“Well.” A sheen covered Jess’s eyes. She was still struggling with losing Nathanial and under a lot of pressure, and she didn’t have a tight hold on her emotions. “Thank you. That means a lot to me.” She cleared her throat and pointed at the diary. “Bake in a couple minutes for me to punch Niamh in the face for manhandling all of us. I don’t care if it’s for our own good—I’ve about had it. It’s annoying.”
“Manhandling…allof us?” Tristan asked, and Brochan’s lip twitch and sparkling eyes were the equivalent of another man blurting out a laugh. Tristan wasn’t aware that he, too, had been “guided.”
Jess turned to Austin, once again stealing his focus. Her beautiful hazel eyes were large and open. “Do you have sometime to meet this hacker with me?” she asked. “The one I asked you about the other day.”
He inclined his head toward Brochan. Jess wasn’t the only one needing help with a schedule of late.
“I can have Kace sit in on the challenge this afternoon,” Brochan offered, “and I can take the one you’d planned to attend.”
Right, that challenge, another high-level placement. The challenger was from a prominent pack on the East Coast. She’d left without looking back, coming here with no safety net or even a hotel reservation. She’d shown up at the bar when Austin was working, waited until he was finished, and asked to challenge into the team. Not the pack, the team. The convocation.
Usually, Austin started people low and made them earn their placement by working their way up. That was standard shifter protocol. But not this woman. Her experience and her belief in what they were doing had him granting her permission to challenge for placement at any level she chose.
She was going for the top, but not the very top. Not the level shecouldchallenge into, if he’d read her correctly. When asked why, she’d said that she still needed to learn the ropes and wasn’t ready for a leadership role yet. She’d elevate when she felt she could increase the value of the team.
Perfect answer. Perfect disposition. He hoped she worked out.
That was the only reason he hesitated now. He wanted to see her fight.
“How about we push Niamh to the evening?” Jess said without missing a beat. She winked at Austin. “Look at how good I am at reading body language.”
“He was all but screaming at you,” Brochan said, and Tristan laughed.
Austin kissed her. “Evening I can do. Good luck with Edgar.”
Her world-weary sigh spoke volumes.
NINE
Jessie
“Prepare thyself,” Edgar said with a flourish as the sun sank toward the horizon. We’d gotten delayed with other matters and had to shift him to later in the day.
We stood deep in the wood, where most of Edgar’s experiments were held. Flowers of experiments past were either watching us, swaying randomly, or wilting vines with their tops chewed off by the basajaunak. They policed the more dangerous of the creations and ate anything that had gone too far.
The basajaunak stood around us now, presumably hoping Edgar’s latest batch would be deemed edible. The almost cognizant flowers tasted better than the run-of-the-mill magical flowers, apparently. To my dismay, they also tended to be worse for flatulence.
Ten thick stalks with large, waxy petals each supported a chrysanthemum-style blossom. Each flower was a different color—fuchsia, sunbeam yellow, lavender, chartreuse—and a dusting of bronze sat at the bloom’s center.
“For the flower of the century,” Edgar said in a strange, echoing voice.
Indigo stood in the center of the setup. As our resident healer, she didn’t have much to do until we had to battle, and so she passed the time helping Edgar with the flowers, hanging out with the nature-loving basajaunak, or running in blind terror from the gnomes.
As Tristan, standing a few paces behind me with his arms crossed, harrumphed at Edgar’s act, Indigo winked at us. “This one is really special,” she said.
With her words, the flowers started swaying and twisting in unison. After a moment, they broke formation and switched to a series of independent movements that somehow worked together before returning to their choreography. I realized they were essentially dancing.
“This flower has it all,” Edgar said, stepping closer to one of his babies. “It has teeth!”
The flower opened a mouth that hadn’t been visible before, revealing fangs.
“It has poisonous saliva!”
On cue, a fang dripped.
“Razor-sharp leaves!”
The flower sliced one of its leaves through the air, then the other, like a ninja.
