“I still can’t believe you hit him.”
“He’s a lying bastard and he lied to me,” Phelan snarled as we walked across the bridge toward the arboretum. I was sandwiched between he and Thom as we headed for the meeting spot we’d arranged a day after Phelan had slugged Cariocecus. Salvaging the alliance had been a near thing and Phelan hadn’t wanted to do it at all, but I’d talked him into it.
Strange how the tables turned.
Phelan was still convinced that Cariocecus was lying about his cousin Seamus being alive. I wasn’t so sure—not after having talked to Neve about it, hearing the certainty mixed with hope and doubt in her voice. She knew the evidence of her brother’s death had been circumstantial at best, only made solid by the fact that he’d never tried to contact them in all the centuries since.
Or had he tried and they’d just never recognized the attempts for what they were?
The others had agreed. We needed to talk to Cariocecus and get to the bottom of this—if we could, if there was a “bottom of this” to get to in the first place.
I refrained from telling Phelan how ridiculous he sounded and just shook my head. “We’ll figure out why he lied to you about it—you’re sure he’s lying?”
“He said my sister told him that Seamus was alive. She wouldn’t do that, not even to save me. She wouldn’t spin a lie like that.”
“Really,” Thom said, giving him a wall-eyed look. “Not even to save your skin?”
“She wouldn’t,” Phelan said firmly. “And if, by some miracle, it wasn’t a lie, why didn’t she tell us that Seamus was alive?”
“I’m sure she had her reasons,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets. It was bitterly cold, but the sky was clear. Thom had expressed a faint hope that the next big snow would hold off a for a few days so we could get some construction done back at camp. He’d left that in Davon and Matt’s hands in his absence this morning.
Phelan skewered me with a sharp look. “You believe him?”
“I don’t disbelieve him outright,” I said, meeting his gaze and lifting my chin slightly. “Phelan, you of all people know that sometimes secrets are the only thing that keep a person alive.”
He swallowed twice and looked away, eyes darkening as his brow furrowed. “It just doesn’t make sense,” he said after we’d walked another dozen feet.
“Neither does anything else,” I pointed out. “We’re still just kind of rolling with the punches and hoping that everything turns out the way it’s supposed to. Now we’re going to get the story and the answers that we all wanted from Cariocecus—as long as you can refrain from trying to break his nose again.”
“It was his jaw,” Phelan said, mild indignance coloring his voice, “and my fingers still hurt.”
“It serves you right,” Thom growled. “Maybe you shouldn’t have hit him.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t lecture me about when to hit people,” Phelan said.
“I’m not going to listen to the two of you fight,” I said, glaring at each of them in turn. “We just need to get through this meeting without killing each other and get the answers we want. Right? Right. Now stop pouting, Phelan.”
“I’m not pouting,” he said.
I just gave him a look and he rolled his eyes, turning away again. There wouldn’t be any real reasoning with him until we got to the bottom of this.
I was hoping that after this meeting, everything would be sorted and we could concentrate on bigger problems—like Menhit, surviving the winter, and the possibility that there’d be more Scandinavian bitch-goddesses of the Underworld coming after Phelan.
Again.
