Page 108 of The Flame Game

“What do you want?” According to my husband’s body language, he didn’t have a care in the world, and his tone came across as more curious than anything else.

“I’d like to cut you a deal.”

My mouth dropped open. It was well enough I’d burrowed into a snowbank, as I would’ve fallen over had I been standing. After everything he’d done, Morrison wanted to cut a deal? How could any man be so stupid and egotistical at the same time?

Apparently, my husband had expected something like that, as he asked, “What deal?”

I didn’t know which shocked me more: that Quinn was even capable of playing the bad cop or that Morrison seemed to think my husband would play ball. Movement caught my attention, and the rabid wolf got to his paws, staggered a few steps, and picked up one of the larger bones before wobbling towards the men.

Morrison approached my husband, stopping in the middle of the road. After a moment of thought, my husband joined the asshole.

“I need that girl for something, and she cooperates with you sometimes. It’ll take a few minutes, and she won’t come to any harm, but I must finish what I set out to do.”

That girl? Me? Had Morrison missed the memo ‘that girl’ was a unicorn who ate meat, breathed fire, and was married to the police chief he spoke to? The breathe fire part would play a very important role in the end of that bastard’s life if I had anything to say about it.

But first, I needed to figure out what my husband was up to, because him talking to the bastard hadn’t been part of the plan. We hadn’t had much of a plan to begin with, but we definitely hadn’t discussed being civil.

How rude.

“And what, precisely, did you set out to do?”

“Reestablish who is human and who is not. We have a responsibility to our people. To humans.”

My husband stared at the man who’d caused us so many problems. “What do you mean by that?”

I wondered if Morrison underestimated my husband like most. Did the asshole really believe my husband would play ball rather than gather information to finish the flame game?

Knowing Quinn, he recorded every word of the discussion to make certain Morrison’s plans died with him.

“Humanity has become severely polluted. Centaurs and humans make humans. Pixies and satyrs? They make humans. Angels and demons? Make humans. Even gorgons can create humans. Vanilla humans and humans with truly dominant human genes are dying. We need to identify those of us who are still human and make sure they are truly protected. These false humans are making it so the real ones can’t be properly safeguarded.”

How awfully twisted. If I scratched at the surface of Morrison’s insanity, I could understand his motivations—and why he would do something like use gorgon dust to flush out anyone who wasn’t human enough.

I bet, in his twisted little mind, he truly believed if someone was human enough, the gorgon dust wouldn’t infect them. Worse, he would have tested the dust himself to make certain he counted as human enough.

How disgusting.

“I see.” My husband gestured, and I realized he pointed to one of the dead animals littering the side of the road. “I stopped because of that,” he lied. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Ah. Rabies. Yes. Nature’s most efficient form of population control.”

Morrison viewed rabies as population control? The math made sense; airborne rabies plus time equaled a heavily reduced population, although everything I’d heard about it implied it would take years before any people actually died from the outbreak.

Hitting the gorgons first made sense if he wanted to get rid of non-humans, and his project with the gorgon-mice-rat doohickeys would have made certain there were enough infected mice not showing symptoms to infect the gorgons without signs of rabies taking hold until it was far too late to save them.

The wolf, which neither man noticed, continued his slow march to the road. Once on the snow-covered asphalt, his stride smoothed out, his ears pricked forward, and he walked better, as though somehow the infection killing him eased its relentless hold on his worn body.

He dropped the bone near my husband’s foot.

So focused on each other, the men still failed to notice the rabid animal.

Idiots, both of them. My idiot gorgon-incubus doohickey would pay for his idiocy through chores and intensive corrective therapy. I hoped the other idiot learned the hard way why it was a terrible idea to ignore his surroundings.

If Morrison even looked at my new wolf wrong, nothing more than a smear would remain when I finished with him.

I wiggled out of my snowbank and wormed to the shadows behind the abandoned tackle shop. I poked my head around the corner to keep an eye on my husband, the wolf, and Morrison.

“How are you hoping for rabies to control the population? I mean, it’s definitely an efficient killer.” Quinn once again gestured to the dead animals along the side of the road.