“All right.” Wade let the fae go without warning and stepped back, but he kept the silver knife. “Let’s go have a talk with your lady.”
The fae touched a hand to her throat, eyeing Wade with a healthy dose of wariness that Riordan himself carried. Then her gaze slid past Wade to land on him, a coldness entering her blue eyes. “Our lady has no business with kin.”
“He’s my tour guide. She’ll have business with him because I said so.”
Gone was the easygoing attitude Wade had embodied for most of the morning. In its place was a hard-faced young man who stared down the fae with a kind of contemplative focus that made the hair on the back of Riordan’s neck stand on end.
The fae on the receiving end of Wade’s attention actually flinched. “Fine.”
Wade blinked, and that weight to the air disappeared. Riordan found it suddenly easier to breathe. “Awesome. I knew you’d see things my way.”
Riordan shook his head in sheer disbelief at how Wade had bullied their way into an audience with Boston’s most powerful fae.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Wade shook out his hands,getting rid of the tingling sensation at the tips where his claws wanted to punch through. He resisted the urge to shift mass but let the hint of his aura bleed back into him. He’d learned through trial and error and one grudging telephone call with Reed how to hide his presence so that people didn’t register him, which was different from hiding his aura to appear as human. It wasn’t quite magic—nothing with spells or command triggers—but something all dragons were capable of so they could stay hidden in the modern world.
He’d used that trick in Seattle when he’d gone searching for Spencer the other year, keeping the locals from seeing him as he dived into a graveyard. Sound was a different problem, but he’d gotten better at buffering a void of silence between his dragon-sized presence and anyone close by not within its boundary.
It meant no one had seen the scuffle—he couldn’t even call it a fight—and now the fae were leading them down Joy Street while Riordan seemed tenser than was probably healthy. Wade nudged the other man with his elbow, raising an eyebrow when Riordan turned his head to meet his gaze. His eyes were a deep brown that made him wonder about Riordan’s sealskin, what itmight look like. But Sage had drilled it into him plenty of times that it was rude to ask questions like that, so he didn’t.
“It’ll be fine,” Wade said.
“You’re demanding time with Lady Caith and not going through the proper channels,” Riordan said.
“Would those proper channels have gotten us an audience before the end of the week?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Exactly. We can call it bad manners if she takes offense. My pack is always yelling at me about those.”
“Our ladywilltake offense,” one of the fae up ahead called over her shoulder.
Wade made a face. “Then she can take it up with my pack.”
“The Boston god pack knows better than to trespass.”
“Not my pack,” Wade said in a singsong voice.
Riordan winced, but the other man didn’t clue the other fae in on what pack Wade came from. Wade would let them wonder about it until Lady Caith asked him a direct question. If she hadn’t fought in the Battle of Samhain, he didn’t think she would know who he was or even know his pack on sight.
“You are certainly trouble,” Riordan muttered under his breath.
“It’s a calling.”
And right now, it was calling him to a massive redbrick five-story home with a front garden filled with plants that were definitely not a local species. Wade paused just past the wooden gate to poke at something that might have been a rose and which probably looked it with glamour. All the other plants were just as beautiful and strange, the floral scent reminding him of the grove where Gerard and Órlaith had gotten married.
“I think there are laws about invasive species,” Wade said.
Riordan hooked a hand around his elbow and dragged him down the walkway to the gleaming mahogany front door. “What the mundane humans don’t know won’t hurt them.”
“That’s a lie if I’ve ever heard one.”
He should know. When he was younger and newly orphaned, bouncing from group home to group home, he hadn’t known what he was. But those hunters who’d found him had known he was something—something unique enough to tempt a god.
Wade had thought he was a werecreature for most of the years he was a prisoner, mostly because he hadn’t known any better. It had taken getting a god-locked collar off his throat and tumbling into Patrick’s and Jono’s lives to learn his own kind of truth. Sometimes he wondered how things might have been different if his mother had lived long enough to explain what he was. But she hadn’t, and he’d never known his father or wanted to find the man. His life was better these days than it ever had been, despite the horror he’d survived.
And if meeting with this Lady Caith to keep others from experiencing it was something he had to do, then he’d deal with her annoyance.
