Chapter 7
When Is a Diary Not a Diary?
This was fucking crazy.
Coffee could be alive, thanks to some fairy deal. Odds were he was in some fairy prison helping a psycho fae cause havoc on the human world. That’s what fairies did after all. And yet, all Yordan could do was stare at The Scot and ache.
The man wanted to know him. He had just declared his intention to rip into Yordan’s guts to figure out what was holding him back, what was screwing him up, and what was making him want. And Yordan was so damn lonely and confused that that sounded good to him. At least someone cared to look, right?
No one thinks you’re a fuckup, least of all me.
McNabb was his boss’s boss. If this had been a simple dressing down by a superior, then Yordan could handle it. It wasn’t the first time the higher-ups had wanted to chew his ass out for one thing or another. But The Scot was a different kind of higher-up.
Apparently, The Scot cared.
No one thinks you’re a fuckup, least of all me.
Yordan shouldn’t need that kind of reassurance. It shouldn’t slide into his gut and make him want to roll belly up, but it did. Not just because of the words but because McNabb had said it.
It was his eyes that clinched the deal. To feel the man’s focused attention was like a strobe light aimed straight at his soul.
Yordan wanted it. Damn it, he craved it.
But it also left him feeling exposed and so vulnerable that he wanted to run.
He knew he had skills above the usual meathead, but damn it, he’d also screwed up.
He was much better at pointing out the flaws in other people’s plans than crafting the plan in the first place.
All those thoughts ran through his head while he stood there locking gazes with The Scot. His heart lurched, his lips tingled, and his cock thickened until it was a distracting throb.
He watched the man’s eyes widen as the biological message got through. He saw his nostrils flare as he swallowed. Just how big was The Scot’s dick? Inquiring minds wanted to know. And hands and mouths and ...
He slammed the cage door on all those thoughts so loud he felt the clang.
Discipline! Order! It was the only way to survive, and damn it, thinking about banging your boss’s boss was not the way to a successful career.
And given that Yordan was nothing without Wulf, Inc.
, he was not in a position to toy with any of the thoughts that were spinning in his brain. Or suggested by his dick.
And yet, he wasn’t the first one to look away. The Scot suddenly seemed awkward as he lifted the stack of spiral-bound notebooks up between them and tried to speak.
“I’ll read—” His voice came out rusty enough that he had to clear his throat. “Um, these. You—”
“The diary. Yeah. Right.”
Back to business. He should feel relieved. It was what he wanted, right? No.
He dropped down onto Coffee’s unmade bed and tried to focus his thoughts.
Fairy deals could have world-ending consequences, right?
So he had to get to work. He opened the journal and immediately saw a child’s immature handwriting, complete with jerky words and bad spelling.
The first sentence was, This is my birthday dairy.
Yordan forced himself to focus, skimming with increasing speed as he settled into the mind of twelve-year-old Dwayne.
Apparently, Dwayne was a spaz—his own word, though the jerky handwriting bore that out.
Born to a family of natural werewolves, he was the only one who’d failed to shift.
It hadn’t been a problem until his twelfth birthday when his younger brother had his first shift, which was proof positive that poor Dwayne was a retard—again, his word.
His mother, a therapist for paranormals, suggested that whenever Dwayne felt too emotional to handle things, he should write things down in this dairy [sic], and it would help him deal with his feelings.
So, the boy did—in huge, emotional swaths of words—before going silent again for weeks.
Yordan skimmed through fury at a missed monster truck rally, several fights with his brother the werewolf dick (young Dwayne was not good with clever nicknames), and then the absolute despair when his younger sister went puppy at a sleepover with her best friend.
It legitimately looked like Dwayne was a mundane in a family deeply embedded in werewolf culture.
This was a difficult position for any kid, but lots of people found their way.
Hell, half of Wulf’s support staff were mundanes who knew about their world without being able to shift.
The other half were older werewolves who just didn’t feel like getting feisty anymore.
So young Dwayne went about his own rocky path to acceptance of being less doggy than the rest of his friends and family. Until one day he met a fairy. And not just any kind of fae, but one who apparently loved gambling. Gamfae, according to the really-not-that-clever-with-nicknames Dwayne.
This was where Yordan slowed down his skimming.
There was no indication of how the two met.
Either one could have sought the other out.
But suddenly, young Dwayne was working out the details of a fairy bet.
Like everyone else, the kid knew that fairies were tricky creatures, but this one bet seemed like a no-brainer. A simple either-or.
According to the bet, Gamfay (he changed the spelling of the name for some unknown reason) bet that Dwayne would shift in a week’s time; Dwayne bet he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, then the fairy would make the kid into a werewolf.
From Dwayne’s perspective, it was a win-win. No matter what happened, he got to go furry.
Great, but what did the fairy get if the kid shifted on his own? Meaning, what happened if the fairy won the bet?
The now-fifteen Dwayne wasn’t so focused on that information, but he finally got there.
If Gamfay won the bet, he got an acolyte.
(Dwayne had needed to look up the word. Good thing, because Yordan wasn’t so sure about it either.
It meant an assistant or follower.) What it meant in reality was that if Dwayne shifted naturally, he would lose the bet and become a Gamfay slave on Earth.
Yordan shuddered. That didn’t sound good at all, but the young Dwayne didn’t think it was so bad.
Gamfay’s driving addiction was gambling.
He’d bet on anything and everything. Didn’t care if he won or lost; he just liked the bet.
And he really loved watching mortals gamble.
So as Gamfay’s Earth acolyte, Dwayne would make bets with his friends, his family, with everyone and everything.
One a day, every day, with allowances for illness.
And then on Dwayne’s death, all outstanding bets would revert to Gamfay. Anything that wasn’t settled fell under fairy terms, which basically meant the fairy got to screw with you until the debt was paid.
Well, shit. No wonder Yordan’s life had been chaos for the last eighteen months.
He’d had an outstanding cash debt with Coffee, which then reverted to Gamfay.
Was that why he’d been an asshole? He’d have to think about that more later.
Right now, the important thing was that his debt was paid.
Yordan kept reading, his mind spinning out scenarios even as young Dwayne was caught.
The kid took the bet and lost. Not because he made a bad bet.
He did not shift naturally the way the rest of his family did.
Nope. Dwayne got bit by a lycanthrope an hour before the end of the bet, and poof, he became a werewolf with all the instabilities of lycanthropy.
Yippee. Two years later, Dwayne bit Yordan, and they both ended up in Wulf.
So now they knew the specifics of the fairy bet. Thankfully, Dwayne had been meticulous in recording the bargain with Gamfay. What he hadn’t been was clear on the exact name of the fairy. And names were really, really, really important, especially if one wanted to end the angsty teenager stupidity.
The Scot looked up from his reading. “Got an answer?” he rasped.
“Yup. Fairy deal. Got a fairy name in your books?”
“No. Just a detailed list of outstanding debts.”
“All of which shifted to Gamfay on Coffee’s death.”
“Gamfay?”
“Nickname. Don’t ask. It’s dumb.”
The Scot nodded. “So how is that a Get out of Dead Free card?”
Good question. Yordan held up the diary. “This covers the initial terms between Gamfay and teenage Dwayne. It doesn’t say anything about keeping him from dying.”
Without a word of discussion, the two of them switched notebooks. Yordan got five spiral notebooks (the ones The Scot hadn’t looked at yet). And the boss’s boss got the diary. Ten minutes later, McNabb sighed.
“What?”
“What happens if Coffee misses on his acolyte promise?”
“What?”
“What happens if Coffee didn’t make a bet? What if he forgot or he couldn’t because he was trapped in ice?”
Yordan thought back, a sinking pit in his stomach. “Wasn’t he in ice for a couple days? Conscious but frozen in—”
“Magical ice. Yes.”
“He thawed out okay. We called him Captain America for a bit until he got too obnoxious calling himself one of the hot Hollywood Chrises.”
The Scot’s lips quirked. “I remember that.” Then he sobered. “But he couldn’t have made any bets while frozen.”
“Shit.”
“Yup.”
Together, they started flipping through the spiral notebook dated the year Coffee had been turned into an ice cube. They found it quickly enough. It was a single bet on an otherwise pristine page.
“Double or nothing bet. Dwayne bets Gamfay that the fairy can’t find the Big Tits Bar tee in ten minutes of looking at human speed. If Dwayne wins, all missed bet consequences are gone, plus he gets a single Death Save. If Dwayne loses, Gamfay gets a Lost Love.”
McNabb frowned. “What’s a Lost Love?”
“No clue. You?”
“Nada.” Yordan pointed. “But it looks like it didn’t matter. He must have won. Had to have if he claimed he had a Get out of Dead Free card.”
“That’s g—” The Scot started to say but then caught his breath. Yordan, too, as dark, flourishing words appeared on the formerly white page.
Unless Dwayne cheated, in which case, all penalties and benefits are enacted at my whim. And I have a lot of
WHIMSY
The last word was writ large and with expanding lines of flourish until it ended in a grinning smiley face that kept winking at them.
“Oh shit,” Yordan muttered. When what he actually wanted to do was scream, What the fuck, you fucking idiot? at Coffee. But that would be undisciplined and completely unhelpful.
Meanwhile, The Scot proved that he was a quick thinker by grabbing a pen and scribbling his next words onto the page.
What’s your name? We want to make a deal.
Yordan gasped. “No! No, we don’t! That always makes it worse!”
The Scot sucked in a breath and nodded. “You’re right,” he muttered. So he carefully scratched out the word “We” and replaced it with “I.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Yordan grumbled, though it was too late. The Scot was already well on his way to repeating the same mistake that had created Wulf, Inc.’s special habit of insanity. Apparently, “Never Make Fairy Deals” actually meant “We Always Make Fairy Deals When We’re Desperate.”
“It’s my risk alone,” McNabb grumbled.
“I’m sure that’s exactly what Coffee thought. And Nero. And Bruce.” He continued listing off the wolves he knew who had made simple, clean, desperate fairy deals and ended up nearly destroying the world several times over.
But it didn’t matter because Gamfay was answering.
Prove you’re worth my time first.
“Fuck you,” Yordan answered just as McNabb scrawled.
How?
Collect the rest of my debts. Then we can wager on Dwayne’s continued existence.
Yordan’s breath caught. “He’s alive?”
Apparently the fairy didn’t need the words to be written out because he answered.
He isn’t dead.
Which didn’t necessarily mean he was alive either, but it was a glimmer of hope. And that was all Yordan needed. He snatched the book from McNabb’s hand. The Scotsman was way too important to Wulf, Inc. to risk himself. Whereas Yordan could get screwed over by a fairy deal and no one would care.
Deal, he wrote. Then he signed his own name to it and felt the weight of the magic settle on his shoulders. Only to have The Scot grab his hand.
“Are you fucking crazy?” he demanded.
No. Just desperate. Just really fucking desperate for a reason he couldn’t even name.
“Uh-uh,” McNabb said as he snatched the journal back. “As your superior officer, this lands on me.” Then he scrawled his own name at the bottom and went to draw a big, dark line through Yordan’s name.
Except, true to the fact of all fairies being assholes, the pen abruptly stopped working. Both their names were now writ big and bold right at the bottom of the page.
“Fuck,” McNabb muttered. “That’s not what I intended at all.”
Which was what always happened whenever some idiot made a fairy deal.