“Uniting the pack against the fae won’t be no trick.” Warren reached up to tip his cowboy hat—and rubbed his ear instead when he realized it was sitting on his knee because we were inside. Warren didn’t wear hats inside a building because it was rude. He was also perfectly capable of speaking with good grammar, he just didn’t always bother. “The fae are pretty good at making themselves unlikeable—excepting Zee and Tad.”

“Excepting Tad,” I said. “Zee can be as obnoxious as the best of them when he wants to be.” But I was still working through what he said—and I figured it out. “Oh holy wow. Oh wow. Oops.”

Warren smiled. “See, I knew you’d think of it when you got going. But if it helps, Adam thinks that pot was boiled when Darryl and Zack jumped in to face off with the troll.”

“Bran,” I said. “Bran is going to be livid.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“He just got things smoothed over from when Charles took out that monster in Arizona,” I said. Livid wasn’t even in the ballpark of what Bran was going to be.

“We figured he’d get the news when it broke on the national front—about twenty minutes ago.”

“National news,” I said.

He tipped his imaginary hat to me. “Yes, ma’am. One of our local reporters was close enough to get your declaration on camera, complete with fiery sigils lit up and down your walking staff.”

I sucked in a breath. This wasn’t my fault. At least, it wasn’t all my fault. It was the fault of the fae for letting a troll loose in my town.

There was no way we could have left that troll to the police. The troll’s appearance was outside my ability to affect—therefore this was not my fault. I felt guilty anyway.

“So what does Bran have to do with Adam’s sudden, knuckle-dragging declaration of protection?” I asked.

“Wait a moment,” Warren said. “He wrote it down because he was worried I might mess it up.” He lifted his hip off the chair and dug around in the back pocket of his jeans. “Here it is.” He handed me a three-by-five card that had seen better days. He’d folded it in half to stick it into his pocket—and Adam had bled on it. There was writing on both sides.

In small, neat engineers’ block lettering I read:

1. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.

2. I cannot afford dissent in the pack over anything if we are to square off against Bran. If they are showing disrespect to my mate, they are not committed to me. They need to be loyal to me, that will matter to Bran.