“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“You saved me.”
Wilson clears his throat, breaking the moment, and we both turn to look at him.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he says. “But if you two would like to fill me in on how this human not only managed to acquire a shifter child, but get it to Fablestone safely, I’d be quite pleased.”
“Of course,” I say. I open my mouth to start telling him the story when I hear a shrieking sound from behind me.
That can only mean one thing.
My mother is here.
She marches up to us and wraps me in her arms.
“I should probably be slapping you,” she says. “But who has time for that? Where’s Daisy? I want to see her.”
“Daisy is inside,” Peggy offers helpfully. “A woman is getting her changed and fed.”
“And who are you?” Mom cocks her head to the side, looking at Peggy. She doesn’t look like she’s judging her. Rather, she’s simply curious.
“Peggy Dane, ma’am.” Peggy holds out her hand to shake my mother’s, and my mother looks at Wilson and me to silently ask if this is really happening.
“Peggy brought Daisy back, Mom,” I tell her. That’s all the information my mother needs. She wraps Peggy in her arms tightly and starts telling her how grateful she is, how we all owe her a debt of gratitude, and how she doesn’t know what we’d do without her.
Then my mother scurries into Wilson’s office and once again, we’re left alone.
“Okay,” Peggy says, turning to Wilson. “So it all started a few days ago when I was leaving work.”
She explains how she ran into Ellie, how she found out about Fablestone online, and how she had two strange people stop at her house. There were a few details she had left out the first time she told the story. When she explains that the people who stopped at her house seemed to be searching for Ellie and Daisy, my skin bristles. I have to fight the urge to shift and go find them right now because I want to kill them for trying to hurt my niece.
For trying to hurt my sister.
For trying to hurt Peggy.
When she’s finished, Wilson turns to me.
“This is bad,” he says.
“We should have moved sooner,” I point out, and he nods.
“We wanted more intel,” he sighs. “Fuck.”
“Look,” I tell him, placing my hand on his shoulder. “Nobody ever said being clan leader was going to be easy. It’s a hard fucking job. We should have gone after David as soon as he was missing, but we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know if he’d been taken, if he’d just left his wife, if he’d gotten hurt somewhere. Going in without an information would have been dangerous. Now we have something, at least. We know Lucky is searching for us and they may have already located our base. It’s only a matter of time before they attack, so we need to be ready.”
“Or,” Wilson says. “We could bring this fight to them.” He looks at me, and my old friend seems sad and pained. I know. This hurts. All of it hurts. There’s nothing simple or easy about figuring out how to stop one of the worst organizations we’ve ever come across.
Lucky is known for capturing shifters and for performi
ng experiments on them. I don’t know if they’re developing weapons, but I know they’re not trying to find the cure for cancer.
“I don’t like the idea of them coming here, Cameron.”
“I don’t, either.”
“I don’t like the idea of them coming onto our turf and attacking us in our own homes. If they’re planning to do that, they must have some sort of weapon that will prevent us from shifting.”