scared, just more aware of things. If you see this woman while you are away from the camp, return here immediately. She has some sort of allergic phobia to cats, and I doubt if she would try very hard to penetrate the depths of the encampment.”
“She’s here?” My voice rose on a squeak. “She’s in Anwyn? Goddess! Is
“What do you mean, everyone?”
“There’s two hit men here, too. They work for Baldwin, that lawyer who has it in for my moms and me because I wouldn’t let them deliver the magic they sold him. He’s the guy who threw me over the edge of the cliff.”
“Two men with no necks?”
“That’s them.” I shuddered despite the warmth of his embrace and the blanket. “Irv and Frankie are their names. They have an obsession with heads in duffel bags. I can’t tell you how that makes me feel.”
“I can tell you how it makes me feel,” he said grimly, his hold tightening painfully around me. “I will simply forgo my pledge to Aaron and stay with you. You must be protected.”
For a moment, I wallowed in the sensation of being cherished, but I’ve never been a woman who shoved her responsibilities onto others. “You can’t do that, although I appreciate the sentiment.” I kissed him gently, then scooted off his lap, taking the blanket with me. “Aaron would be pissed if you broke your promise to him, and as for Irv and Frankie, I’ve already taken care of it. Doug sent out guards to nab them when they followed me to this camp.”
Gregory chuckled. “The reclamation agent will have trouble gelding them as she wishes, then. I’ll have to tell her that they are out of her reach.”
I gathered up my clothing and began to put it on, feeling that further sleep was not going to be in the cards. “I suppose you could, although I don’t see why you’d go out of your way to tell her anything.”
“Er . . .” An odd expression akin to embarrassment crossed his face. “As it happens, I was supposed to report to her last night about what happened to the two men.”
“Why?”
“I ran into her as she was about to enter the camp, and played upon her feline phobia in order to keep her from hunting for you.” He made a face. “It seemed preferable to having to run through the camp attempting to make sure you were out of the way.”
I shivered again, slipping on the long linen tunic that was among the clothing Seith had left for me the night before. “Definitely. Doug has issues where you’re concerned, and he wouldn’t hesitate to carry out his threats of jailing you if he sees you. Which means,” I said, pulling aside the tent flap enough to peer outside, “that we should get going. It’s getting lighter.”
“We?”
I pulled on the pair of leggings and my tennis shoes. My sword had been cleaned and set just inside the tent. I hesitated a second, then strapped it around my waist, feeling that it was better to have it with me than not. “I don’t have to be on duty until late this afternoon, and besides, I’ve always wanted to see what a thief does. I can shadow you.”
He stood up and pulled me against him, his lips curling when I melted into his chest. “Not while I report to the reclamation agent.”
“What
“I haven’t a clue, and I don’t particularly care. You can help me find the bird if you like.”
I wiggled against him, wondering if there was time for a quickie before too many people were awake. “Did you find the dog and the deer?”
“No and yes. The dog is long since deceased, although I suspect a puppy from one of its descendants will stand in for it. The deer I left outside your tent.”
“You did? Did you feed it? What are people going to say when they see it?”
He kissed me quickly, then took my hand and led me toward the tent opening. “That you have exceptionally bad taste. Behold, the famed roebuck of Aaron.”
I gazed upon a stained, broken marble statue that was propped up against a tent pole. “That’s his valuable deer?”
“According to Ethan it is, and I don’t think he was lying about it. He seemed much too preoccupied with himself to care what happened to the spoils of war, so to speak.”
“Hmm. It’s kind of a letdown, to be honest. I was hoping for a magnificent, randy buck.”
“And you have one, my vixen,” he said against the nape of my neck, pulling me against him.
I thought seriously of pushing him back into the tent and having my womanly way with him, but voices from the tent beyond had me quelling that idea. “Come on, let’s get out of here before someone sees you. You can tell me about the bird on the way over to Ethan’s camp.”
We managed to make it to the stream without being seen, and while we crossed it and skirted the edges of Ethan’s camp, Gregory told me about his meeting with Ethan.
“I didn’t realize he named his hand. To be honest, I didn’t think Alien Hand Syndrome was real until Colorado said that’s what the problem was with Ethan.”
Gregory looked askance while I explained my experience with Ethan. “He is an odd man.”
“Yes, but he does seem to be kind of helpful. At least you got the deer, and he said you could get one of the dogs. Oh! I think that’s the tent where my moms are. Peaseblossom said it was next to Ethan’s.”
Gregory looked toward where I was pointing, to a purple and white tent. “Why don’t you visit them while I hunt out the reclamation agent? I don’t want you wandering around the camp until I know where she is.”
“You’re cute when you’re overprotective,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze.
“One moment.” He moved ahead of me, checking down first one aisle, then the next before beckoning me forward. “Stay at your mothers’ tent. I’ll find you once I’ve spoken to Death’s minion.”
A chill went down my spine at his words. I didn’t want to lose my soul any more than I wanted my head in Irv’s favorite duffel bag. “All right, but if you’re not back in a couple of hours, I’ll have to risk leaving on my own. I want to check with Doug that those two hit men are safely confined and not likely to get out. I don’t need them telling this woman that I’m just a stone’s throw away.”
He glanced around quickly, then pulled me into a kiss so hot it left a little shimmer of electricity snapping and crackling along our skin.
“Show-off,” I whispered against his lips as the charge faded away.
“You bring it out in me. Stay safe, sweet Gwen.”
I watched him walk away because . . . well, because he looked really good from the rear and I enjoyed the view. That thought had me pondering, on the way to my moms’ tent, just how I was going to fix things so that we could have a future together.
“There’s got to be a way,” I muttered to myself, my gaze skittering from person to person in search of the woman Gregory had described. “I won’t ask him to leave the Watch for me—not that I know if he would . . . no, he would . . . maybe—but there has to be something we can do to get the Watch to ignore Mom and Mom Two. Hmm.”
No solution had struck me by the time I entered my mothers’ tent, but I had resolved two points: I was going to warn them about the woman who wanted my soul, and I wasn’t going to tell them about Gregory and me. Over the course of my life they had both, singly and jointly, gone into periodic matchmaking modes, trying to hook me up with men and women . . . and one or two androgynous individuals about whom I was never really certain.
Usually I resisted their efforts, but sometimes, when I was feeling particularly lonely, I’d go out on a blind date or two just in case they were right and they really had found me the perfect person.
They never did. Trust the one organization that made my life a hell to bring my attention to a man who actually might well be the person with whom I wouldn’t mind spending the next few hundred years. Regardless of whether he was or was not a life mate, I wasn’t going to inform my moms about him. They would be merciless in their attempts to find out information about Gregory and would probably demand that he do something silly like marry me. They were very big on binding ceremonies.
“I’ll just keep mum about him, and focus their attention on ways to deal with the Death woman,” I told
