Chapter 8

Di and his weird friends told us to take our time planning and casing the place, but we absolutely had to get taken on the full moon because their seer said that was important. Benji and I would be more in tune with our animals and the full moon was also important to Pax.

That was about the only part of this that made sense. I was pretty sure Di wasn’t even his real name and since the other two refused to give us their names, I was guessing his last name was out. I didn’t like being hired for dangerous jobs by men who couldn’t be bothered to tell me their names and were getting all their intel from a seer. But my bear really seemed to like it when Di flirted with all of us.

Which I was totally pretending to be mad at right now, even though he was right about most shit. Pax and Benji wanted to trust him. My bear did, too. It was my big, stupid man-brain that didn’t want to. My big, stupid man-brain was right about most things, too ,because I was over three hundred years old now and grew out of the stupid stuff.

If I refused the job, Benji and Pax would be hurt because they needed this. If I had been wrong about everything, the Coalition would continue. Their funding didn’t get cut off when they got excommunicated and the government stopped giving them money. They had a lot of dark money donated by various billionaires. The Coalition turned around and made some campaign donations to some politicians to make sure the government didn’t outlaw them like they had done in other countries.

The Coalition wasn’t going to go away unless something major happened. My team and I were something major. I might not know what Di and his friends were or even what their names were, but this green witch was important enough to contact a seer and risk pissing me off by calling Benji instead of me.

I didn’t really know how a green witch was the answer to all of this, but we’d all heard of Athena and her heroes. We’d managed to figure out it was Athena who touched the green witch. They weren’t really forthcoming about how Athena had touched this woman and refused to even give us her name. That made it harder for my stupid man-brain to trust them, but at the same time, how exciting was it to be a hero in one of Athena’s quests and get to stop the Coalition? As far as I knew, she hadn’t meddled with us in a very long time.

We were letting Benji take point. Being reckless wasn’t in my nature and Pax needed to be taking a crash course on how to be a fake priest for a bunch of extremists. Father Nathan back home was helping him. He hated those people and had no problem with anyone supernatural.

We all volunteered at the soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. Father Nathan told us after we were cleaning up for the night that he had his own experience with the Coalition. They didn’t take him. He was as human as they come.

He said he had been born on the same day as his neighbor. They were in daycare together and had been inseparable since they could walk. They took his neighbor and his entire family when Father Nathan was thirteen because someone found out they were vampires and reported them.

We never talked about it, but we were pretty sure Father Nathan knew we were supernatural and that was why he shared that story. He was being vulnerable and honest, so Benji opened his mouth and shared that we tried to help their victims. Father Nathan didn’t come out and ask because it wasn’t safe for us, but he did tell us if we ever needed help to come to him.

Father Nathan made us a little bargain when we asked to raid his closet and for him to give Pax a crash course on fooling these people. It wasn’t unexpected either. Father Nathan wasn’t old in human terms. He was in his forties, so there was a chance his friend and their family were still alive.

That was all he wanted. His friend and his family out of there and if we happened to find them, to tell them about the sleepy small town at the bottom of the mountain we lived in. He’d help them get set up. Which we would definitely do.

We managed to get an Air BnB close to New Eden Asylum. Pax finally came into the living room from his video chat with Father Nathan. I’d been trying to find out anything I could about New Eden Asylum like building schematics.

“Benji is being secretive again, and he asked me if there were any rules in the BnB lease about chickens. You might want to go talk to him.”

Fuck. Benji’s wolf didn’t have as much of a prey drive as they normally did because of his demon. When he shifted, he just enjoyed running and not hunting. If Benji was asking about chickens, he was planning something nefarious and Sherrif Riddle was in another state.

I walked into Benji’s room and he had a whole-ass murder board set up with pictures and red strings. There was definitely a photo of chickens up there. Benji shrieked and threw a sheet over it.

“You can’t see it. If you know what’s going to happen, it’s not going to work. I love that you’re a big, sexy bear daddy, but you’re also like, super responsible. Shh. Sit back and let it happen,” Benji said, pressing his finger to my lips.

“No chickens, Benji.”

“I haven’t decided on the chickens yet. The bitches renting us this Air BnB expect us to do their laundry, take out the trash, and are charging us two hundred dollars to use the hot tub. The chickens were so the Coalition thinks we’re just two dumb shifters who can’t help themselves. I think the chickens would be better served as sleeper agents because fuck them for charging for the hot tub.”

“Benji, the chickens might get hurt.”

Benji gasped.

“No chickens. I’ll figure something else out about the hot tub.”

He was a giant softie for an apex predator. He didn’t even like killing roaches. Pax’s familiar was a snake. Benji loved the snake, but he didn’t love what he ate and pretended like Lenore was a vegetarian. Which was wild because Benji very much wasn’t.

“Maybe don’t fuck with the people we are renting from? If the cleaning fee is that much, how much are they going to charge if you do you?”

Benji gave me this wolfish grin, and those horns popped out. Fuck. I really wanted to kiss him and paddle his bottom. He had this ethereal beauty about him that was even more lovely when he was being a menace.

“Pax rented under fake names and gave them the cards with just enough to cover the house and fees. We’re going to publicly get taken by the Coalition, so it’s not like they’ll be looking for us. They’ll charge the card as fast as they can and forget about us.”

I leaned against the door and Benji looked at me hungrily.

“They could decide not to rent to our kind again.”

“They already don’t. We’re all hiding, Cas. How they gonna know?”

“So impertinent,” I growled.

“No way. Don’t distract me with your magic bear dick until later tonight. The full moon is in a week and I’m onto something.”

I smiled to myself.

“I’ll let you get back to work.”

I went back to the living room to join Pax.

“I talked him out of the chickens. They were more for the owners of this establishment than anything.”

“The hot tub? He’s been mad about that since he found out it’s extra.”

“Pretty sure he just wants hot tub sex,” I pointed out.

“You don’t?”

“There’s a natural hot spring in the mountain that we’ve had plenty of sex in that’s probably a lot more sanitary than that hot tub. Loads of people probably already had sex in it and that’s why there’s a fee.”

“Is it weird they could arrest me for charging money to fuck me in that hot tub, but they can charge a fee to fuck in the hot tub or am I thinking too hard again?”

“You’d better not be charging anyone for what’s mine. And yeah, it’s weird, prudish, and stupid. The people who made those laws and the ones keeping them on the books are paying the most for it, too.”

Pax’s phone went off. None of us were the kind of toxic, puffed-up men that needed to read it if one of us got a text. We wouldn’t be like that when we met our woman either. Trust and consent were a beautiful thing. Pax could have gone to the other room while his assistant read the text out, but he didn’t because he also trusted me.

“Man, once we spring those weird dudes’ green witch, we need to find Father Nathan’s old friend because the man apparently knows computers, too. He’d been looking into the Coalition, too, and tried infiltrating them once. He used everything he knows to make New Eden think I’m a transfer from a facility in Europe that got shut down recently because of the government. He said my Hamlet at the community theatre brought him to tears and he knows I can pull an accent to fool them.”

“Your Hamlet brought everyone to tears.”

“You do know how to flatter, but they expect their fake priests to live on site in some kind of dorm. I’ve been hiding, so no one knows I’m associated with the two of you, but I’m going to have to portal myself to the airport so I can pretend like I just caught a flight here when they pick me up.”

I grabbed Pax and hauled him into my lap so I could squeeze him.

“I swear to shit, if this goes wrong and they hurt you again, I’m killing everyone.”

“They won’t,” Pax said, nuzzling my neck. “You’re going to have to figure out what kind of gift basket to get a real priest who wants to get revenge on the fake priests who took his best friend would want. Father Nathan said they have this weird vetting process that involves ingesting a metric fuck ton of colloidal silver.

“It’s enough to seriously fuck us up, but colloidal silver is usually harmless to humans. Enough silver would kill them, too, but they aren’t giving them that dose. They are giving them just enough that it sometimes turns their skin blue. There are a few blue fake nuns and priests out there.”

“Smurf nuns!” Benji gasped. “No one told me we were cuddling.”

“You had to rearrange your whole plan because the chickens were out, baby.”

“I had an epiphany and now I need everyone to tell me I’m pretty, and brilliant, and feed me tacos.”

“Get over here, you.”

Benji probably did have an amazing plan that would get us where we needed to be. It was probably going to be insane and a million times worse than anything he’d ever done to Sheriff Riddle for making him lose that Pokémon.

And I wouldn’t know a damned thing about his plans until they were happening right in front of me.