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I grinned at him. Conn probably knew what the guy was about when he let him inside the house. My familiar was bored out of his black-horned skull. We both were. Maybe taking some temp jobs would be a good thing—if the good colonel was open to that.

“Maybe I could help ya with yer werewolf mystery, but on a part-time basis. I have irons in lots of fires at the moment, and I need to be around to pull them out when they get too hot.”

“Fine. I can pay you as a contractor until you decide to join the payroll.”

“But we’re for sure starting with the werewolves?”

Ben shook his head. “No, we’re starting with the missing women. The werewolf angle is only a lead.”

I smiled at his cleverness. “That’s a very enlightened view for a man with no paranormal powers of his own.”

“I had two outstanding teachers recently who illuminated my mind,” he said, saluting me with his lemonade glass as he rose. “I’ll drop this in the kitchen on my way out. There’s a packet already on your kitchen table with all I know about the situation. We’ll do a contract-for-hire agreement later. Call the number on the card inside. Better still—add my number to your phone and Conn’s. He’s welcome to call me anytime.”

I mock-saluted him, which made Ben laugh. Normally, I saluted no one unless it involved the middle finger on one of my hands.

ChapterThree

Iwasn’t a female who kept a diary, but if I was, I would keep track of how many days and nights it had been since I last saw or heard from Rasmus. And I would have written the same things about Mulan because I’d wasted the same amount of time worrying about her. The only thing to do about Rasmus remaining incommunicado was to curse him under my breath.

Tracking down Mulan would be easier, but I loathed the idea of doing so. I wasn’t the type to meddle in another woman’s life decisions—romantic or otherwise. Encouraging the easily irritated Wu Shaman to give my familiar a chance was more romantic advice than I had ever given any non-familial person. Ma and Fiona were the only two women I ever spoke to about the men in their lives, and even in those cases I never asked for details.

Ma hadn’t volunteered information about her booty call man and I hadn’t asked or wanted to know. Whatever happened between Fiona and the Daniel fellow Jack had talked into taking the guardian serum was her business. So long as my daughter was fine about her love life then I was fine too. I felt no need to be Fiona’s moral compass. Being one for all demonkind was enough responsibility.

The only problem with my don’t-get-involved strategy was that I’d already given Conn advice about courting Mulan. I had never, ever crossed that line with him until now.

Not that I had any secrets from Conn.

When he became my familiar, I’d already been married to Jack, but he knew about the previous men I’d gotten close to—all four or five of them. He and my Grandmother O’Malley had followed my life decisions closely but they hadn’t interfered or stopped me. I’d married Jack, gotten pregnant, and gotten Conn all within the space of two short months.

My parents hadn’t liked Jack but they’d pretended to for my sake. Until I got out of prison, I’d stayed blissfully oblivious to how deep my parents’s dislike of Jack ran. There was no war between us when we married, though Ma had issued a slew of warnings. I had been so naïve back then that my face burned even thinking about it now.

The only war my parents ever fought with me and won was the one where they convinced me to keep Conn being a demon secret from everyone not named O’Malley. They’d so rarely asked me to do anything serious that I never questioned giving them my vow.

In hindsight, it was wise of them to force me to do the one thing that would save me and Conn both. And it was wise of me to have kept that promise to my parents because I had certainly not been wise about Jack in any other way.

My parents had spoken vaguely about all of Conn’s previous caretakers. Out of a lifetime of respect for them, I’d allowed them to get by with that. Recently, though, I learned they feared Conn’s powers and feared telling me it was Grandmother O’Malley who’d passed him on to me.

But what no one had known or guessed was that I had never been afraid, not even when I saw how powerful Conn was. Maybe I was too relieved to have found a kindred soul within my family. Gaining Conn was like going from being a lonely only child to having a beloved twin who shared everything with me.

What Conn did when he wasn’t me, well, I figured that was his business and none of mine—hence our unspoken privacy agreement. In our time together, Conn had frequently mentioned that I allowed him a range of personal freedom he hadn’t had in centuries.

Conn had wanted me trained in more than witching, so he trained me to fight with magick and the powers his presence gave me. When I outgrew Conn’s tutelage, he visited the mound where the ascended soul of his original keeper had gone after his physical death.

My imp familiar returned with my ancestor, The Dagda, walking beside him in a physical form once more. The Dagda found a place near my parents to live and stayed for a year to train me before announcing that he was going to explore the world while he was on this plane again.

I was sad to see my ancestor go, but happy that he’d done so much for me.

After The Dagda left, I joined the Shadow Breakers to use all that I’d been learning. It was intense work but I loved every minute. That was a special time in my life—one I didn’t realize then would never be repeated. For those precious first two years of Fiona’s life, I had everything it took for a woman to be happy.

Goddess, what blinders youth puts on a person.

Imperial demons normally didn’t take advice from others or seem to need it, but I thought I was helping when I told Conn how Mulan felt about him. Now Conn refused to be anything other than a dog in my presence and Mulan wasn’t responding at all to my efforts to communicate. I was sick of both of them being so childish, but that wasn’t why I was determined to break through their nonsense. It was because I didn’t want to talk to the werewolf pack alone.

I’d not dealt with that species much, but the one time in Ireland had been enough to teach me some valuable lessons. For any living, breathing female, walking alone into one of their gatherings was the equivalent of walking into a frat house naked and shouting ya were ready to take them all on.

Shifter wolves were bawdy and always ready to engage in a quickie. It was their favorite sort of activity. Even the married ones who restricted themselves to one partner out of loyalty would still flirt with ya mercilessly. I’d had to threaten to sever one werewolf’s private parts with my sword to get my point across.

So no... I wouldn’t be tackling my first American werewolf pack alone. I was going to make Conn help me, but first I needed to know how to handle him in his latest brooding dog mood. To figure that out, I had to confront Mulan and find out what had gone wrong between them.