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Josie folded her arms. “And that trouble can easily spill over to the rest of Fairhaven.”
The meeting had already taken off in a direction I hadn’t intended. The Corporation wasn’t on my agenda. So much for Kane’s idea to get ahead of my story and engender trust.
I rose to my feet in an effort to redirect the conversation. “Never mind Addison. The Wild Hunt is coming to town.”
“Because of you?” Alfonso asked.
“See? You’re proving our point already,” the mage next to him said. In my head, I called him Weasel because of his lean build and thin, sharp face—and also because I couldn’t remember his real name.
“Not because of me,” I said, although I recognized that wasn’t strictly true. If it weren’t for me, Matilda wouldn’t have come to Fairhaven and the Wild Hunt wouldn’t have targeted the town. “That is to say, it isn’t me they’re hunting.”
“What’s the request?” Camryn asked.
“I want your help protecting Wild Acres.”
“You know we can’t kill in Fairhaven,” Vaughn said.
“I’m not asking you to. We need to assemble a team to round up any animals in the forest and herd them through the crossroads to a safer place.”
“We’re not cowboys,” Weasel objected. “Hell, I don’t even know how to ride a horse.”
“You don’t have to be a cowboy. You only have to track them down and guide them out of harm’s way. There’s a stag and a boar.”
“Should we personally escort the squirrels, too?” Weasel asked in a mocking tone.
I hesitated to reveal the extent of the white stag’s mystical power in case any of them decided to sell the creature to the highest bidder. They weren’t all as honorable as Kane. On the other hand, the truth was my best chance to persuade them.
“The stag is a white hart,” I said.
“Aren’t they supposed to be impossible to capture?” Alfonso asked. “How are we expected to guide it through the crossroads?”
“You’d be working with the Night Mallt herself. She thinks with the right team of hunters, she might be able to find the stag before the Wild Hunt does. Trust me, we don’t want their leader to get his hands on the stag’s power.”
Weasel scratched the nape of his neck. “Hunting an elusive stag sounds time consuming.”
“Are you kidding me? You hunt for a living. You track your target, hunt them down, and kill them. That is literally what you do.” I tried my best to keep the frustration out of my voice.
“Yeah, but we get paid for it,” he replied. “Handsomely, I might add.”
“Franco is right,” Vaughn chimed in. “This sounds like unpaid labor, which would be in violation of guild rules.”
Franco. Franco. Franco. I tried to commit Weasel’s real name to memory.
“Why not ask the pack?” a goateed mage asked. Cedric. “This seems more like a job for werewolves than assassins.”
“I considered that,” I said, “but the goal is to guide the animals to safety. If the wolves’ natural instincts kick in while they’re chasing down a magical animal, there’s a risk they’ll lose control.”
“But does that make it a risk not worth taking?” a woman with a chin-length haircut asked. Monica.
Vaughn’s gaze settled on me. “You can control spirits, right? Can’t you just seize control of the host and stop them when they get here? Then there’d be no need to relocate the animals.”
“I can’t control them. They’re not dead.”
Alfonso nibbled on an olive from his martini. “How can they be alive if they’re spirits?”
“They’re not the ghosts of the dead. Think of them as traditional land spirits.”
Franco shrugged. “I don’t get it.”
