Page 81 of Outfoxed

I debated telling his mother he’d been the provisional buyer. What would she do?

I considered her through narrowed eyes, one ear pricked forward, the other turned back.

“His fox is looking at me funny, Theo. Did they feed her today? Is this how foxes communicate hunger levels?”

“She is probably trying to figure out a polite way to state you belong in an institution.”

“I was wondering how you would handle my provisional buyer, actually.”

“I’ve already received a request to negotiate. I have not yet replied. I like making jerks stew before telling them no. You’re the boy’s fox now.”

Crazy rich people. I reached for my backpack, but the woman batted my hand, clucked her tongue, and pointed at the seat until I sat back. Without a care in the world, she unbuckled her seatbelt, thumped to the other side of the limo, and retrieved my bag before returning to her spot. With a dramatically heaved sigh, she clipped her belt back into place before placing my backpack on my lap. “You don’t pick anything up or fetch a damned thing until the family doctor says so. You can carry your sword around. But that’s it. There’ll be no pulling your stitches or hurting yourself fetching anything.”

“You’re hovering, Stephani.” Theo sighed. “Please forgive her, Miss Tamrin. She’s an overprotective idiot.”

“I’m a mother. It’s my job to be protective, and some bastard shot the boy’s vixen. When I find that bastard, I’ll make the boy deal with him. The boy’s useful for things like that.”

Yes, I could see him being very good at eliminating people in the Alley, and I wondered what tricks he had in the other quadrants. I dug through my bag, retrieved my provisional contract, made sure she couldn’t spot her son’s name on it, and waved it around. “I could be talked into cooperating with your plans for a price.”

“Oh, this will be good. What do you want, my little fox?” Stephani clapped her hands. “This is wonderful, Theo. I thought it’d take her weeks to warm up, but she’s already trying to snooker me. Today is the best day I’ve had all year. In years, even.”

“There’s some people in the South who need to meet their ends.”

“Oh, the little fox has a vicious side to her. Talk. What did they do?”

“They’re killing people in the Alley.”

Silence.

“You have my attention.” Something about the woman’s tone changed, darkened, and made me shiver. “But you must tell me how you know.”

Shrugging hurt. “Maybe I’m a quadrant master, too. Maybe I coerced someone into looking into it for me. What do you think?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Obviously, I was too cheap and hadn’t thought to have you tested if you might also be a little witch or mage. You have the bloodlines to be one. But if you’re angling for somebody in the South while you were in the Alley, that would make you a little witch. You know where because you’ve seen into the South, and you’ve enough skills you got a visual and general sense of your targets, but not enough skill to have identified them. And since you’re that confident, you’re a past scryer, as a future scryer would hesitate while debating over the inevitability of it. As scryers require talismans, you got a hold of something resulting from a man-made storm, which would have linked you to the mages, and since you’re confident they’re in the South, you’re after a music mage—or several of them. Yes, a coven of the bastards. They prefer the term choir. I prefer the term dead, as there’s rarely anything good about that lot.”

“It’s probable they’re in Miami or Orlando, I know for certain they’re in the South, and since they are music mages, if they know what’s good for them, they wouldn’t step foot within a hundred miles of New Orleans. The queens would have them long dead, and we’d be better for it.”

Stephani Moretti’s smile bore a sharp edge. “Do you know what I taught the boy when I figured out he was a little mage?”

“What did you teach him?”

“Ethics.”

Yes, I believed that. “The kind that would make him snap a finger, say a word or two, and take off the hand of a would-be assaulter who was going after a teen?”

That caught her attention. “As a matter of fact, yes. That is something he would do.”

“There’s a poet in the Alley making a reputation for himself, and he didn’t appreciate when a sleaze touched a teen waitress in a bar.”

“Damn that boy! How many damned lawsuits is he going to make my lawyers deal with? Last year, I had to deal with his rash behavior three times. Justified, and they regretted crossing the boy, but still. He isn’t even home and he’s costing me a fortune. This is all Marco’s fault, daring to use me to make sons!”

“And yet you want another one,” Theo said, his tone a mix of tired and exasperated.

“Well, yes. He does have this tendency to make excellent sons. But I really want a daughter, damn it.”

“Why would there be a lawsuit? He was in the Alley, and he wasn’t in one of the better parts of Tulsa. The asshole’s probably a corpse by now. You don’t live long in the Alley short a hand.”

“Tulsa has better parts?” Sandro’s mother eyed me with interest.