Curran looked at me. His eyes were the color of rain, solemn and grim. He looked like a man who was resigned to his fate but really didn’t like it. Whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t in a good place.
“Hey there, ass kicker.”
“That’s my line,” he said.
I made my voice sound casual. “What are you building?”
“A smoker.”
The fact that we already had a grill and a perfectly fine fire pit about ten feet behind him must’ve escaped his notice.
“Where did you get it?”
“Raphael’s reclamation crew pulled a bunch of these out of the rubble of an old home improvement store. He sent me one as a gift.”
Judging by the number of parts, this smoker was more complicated than a nuclear reactor. “Did you read the instructions?”
He shook his head.
“Why, were you afraid they’d take your man card away?”
“Are you going to help me or just make fun of me?”
“Can’t I do both?”
I found the instructions, flipped to the right page, and passed him the washers and nuts for his screws. He threaded them onto the bolts and tightened them with his fingers. The bolts groaned a bit. If I ever wanted to take this thing apart, I’d need a large wrench to do it. And possibly a hammer to hit the wrench when it wouldn’t move.
Curran lined up the hinges with the top of the smoker. They didn’t look right.
“I think these hinges are backward.”
He shook his head. “It will fit.”
He forced the bolts through the hinge holes, tightened the screws, and tried to attach the top to the bottom. I watched him turn it around about six times. He threaded the bolts in, attached them, and stared at the mutilated smoker. The lid was upside down and backward.
Curran glared at it in disgust. “To hell with it.”
“What’s bugging you?”
He leaned against the wall. “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Europe?”
“No.”
I came over to stand next to him.
“When I was twenty-two years old, Mike Wilson, the alpha of Ice Fury, came to me with an invitation to the Iberian Summit.”
Mike Wilson ran a pack in Alaska. It was the only pack in the United States that rivaled ours in size.
“Wilson’s wife was European, Belgian, I think, and they used to cross the Atlantic every couple of years to visit her family. She’s his ex-wife now. They had a falling out, so she took their daughter and went home to her parents.”
Considering that home was across the Atlantic Ocean, she must’ve really wanted away from Wilson. “Mike didn’t fight for his kid?”
“No. But ten years ago they were still together. They stopped in Atlanta on their way to the summit, and Wilson invited me to come with them to Spain. He made it sound like a deal for panacea was on the table, so I went.”
“How did it go?”
“I expected it to go badly. Turns out I was overly optimistic.” Curran crossed his arms on his chest, making his biceps bulge. “Things in Europe are different. The population density is higher, the magic traditions are wider spread, and many structures are old enough to stand through the magic waves. The shapeshifters are more numerous, and they started hammering out packs and claiming territory early on. There were nine different packs at the summit, nine sets of alphas, all of them strong, all of them ready to rip my throat out at any minute, and none of them honest. It was all big smiles to my face and claws at my back the moment I turned around.”
“Sounds fun. Did you kill anyone?”
“No. But I really wanted to. A werejackal from one of the packs approached me to make a deal to sell panacea, and the next day we found his corpse outside with a rock the size of a car tire where his head used to be.”
“Fun.”
“Yeah. I brought ten people with me, some of the best fighters in the Pack. I thought all of them were solid and loyal. I went home with four. Two died in ‘unfortunate accidents,’ three were lured away by better money, and one got married. The Pack was still young. Losing every single one of them hurt, and there wasn’t anything I could’ve done about it. It took months for the power vacuum to sort itself out.”
Old frustration laced his voice. He must’ve spent weeks thinking it over, dissecting every moment looking for what he could’ve done differently. I wished I could reach through time and space and punch some people.
“We came in outnumbered and outgunned, and went home empty-handed. I said never again.”
I waited. There had to be more.
“One of the alphas I met was Jarek Kral. Tough, vicious sonovabitch. He owns a chunk of the Eastern Carpathian Mountains and has been steadily expanding. The man is obsessed with his legacy. He thinks he’s some sort of a king. Most of his children died, either from going loup or from being his children. Only one daughter survived to adulthood, and he tried to give her to me.”
“He what?”
Curran faced me. “When I got back to our ship, there was a seventeen-year-old girl named Desandra waiting for me with a note. The plan was that I would marry her, and he’d pay me each year, as long as I agreed to send one of my sons his way. Jarek preferred two, as an insurance against one of them dying, but would settle for one.”
Charming. Fifteen minutes in a room with Curran would tell anyone with half a brain that he couldn’t be bought and he would never sell his children.
“You didn’t take him up on his generous offer, I take it?”
Curran shook his head. “I didn’t even talk to her. We sent her back where she came from. Jarek married her off to another pack, the Volkodavi from Ukraine.”
Wolf Killers, huh. Interesting name for a shapeshifter pack.
“Desandra lived with the Volkodavi for a few months, and then Jarek changed his mind, so she had to get a divorce. Later Jarek sold her off into another marriage, this time to a pack from Italy, Belve Ravennati.”
“He’s a kind and loving father.” I hopped on the parapet. I could write a book on bad fathers, but Desandra would probably give me a run for my money.
A corner of Curran’s mouth rose in contempt. “He isn’t her father. He’s her pimp. He got into some sort of dispute with the Belve Ravennati during the last Iberian Summit and they pissed him off, so he ordered Desandra to come back home again. Desandra had a fit. Her current husband and her ex-husband were both at the summit, so she slept with both of them. Now she’s carrying twins, and the amniotic tests are showing DNA from both men.”
“How does that work, exactly?”
“That’s what I said.” He grimaced. “I had to ask Doolittle. There is a term for it, hang on . . .” He pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket of his jeans and read it. “Heteropaternal superfecundation. Apparently, it means twins from different fathers. I’ve never heard of it, but Doolittle says it’s a real thing and it happens with shapeshifters more often than with normal humans. From what he says, there are identical twins and then there are fraternal twins. Fraternal twins occur when two eggs inside a mother are fertilized at once. The super-whatever happens when they are fertilized by different fathers.”
“I still fail to see how any of this epic mess is our problem.”
Curran grimaced. “Jarek controls a large chunk of the Carpathians. He was trying to make marrying Desandra more attractive, so he set up Desandra’s firstborn to inherit a profitable mountain pass. Apparently during the fight at the summit, Jarek told Desandra’s current husband that if she got pregnant, he would rather kill her and not have any grandchildren before he would let Belve Ravennati get their hands on the pass.”