“Tippi, you sure you don’t want to play?” Zab asked.
“No, thanks. I’m good.” There was no way I’d be able to learn anything new with the way my thoughts were scattered these days. The only thing that might get me through the day was lots of tea and cocoa.
I was making tea in the back when the sounds from the other room faded, signaling that someone had muted the room.
Hawk walked over and leaned on the counter beside me. “I know what you did.”
Hawk didn’t bluff. If he said he knew, he knew. Only problem I was having was which thing did he know? I was accumulating quite a pile of secrets lately. It was hardly a good idea to dump out my entire treasure chest of information at his feet. Odds were he was talking about immigration, but just in case…
“I didn’t have a choice.” I shrugged, hoping that the conversation to follow might lead me to a few breadcrumbs of what knowledge he possessed.
“You didn’t?”
I made a show of stirring my tea. “No.”
He crossed his arms, leaning back further. “What am I talking about?”
I took a step away, drinking my tea. “The thing. You know, the thing I did that you’re upset about.”
“You reached out to immigration.”
Dammit. How’d he find out so fast? I didn’t know if the mailbox trick would work, and he already knew about it?
“Are you going to talk?”
“You tell me how you know and I’ll talk.” I hadn’t planned on letting him in, but if anyone would help keep me here, it was Hawk. More than anything else, Hawk was a survivor. Sometimes I was afraid to know what ends he might go to in the process of surviving. Right now, it worked to my benefit, because he thought I was a key to his and Xest’s survival.
“I have an agreement with the mailman,” he said nonchalantly, as if that were nothing.
“You know him?” In Xest, that was like saying you knew the Rolling Stones. How was that even possible?
“Yes. Now, why did you reach out and not fill me in?”
He was watching me intently. Every time he looked at me this way, it made me a little tingly inside where I shouldn’t tingle. I walked over to the couch, a safer distance away.
“Did you stop my letter?” I asked, the thought suddenly occurring to me.
“Answer my question first. That was the deal. An answer for an answer.” He closed the distance, sitting on the other couch, eroding my buffer.
“At my immigration appointment, you alluded to them having been around for thousands of years. They’re immigration; they must have some record of my mother. I’m tracing back my origins, trying to find a thread back to Dread so we can figure out how to get rid of it, once and for all. And I didn’t tell you because we’re not speaking.”
I sipped my tea, acting as cool as he did.
“Which is why I was reaching out to them as well. Now that we both did it, we look scattered,” he said.
He had too? I should’ve guessed. “Why didn’t you tell me? It’s okay for you to do it and keep it to yourself but not me?”
“I was going to tell you, but as you mentioned, we’re not speaking.”
We both fell silent, the new problem obvious. Neither of us knew who would hear back first. What if they contacted him? I wanted to be told immediately. There was only one thing to do: broker a deal with the enemy.
“Speaking or not, whoever hears first tells the other.”
He made me sweat it out for a couple of minutes before he finally said, “Deal.”
12
I grabbed my jacket, heading to the door as Zab yelled from the table, “Hey! Where are you going?”
I stopped walking as I pulled my jacket on. “Was going to get some air.”
“Want company?”
Zab was good at keeping things light when he needed to, and considering my brain was weighed down with two tons of worry, I was ready to bribe him to come along.
“Yeah, definitely. We can get a cocoa while we’re out—my treat.” If there was one thing that got Zab moving, it was Sweet Shop cocoa. Gilli had a way with chocolate that couldn’t be touched. Even Bertha seemed to avoid making anything chocolate based, and I’d bet coin it was because she didn’t want to tarnish her reputation, coming in second with anything edible involved.
“All you had to do was ask. You didn’t need to bribe me.” He grabbed his jacket, moving a little faster.
“Does that mean you don’t want cocoa?” I asked. “I’ll drink them both if you want.”
He held the door open. “Oh no, you offered and I’m getting a cocoa.”
The streets were quiet as we made our way over, as they always seemed to be these days, especially after nightfall.
Zab looked both ways before walking far from the building, just as I did. Couldn’t even cross the street without getting ready to defend yourself.
“Can’t wait until this place is back to normal,” Zab said as he continued to look in every direction.
“I know,” I said, looking both ways myself, but for a different reason. There was one predator that liked to come out at night, and that was me. One of these times, I was going to manage to catch some grouslies.
The shop was empty when we walked in, one of Gilli’s workers wiping down the shelving for lack of anything else to do. They were close enough to the broker office that I saw a lot of the foot traffic that passed us by. This place used to always be packed. If they got a couple of people an hour now, that was a lot.
She handed us two cocoas, knowing our order by heart, plus a bag of fudge on the house.
“Why do I never order these?” Zab asked, popping fudge into his mouth as we walked out.
“I’m wondering the same,” I said after my first bite. They were like little pieces of heaven in your mouth.
A muffled scream came from around the corner. I took off at a run in that direction, my cocoa splattering on the ground.
Gilli was standing behind the Sweet Shop with a herd of grouslies attacking her legs, her employee standing in the back door with a broom in her hand, looking for an opening she seemed too fearful to take even if she could.
“Stay close to me,” I yelled to Zab, not wanting them to switch attacks and go for him after I scared them away from Gilli.
I didn’t wait for him to agree as I ran toward her, the ground already covered in blood. The alley lit up, as if Zab had shined a spotlight on the grouslies.
They scattered well before I got within a few feet of them, running as if I were the devil himself and had come to collect them for hell.
Gilli was on the ground, her pants in shreds, her hands torn apart as she continued bleeding, a pitiful moaning coming from her. She turned on her side, balling up in a fetal position.
I dropped to the ground beside her, knowing we had to get her back to the broker building fast before the poison could spread.
“What should I do?” Her employee ran toward us but then stopped short, looking at me as if I were as scary as the grouslies.
“Go back in so you don’t get attacked after we leave. We’ll take care of her. Hawk knows how to treat this. She’ll be fine.” I turned my full attention back to Gilli. “I’m going to wrap your arm around my shoulders so we can get you help.”