Her smile was sweeter than the drink. “Yes, please.”
I sent more sugar her way, in the form of fluffy white marshmallows, then stuck my nose in my mug so she didn’t see how much I wanted to hold her. Kiss her. Take her away from this place that we both called home and get her somewhere safe.
“What are you thinking?” I asked, because her eyes were alive with thoughts.
“Well... bear with me while I kind of work some ideas through,” she said.
I nodded. “Of course.”
We were making steps up as we went along. Having a partner who would work through problems with me, felt like heaven.
“What if we knocked your dad out? For just like... a minute or five? Nothing to call too much attention to him.”
I stared at her. “I like that idea.”
She grinned at me. “Because I’m assuming, and correct me if I’m wrong, but if he’s unconscious, his wards will get knocked down too, won’t they?”
“Yes, they will.” I agreed. “Or at the very least, he won’t be awake to hear the alarms. But how are we going to manage that, do you think?”
She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know, but it will be our wedding. Won’t there be a moment where we could drug him?”
I tried not to laugh. This girl had come a long way in a short space of time. “Well, yeah, I guess. Like when?”
She grimaced. “We want the most amount of time, don’t we? So maybe I could kiss him on the cheek at the beginning of the ceremony and coat my lips with a poison? Or we could slip something in his drink for the toasts at the reception?”
I tried not to get too excited about the fact that she’d agreed to marry me and that it would be us, and not our clones, who actually went through with the ceremony. She would still be my wife, even if it was just to save her wolves. And that, in itself, was awesome.
“Umm...” I tried not to think of her in a long white dress and bridal veil, walking toward me with a soft little smile lifting her lips. “Ah...”
My brain seemed to have shut down. I couldn’t get past that enticing image of Monique, my soon-to-be wife.
“What would be easier?” she asked, not sounding affected by the change of events at all. “And what would be less worrying for him? Because if he passes out, isn’t he going to notice? So, there’ll need to be a valid reason.”
Yeah, he would notice. My brain tried to get back on board.
“Let’s go through the plan again. Say, we get married, then make our way to the reception hall. There, we clone ourselves, and one set of us heads off to save the wolves. Is that what you want to do?”
She nodded. “Exactly. We leave our clones there, and you and I go save the wolves. Then, when your dad passes out, his magic will be turned off for a few minutes, which is when we slip in under the wards, rescue the wolves, and run to the veil. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in the forest and gone before our clones fade to nothing, and no one will even know where we went.”
“It’s a good plan,” I said, though I wasn’t sure about Dad’s magic and how the alarm system worked. Hopefully, by the time he woke up and worked out something was wrong, we would be long gone. “It’ll work, if our clones can think of a good excuse for why my father would suddenly pass out. And figure out how to get him to black out in the first place, of course.”
We sat next to each other, drinking our hot chocolates and resting against the back of the couch. I could feel myself fading. “I’m sorry, Monique, but I’m going to need to get a couple of hours’ sleep if we’re going to pull this off tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” She sat bolt upright.
I frowned at her. “We can put it off, if you want. A couple of days? But how long do you want to leave Xander and Kyle down there?”
Darkness clouded her eyes. “I want to get them out, now.”
Just what I thought.
“Then we do it tomorrow. Let’s get some sleep, and at sunrise, I’ll go tell my dad that we want to get married immediately.”
Not exactly the romantic proposal story I ever wanted to tell my children, if we ever had any, but there it was.
I stood up and held out my hand. “Want to come lie down with me? No funny stuff. Just sleep.”
I was so tired I was about to fall over.