and I reach for a number and come back with nothing. My mouth is hanging open, and I don’t fix it.
Jalen comes in behind me and presses a gentle hand to my back.
“You okay, baby? Your scent is off.”
I look up at him slow, with my eyes narrowed.
I keep it behind my face. This dragon is sitting on enough gold to end world hunger, and he spends his time running a messy podcast about a diner cook.
What in the actual fuck.
Malachi groans at us and steps around, headed down the gallery on his own business. Jalen starts to follow. Then he looks back at me instead.
“Baby,” he says.
I wave my hand at all of it, the shaft, the gold, the green shine at the bottom. “You’re sitting on all of this.”
He leans against the railing with his back to a couple hundred fortunes. “It’s more Malachi and Dorian than me. They’re the bigger hoarders. And it’s not all ours. There’s treasure in here from all over Shadow Wolf Creek. Even the gargoyles bank with us. We’re just the better clan at guarding it.”
He takes my hand. “Come on. Let’s go get what the witch is looking for.”
Deeper along the gallery, Malachi stops at a second door set into the wall, a safe inside the safe. He leans in and breathes at it, and the locks start to turn and slam shut on him. He groans and steps aside. “Zuri. You’re needed again.”
I go to the vented panel beside the door and breathe at it. The vents take my scent, the locks roll over clean, and the small door swings open.
“I want every bottle from Stillwater out of this town,” Malachi says to Jalen. “Immediately.”
“Already on it,” Jalen says.
Malachi reaches into the safe, and when his hand comes back out, the amulet hangs from his fist by its chain, dark and older-looking than its picture. He holds it out to me.
I don’t take it. I put my hands behind my back.
“Now what?” Malachi says.
I look over at Jalen. He’s grinning.
“I have a plan,” he says.
I total up my own leverage while the two of them stare at each other. The witch can’t turn me. There’s no family she could threaten that would move me, and nothing I own is worth taking.
Then I remember the one entry I left off the sheet. There’s one person in that hateful town who could still hurt me.
Renee.
I don’t explain. I walk.
I stay ahead of them the whole way down to our floor, and by the hall I’m power walking, and by our door I’m nearly running. I push through into our room and go straight for my tote bag sitting beside the dresser.
I dump it on the bed and dig. My phone is at the bottom, dead as I left it. I sit down and dig until I find the charger too. I’m hunting the wall for a plug when Jalen tosses the amulet onto the quilt beside me.
He takes my shoulders in his hands. “Baby, what’s going on?”
“Renee.” Then I’m crying.
He pulls me into his arms. “Whoa, whoa—“
“She’s my friend,” I say into his chest. “I just deserted her.”
I know exactly what being left feels like. And I did it to her.