“You riding dirty?” Connor asked.
Alexei humphed.
“How much you carrying?”
Connor’s voice, dropped to a whisper, had gone so serious, I thought we’d shifted to talk about transporting contraband across state lines. Especially when Alexei reached into a small leather backpack, pulled out a wrinkled and folded paper bag.
He unfolded the top, poured the contents on the table. But where I’d been expecting to see drugs or contraband, I found a hoard of candy. There were gummi bears, sour sharks, licorice, and lemon drops. A rainbow of taffy, a sleeve of candy wafers I didn’t think they even sold anymore.
“You’re hilarious,” I said to Connor.
He smiled at Alexei. “Told you that would make her nervous.”
“I won’t apologize for being law-abiding.”
“Long as you aren’t a square,” Alexei said, tracing the shape in the air with his fingertips.
I rolled my eyes. You could take the shifters out of Chicago, but that apparently meant bringing along their inner fourteen-year-olds.
“Shifters,” I muttered, and took a square of banana taffy. “Sarcasm tax.”
Alexei almost—but not quite—smiled.
I unwrapped the taffy, read the joke on the inside of the wrapper. “‘Knock, knock.’”
“Who’s there?” Alexei asked. At least he was game enough for a bad joke.
“‘Orange.’”
“Orange who?”
“‘Orange you glad you ate this delicious taffy?’” I read.
Alexei’s expression was grim. “That’s moronic.”
I smiled, handed him the wrapper. “You’ll have to take that up with the taffy people. Tell me about Alaska,” I said to Connor. “Has everyone made it to Aurora?” I popped in the candy.
Alexei snorted, stirred his coffee, metal on ceramic making a tinkling sound as he mixed.
“Almost no one has made it yet,” Connor said. “They take their time. It’s a tree,” he said, and unwrapped a bundle of silverware. He put the spoon on the table. “Main branch,” he said, then added the fork and knife so the blunt ends of all three touched, but the functional ends were fanned out. “Secondary branches,” he said, pointing to the fork and knife. “Most of the travelers take the main branch, but there could be as much as two days of riding between the first and last riders. That’s a long column with potential stragglers, and it’s hard to defend. So we use the branches. Two separate groups of shifters edge out from Chicago on routes that run alongside the main branches, but between fifty and a hundred miles apart. They ride ahead, scout territorial problems.”
“And provide a shield,” I guessed.
“Exactly,” Connor said approvingly. “They can close in from the sides if necessary, but they give the main Pack plenty of room to move. And spreading them out—keeping the main group smaller—tends to keep the locals calmer.”
“Tends to,” Alexei muttered. “But does not always.”
“Thus your last two weeks,” I said to Connor.
“Thus. Shifters in Colorado. Vampires in Arizona. Among other problems.”
“How’s Riley? I forgot to ask last night.” Riley was Lulu’s ex-boyfriend, a hunk of a shifter who’d been wrongly accused of murder when the fairies had worked to take over Chicago. We’d helped secure his release, and the moment he’d walked out of his cell, he’d joined the caravan.
“Better,” Connor said.
“He’s the knife.”
I looked at Alexei. “Leading the line?”
Alexei nodded, sipped his coffee.
I looked at Connor. “You want to tell me why Gabriel thought we might need backup?”
“’Cause the clan is run by assholes?” Alexei suggested.
I shifted my gaze from him to Connor, brows lifted.
“The leader’s arrogant,” Connor said. “I called my great-aunt Georgia to get the details about the initiation, found out there’s been some dissent in the ranks over the last few months. Clan elders versus young guns, as far as I can tell, but I don’t think I’m getting the whole picture.”
“You think they’d hide something from Gabriel?”
“Yeah,” Connor said. “A Pack’s not like a vampire House. There are more of us, but we’re spread over a larger territory, so the local outfits tend to act like fiefdoms. That’s fine by the Apex. As long as everyone is treated well, things are run fairly. But sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if that’s the situation here, but we’re hearing grievances, and the responses from the clan leaders don’t engender much confidence.”
“And that’s where we come in,” I guessed, and Connor nodded.
“Ought not pull the sword unless you have to,” Alexei said.
I smiled thinly. “Vampires don’t pull swords unless they mean to use them.”
He made a sound I thought was approval, but how would I have known?
“I’m going to gas up the bike,” Connor said, rising and pulling bills from his pocket, tossing them onto the table. “Pay that, will you, Alexei?”
He gave me a meaningful look, then walked out, leaving the two of us alone. And, I thought, trying to get us to talk to each other.
I looked at Alexei, found him looking back at me.
“How’s your family?” I asked him.
“They’re Breckenridges.”
“Rich, fancy, and condescending?”
A corner of his mouth lifted. “Pretty much. Yours?”
I considered my answer. “They’re Sullivans. Political, particular, and very focused on Cadogan House.”
“I think we’re supposed to be enemies.”
I looked up at him. “Are we? I mean, I know there’s no love lost, but I didn’t know there were active grudges.”
“I’d call it more lingering resentment.”
I nodded. I didn’t doubt he was telling the truth about his family—they were Brecks—but I think he was being sarcastic about the rest. His voice was so flat, it was hard to tell. On the other hand, there were shifters who didn’t like me, and they hadn’t bothered to mask the emotion, so I decided to play along.
“Okay. We should put on a good front for Connor, though. Especially since he went to all the trouble of assuring we’d talk to each other.”