That same annoying feeling that flooded him when he’d looked at her bloody wedding dress came over him. He wanted to fix it, just to make it go away.
He strode to her and said, barely above a whisper, “Do you recognize this?”
“No.” She looked at him, and a small hopeful spark lit her eyes. “Do you?”
“No.”
The spark died. Hugh felt a sudden rush of anger, as if he’d failed somehow.
If they got hit on the way back, she would jump into the fight. She had too much power to sit back. If he lost her, her nature-worshipping cabal would riot. Like it or not, everything in Baile and the town revolved around Elara.
“Stay near me on the way back.”
Surprise slapped her face. She turned it into cold arrogance. “Worried about my survival?”
“Don’t want to miss an opportunity to use you as a body shield.”
“How sweet of you.”
“Stay near me, Elara.”
He walked away before she could come back at him with something clever.
7
Elara leaned against the table. They were upstairs in the room designated as her “study,” which she never used. She preferred the small room off her bedroom. The study held a large wooden table, flanked by five chairs on each side, which nobody was using, except her and Johanna, who sat cross-legged on the table, mixing reagents in small glass beakers.
Past the table, an open area offered four plush chairs set around a small coffee table, with smaller chairs scattered here and there along the walls. Hugh had taken one of the soft chairs. Stoyan, Lamar, and Felix picked seats along the wall. The crazy one, Bale, wasn’t invited to the meeting because he was standing watch. Just as well.
On her side of the room Savannah sat in a plush chair, while Dugas leaned against the wall.
Hugh was in a foul mood. They’d had three of these weekly meetings so far, with cooler heads on both sides present, because when they tried to work things out on their own, their discussions ended in a barrage of mutual insults. She’d seen him irritated before, even enraged, but this was new. His gaze was focused, his eyes dark. He sat in a large Lazyboy chair, flipping a knife in his hand, tip, handle, tip, handle. At first, she watched, waiting for him to cut himself, but after the first ten minutes she gave up. Some people paced, Hugh juggled a razor-sharp knife with his right hand. Aw, the man she married.
Ugh.
Elara tried to sink some sarcasm into that inner ‘ugh’ but couldn’t even fool herself. Hugh was worried. She never seen him worried before. Hugh always had things in hand and the grim look in his eyes was setting her on edge. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but he looked like a king whose kingdom was on the brink of an invasion. And she was his queen.
Ugh.
What was even going on in his head? She had a feeling that if she cracked his skull open and somehow let his thoughts free, they would be echoes of her own. What is that creature? Why did the warrior kill? What did he do with the bodies? How do we guard against him? And the loudest thought of all, playing over and over. What did I miss? What else can I do? It was driving her crazy.
“Next item on the agenda,” Dugas said. “Rufus--“
She pushed away from the table. “We should send people to the nearest settlements.”
Savannah reached out, touched Johanna’s shoulder, and signed.
Hugh gave her a dark look. “Why?”
“To warn them. And to set perimeter wards.”
“What makes you think the wards would hold him?” Hugh asked.
Johanna put the beaker down. “They would not. He would make noise breaking them. An early warning system.” She picked up the beaker, raised it, shook the dark green liquid in it, and put it down again. “We have soil from the palisade where he stood. We can key the spell to him. It would not be expensive.”
Hugh stared at her for a long moment.
“Not very.” Johanna gave him an apologetic shrug.
“I need your approval, Hugh,” Elara said. “It’s a safety measure.”
“Your people will need escorts,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How many settlements do you want to warn?”
She glanced at Savannah.
“Seven,” she said.
“Okay,” Hugh said. “We’ll do them one at a time.”
“That will take a week.”
“Congratulations, you can count.”
She crossed her arms. “Hugh, this is important. Every day we delay, people may die.”
“I will have to send at least twenty people with each party. Any less is inviting an assault.”
“So what’s the problem? Seven by twenty is one hundred and forty.”
“Exactly. You want me to send almost half of my force out into the woods at the same time. That risks the lives of my soldiers and leaves us vulnerable, and I won’t do it. One at a time.”
She unclenched her teeth.
He beat her to the punch. “What makes you think that sending a party of twenty armed soldiers and some witches would predispose these settlements to trust us? A lot of these people are paranoid separatists. They’ll see us as a threat.”
“We have to try,” she said. “They killed the children, Hugh.”
“Fine,” he said, his face still dark. “But one at a time.”
That was all she would get. She could argue more, but he was putting the welfare of their people first. Elara couldn’t really blame him for being cautious. “Thank you,” she made herself say.
“You’re welcome.”
Silence fell. She relaxed a little. The rest of the items on the agenda were routine.
Dugas cleared his throat. “As I started to say, Rufus Fortner is coming here this Friday.”
“The head of the Lexington Red Guard,” Elara said.
“I remember,” Hugh said. “He was at our wedding.”
“He’s looking for a supplier of RMD. The remedy,” Savannah said.
The remedy was an all-purpose anti-magic contamination salve the same way Neosporin was an all-purpose antibiotic ointment. It was particularly useful in sterilizing wounds inflicted by vampires. The Vampirus Immortuus pathogen was weak at the start of infection and could be killed with rubbing alcohol, if it came to it, but the remedy was the established and proven sterilizing agent.
“How big is the order?” Hugh asked.
“We stand to make over a hundred grand in the first year,” Dugas said. “Likely two, three times more, if they like the product and place additional orders.”
“What do we know about this guy?” Hugh asked.
“He’s a good old boy,” Lamar said. “Neo-Viking. ‘Work hard, play hard, beer me wench, if it breathes I can kill it’ type.”
“He’s coming to hang out with you,” Elara told him. “He was terribly impressed with the fight at the reception and he’s starstruck, because you have a reputation. He wants to get drunk with the Preceptor of the Iron Dogs and swap war stories.”
Hugh shrugged. “Okay, we’ll ham it up for him. We’ll need a feast and a barrel of beer.”
She blinked. “A barrel? We don’t really brew beer in barrels. We do it in big drums.”
“That’s fine, we’ll pour it in a big wooden barrel. I saw it in an old movie once,” Hugh said. “Trust me, it never fails.”
She waved at him. “However you want to do it. We need this guy. We’ve been wooing him and the Mercenary Guild in Lexington and Louisville for over a year and they wouldn’t give us the time of day until you showed up. It’s not just his order.”
Hugh nodded. “He’s a foot in the door. If we can get him, we’ll get the rest.”
She smiled. That was one thing she never had to worry about. Hugh was a massive pain, but when he saw an opportunity, he grabbed it.
Dugas checked his notes. “Last thing. The first escort from the Pack arrives tomorrow to pick up the two shapeshifter families. We don’t anticipate any problems, but just in case…”
The knife stopped in Hugh’s hand. “What pack?”
“The Pack,” she said. “Atlanta’s Pack. The Free People of the Code.”
His people sat up straighter. Stoyan’s face turned unreadable like a wall.