Chapter 5
And the Winner of the Wet T Is...
Yordan moved quickly upstairs, feeling like he’d been beaten to hell and back.
He was too young to feel an all-nighter like this.
He really didn’t want to talk to anyone, so he avoided the kitchen and living spaces, heading to the bedroom wing without seeing anyone.
He’d lived here for almost two years ages back, and so he went for his usual room, second to last on the left.
But in order to get there, he had to pass down a long hallway of emotional land mines.
Nero’s combat pack lived here, and they’d taken the nearest rooms for their own. But before Nero commanded the geek squad, he’d had the slickest, best pack in Wulf history. Or so they’d claimed. And then they’d died in a hideous demon hunt gone wrong.
Yordan had known them, most when they’d come to HQ for initial training. Shit, every inch of the mansion held memories, but the bedroom wing was a barrage of things that were lost, people who were gone, and opportunities that would never come again.
He touched Mother’s door first. That was her handle because she loved to say, “I’m not your mother.
Clean up your own shit.” She was badass through and through and could shoot the wings off a fly with her Beretta, but she had a secret love of all things dragon that he’d discovered on her second day in training.
Dragon mythology, dragon tattoos, Dungeons every exhale was ragged. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder.
He stiffened immediately, trying to cut off the display. It ended up choking him. He wanted to straighten up, but instead, someone shoved a T-shirt into his hand. He used it to wipe his face. And then he heard words spoken in a low brogue.
“Grief is an honorable emotion. There is no need to hide it.”
The Scottish asshole speaking some fortune-cookie platitude.
Yordan wanted to dismiss it, but the words sank in anyway.
And once inside, he felt the meaning of them soothe him.
There was nothing shameful about mourning his friends, and fuck anyone who looked down on him because he was weeping like a child.
He’d gotten the news the day before his pack had taken on an evil witch coven.
There’d been no time to properly mourn then, and afterward, he and Gummy had gotten rip-roaring drunk.
That had been more about burying the pain instead of feeling it.
Now, he’d somehow ended up sitting on Coffee’s unmade bed, and he couldn’t stop himself. The tears wouldn’t stop flowing.
“We’re alone,” The Scot said, his hand squeezing tighter. “No one will see.”
The Scot was seeing, but it was too late to prevent that.
So Yordan let the grief flow. He knew it was an open wound that needed to bleed.
He stopped fighting it and breathed into the cotton tee while the tears seeped into the fabric.
McNabb remained at his side through it all, eventually sitting beside him and drawing him close with his large body, warm and comforting.
Yordan sobbed like a child for a very long time. It wasn’t just because he grieved Coffee and Mother and all the others who had died in the last two years. He grieved for himself, the survivor who had to go on somehow with a gaping hole in his life where his friends once stood.
He’d managed to do it for a while. For eighteen fucking months while he filled his life with postapocalypse cleanup and poking at his packmates. But here, now, he saw what was wrong with his life.
He missed his friends. He missed Coffee, who was more of a brother to him than anyone else. And he missed the innocent belief that as trained combat werewolves, they could face down anything and win.
Sometimes surviving sucked. And with that realization came a fresh wave of tears.
Fortunately, these felt like cleansing tears.
And in time, they faded to nothing. Eventually, he could breathe again without shuddering.
And while he used the tee to mop up his face, The Scot finally asked a question that had obviously been weighing on his mind.
“How’d you get into the room?”
“What?”
“We’ve been trying from the beginning. Couldn’t get into his room or Cream’s.”
“I just opened it.”
“But—”
“There’s a trick to it. On both their doors.”
“Oh.” A long pause followed as the man leaned back against the wall. “What kind of trick?”
Yordan sighed, wondering why this was so fucking important. “It’s a way you lift and twist it. Takes half a second to learn.”
“And would this trick make the door unbreakable?”
“What? Of course not.” The doors on the bedrooms were plywood. A hard sneeze could break them. Unless... He frowned at The Scot. “You couldn’t get the doors open?”
McNabb pointed to the closed adjoining door to Cream’s room. “Neither one.”
“What did you try?”
“A locksmith. A chainsaw. A sledgehammer.”
What?
“Then it became—”
Yordan was smart enough to finish the sentence for him. “Another thing on the list.”
“Yup.”
The two of them stared at each other for a long moment. For the first time, Yordan noticed how tired the Scotsman looked. A haunted exhaustion lurked beneath all those ruddy good looks. And a sharp mind.
Fortunately, Yordan could be pretty sharp himself. “How many things are on this list? Things like doors that won’t open and sudden spinning vans in the motor pool?”
“Dozens.”
“And do they all feel like—”
“Fairy tricks? Yeah, they do. Any idea who might have forgotten the Wulf, Inc. motto?”
Never make a deal with a fairy.
“Ummm.”
McNabb straightened with a scowl on his face. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Not me!” Yordan rushed to say. “But, um, Coffee used to say he had a Get out of Dead Free card.”
The Scot jolted. “What? How?”
“I don’t know!” Yordan rubbed a hand over his face. The conversation had happened years ago when they were both shit-faced. “I didn’t even remember it until this second.”
“Think hard.”
He was trying! “Cream would know.” But of course, Cream died at the exact same instant as Coffee had. “And maybe the others on his team.” His voice was subdued.
“Nero?”
Nero was the alpha of the team and the only one who had survived the mission. “Um, no. Nero had a healthy fear of the fairies.”
“With good reason!”
Couldn’t argue with that.
The Scot ran a hand over his face. “So, what—exactly—was this fairy deal?”
“I don’t know that he had one. We were drunk. He was laughing about his Get out of Dead Free card...” His voice trailed away. They both knew that fairies were the only ones who could give something like that. And they always, always held some sort of trap.
“How can we find out?” McNabb pressed.
Yordan looked around. “There would have to be some sort of clue. Some record or something. And it would be—”
“Here. In his personal things.”
“That have been locked behind an impenetrable wall for nearly two years?” He glared at McNabb. “How could you let it go this long?”
“It’s a really long fucking list!”
Yordan pushed to his feet, his exhaustion fading beneath a desperate need to search every inch of Coffee’s room. And if the bastard really was alive somewhere in fairy heaven, then he was going to grab the asshole by the collar and...and... He’d kill him for real. Or kiss him. Or both, probably.
“Damned asshole,” Yordan muttered. He went to Coffee’s desk as The Scot started on the closet. “You don’t have to help me look.”
“The hell I don’t. If he’s alive somewhere, we have to find him.”
“What if it’s fairy heaven and he’s sunning himself on a beach somewhere?”
The Scot shot him a hard look. “You know any fairies who have reason to treat werewolves with that kind of kindness?”
No. No. And hell no.
“Then we better get to work.”