Rick LaFleur said, “Your boy will need a pack.”
To the gorgeous white-haired man sitting beside me, Mama said, “Can you’un capture him and send him to the werewolf pack, where the others went?”
“We can. It’s expensive for the pack to feed and clothe and educate the boys. The church has been making payments for the ones there now, but it isn’t enough.”
“How much more does the church need to pay?” Daddy asked.
LaFleur named a figure that made me want to cry and made Daddy wince. “And if you send them more boys,” my boss added, “that will increase the cost of board and school.”
“We’ll find a way,” Daddy said. “I’ll talk to the elders.”
“We’lltalk to the elders,” Sam said. “All our faction. Amos, Rufus. You too.”
The elder brothers nodded. Sam wasn’t the eldest Nicholson son, but he had always led the way.
LaFleur’s cell made a faint sound and he looked at the face. “Occam and Rettell have the boy located at the Stubbins farm,” he said.
“Can you’uns get the boys to safety?” Mama asked. “They get caught here, they’ll get kilt. Burned at the stake at the very least, by the factions that hate anything not fully human.”
Knowing I was speaking cruel words, I said, “It’s easy to hate something not fully human, while denying you, yourselves, ourselves, are not fully human, and probably never have been.”
Mama closed her eyes and bowed her head so low I could see only her bunned-up hair.
LeFleur said, “I’ve tracked canines before. I had the presence of mind to bring a large cage. It’s out front of your home in the pickup truck. PsyLED can take them in and arrange transport.” He looked at his cell phone again and then at FireWind. “Kent is on premises. She has asleepy timeworking readied. Once she casts it, would you be willing to pull them out from under the house? Then we can go to the Stubbins farm and get that one.”
“A vampire’s buried on my land,” I said, “asleep with thorns in his belly, underground.”
“Will he be safe there until dark?” Rick asked.
I shrugged and answered truthfully, “I don’t know.”
“We can try to backtrack from the crime scene”—Rick meant where the Purdy boy was killed—“to the rest of the vampires and hopefully stake them and arrest them while they’re asleep. We have the Dark Queen’s permission to take them. And save Soul and free any other prisoners.”
FireWind chuffed agreement and stood. He trotted to the door.
LaFleur said, “Thank you for the hospitality and the coffee. Ingram, we’ll see you at the Stubbins farm.”
“He ain’t eaten,” I said, indicating our boss-boss. “He needs meat.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Rick said. He and FireWind walked through the door and out into the warming day.
Which left me alone with my family.
“It’s time to tell the young’uns the women’s stories,” I said. “The men and boys too. They have a right to know who they are and where they come from. And what they and their offspring might become.”
“What do you mean, what we might become?” Harry asked.
Sam’s face looked like stone. “And our children?” Sam asked. It seemed he hadn’t heard the women’s stories either. I wondered if SaraBell, his wife, had known. He looked at his father. “Daddy? You’un said we got no problems. You’un and the mamas keeping secrets?”
The resultant anger of the Nicholson parents was not pleasant. But it did afford me the chance to get out before Mama turned her ire on me for letting the secret cat out of the invisible bag.
* * *
I got to the rear of the house just as FireWind backed out, pulling the secondgwyllgiby the scruff of the neck. My half brother’s eyes were closed to red slits from the spell T. Laine had cast, but most of his face and his hands were still human. He was scrawny, his black coat ragged and bloody where the fight and the thorns had torn it.
Both boys were loaded into a large cage, with water and dog food in bowls and several fluffy blankets placed at the back for when they woke up afraid and trapped.
Sabtah ran out of the house, carrying two bags. “Change a clothes for both,” she said. “And Zeb’s things. I…Tell him I love him.”
