Page 84

For a moment, I simply looked at him. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, staring past me at the house. There were voices inside, footsteps overhead, someone laughing somewhere toward the back. These people had fed him, argued with him, made room for him at their table and trusted him to stand between their children and anything dangerous enough to come through the wards.

They had no idea what he had kept from them.

"Ready?" I asked.

River's eyes came to mine. "Yes, I am ready."

"You want me to come with you?"

The question was out before I had time to examine why I'd asked it. Two days ago, I might have offered because I knew Alex better than River did. After last night, the instinct felt different. I wanted to make whatever was about to happen easier for him, and the realization made something tighten in my chest. Hecate help me, he was giving me heartburn already.

River studied me long enough that I wondered if he understood exactly what I'd been thinking.

"No." His gaze moved toward the yard again. "You were right. I have to do it on my own."

There wasn't anything to argue with in that. I nodded and continued up the steps, although every instinct I possessed wanted to turn around before I reached the door.

I didn't.

The kitchen smelled like cinnamon nudging the back of my mind but I had nothing to offer it, because apparently the universe had decided subtlety was overrated.

Sissily sat on the counter with both hands wrapped around a mug nearly the size of her head, wearing a cardigan that had survived enough disasters to qualify for pack membership. She looked up when I walked in, and I watched her relief arrive first.

It lasted approximately three seconds.

Her gaze moved over me, slowed, and came back to my face with considerably more interest than I appreciated. "Oh, you absolute idiot," she hissed.

"Good morning to you too."

"You slept with him."

I stopped halfway across the kitchen. "I'm not having this conversation with you in a public kitchen."

"You slept with him, then drove two hours, and you didn't call me." She ignored me, abandoned the mug and hopped off the counter, five feet of ruined cardigan and outrage coming directly at me. "Twenty-two years, Hazel. Twenty-two years of me telling you every single thing that happens to me, including things you have actively begged me to stop sharing, and you sleep with Blackman but somehow decided it doesn't warrant a phone call?"

"Hecate help me…"

"I had to look at your face and figure it out myself. Do you understand how offensive that is to the institution of friendship?"

Despite everything, I almost laughed. "Sissily."

She was already drawing breath for another assault when I caught her gently by both shoulders. Whatever she saw in my face stopped the words before they came out.

"I need you to listen to me for a minute. Then you can yell about River for the rest of my natural life. I'll sit quietly and let you draw diagrams if you want, but right now I need you to listen."

She had known me since we were four years old. I watched that history work its way across her face as the outrage faded and something far worse took its place.

"No."

I hadn't said anything yet.

"Listen."

"No, Hazel. Whatever you're about to say, no."

"Eight days." My hands slipped from her shoulders. "Danika has eight days and nothing left to bargain with. If that contract goes to auction, a demon owns the High Priestess of the Gatekeeper's Coven. Not just her soul. Everything she knows, every ward she's built, every secret she's spent sixty years collecting. And there's a sanction on this pack with my name sitting at the other end of it. Both problems disappear with one solution."

Sissily stared at me as if I'd started speaking another language. "You are not that solution."