Chapter 22

Chapter 22
“Enough!” Duggan squeaked. “Why do you insist on embarrassing me as much as possible? You all know what will happen!”

A round of snickers and stifled laughs went through the room, but after everyone assured Duggan they didn’t mean anything by it, he resumed his normal anxious handwringing. “If this is all true,” he said, “and I don’t doubt it is – Isabel here has a superb mind for a human – then we’ve still got to deal with Jenga somehow. If he’s done this before, and is trying now, he’ll certainly not stop until he’s drained the coffers.”

Jamie put her stiletto-clad claws on the desk, rocking backward in her chair. “And as the town treasurer, it’s probably my duty to inform you all, since you never listen when I give the monthly budget reports; we’ve been running on empty for a few months.”

“Empty?” Erik said, turning to her. “I thought you said there was plenty of money for the rest of the year.”

She nodded. “There is, but there’s no surplus. When the last round of theft happened, we were in the middle of a boom time. Remember – back then, Clay’s boy Sedge, along with those two werebears, they were in the

NFL.”

“Oh, right,” Erik said. “How much did that bring in?”

Somehow stopping himself from licking his lips for a second, Clay spoke up. “My boy, you know, he was just, you know, the kicker for the Giants. But he still made a couple million a year, you know, and even though we have a very reasonable local tax rate, it was still a great deal – couple hundred thousand, just from him or so.”

“Right,” Jamie said before anyone could continue talking about football or the local taxation rates. “And now, we’ve got no NFL players, so we’re running on a much tighter budget. If we get drained, it’ll be a long, long time before we can recover.”

Another silence fell on the room, and everyone spent a few moments looking back and forth at each other.

“What’s this about a mate, again?” Clay asked. “Can we talk about that again? Mating is much more interesting than budgets.” I was almost relieved to have the tension break.

Except that the next second, everyone’s attention turned to me.

Suddenly, I wished I could turn into a hedgehog or a millipede or a squirrel or something and get the hell away, but try as I might, no hair or extra legs came out when I closed my eyes and concentrated.

“Is this really the time?” Erik said. He stood up, getting irritated, and took a short walk around the conference table. “Do we need to deal with this right now?”

He took a deep breath.

No one said a word. The only sound in the room was Jamie sliding a pencil out of her hair, and re-twisting the bun. At least, that was the only sound until Erik let out a sigh. “What do you want me to say? You want all the details?”

Clay was the first one to speak. “Yes, that would—”

“No!” Jamie and Duggan both cut in. After a quick look at each other, Jamie nodded and Duggan continued.

“No, Erik, we don’t need all the details. But considering what we’ve just listened to about Jenga conspiring to drain the town coffers, it’s only fair to consider that the person making the assertions also be scrutinized.” “English?” Erik said, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Meaning, if you’ve really taken a pureblood as your mate we should probably know why we should trust her.” Duggan rubbed his nose. “After all, this is the first any of us have heard about the money being taken by anyone except Atlas’s last mate, isn’t it? Kind of an uncomfortable coincidence.”

“That’s enough!” Erik slammed his fists on the table. “This is... she’s... I love this woman, and you’re questioning my judgment?”

His voice roared off the walls. Everyone stiffened, not wanting to draw any extra attention from Erik.

“No,” I said. “No, no, it is fair.” I said, standing up, as seemed to be proper.

Duggan exhaled audibly.

“I know that you all have been incredibly nice to me, and I know that I feel more at home here, among all of you, than I ever did back in Ohio. But

—”

“What does that have to do with the money, though?” Clay said. “I’ve heard one, you know, thing for the past decade years, and then you show up and say, you know, something different. We all like you, Isabel, you know, I think we agree on that. But it doesn’t much matter how at home you feel if you’re out to get our money. You two fooling around is your own business, but once there’s an official mating involved, then that’s different.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hands up defensively. “Look, I know all this. Jamie explained it to me the other day. Erik’s been holding off on marking me as his mate because he didn’t want this exact thing to happen. He loves this town so much, and takes his duty so seriously that he was willing to sacrifice his own happiness – and mine too – to keep the peace.”

“That’s noble and all, but it still doesn’t answer the question about the money. Isabel, why should we trust you?” Duggan’s eyes told me that he didn’t like what he was asking. Kind old Duggan didn’t want to hurt anyone.

I swallowed hard. In all of the craziness of the last few days, the one thing I never considered was how to prove that I wasn’t making it all up. Leave it to me to forget the most important part – why should they trust me?

My eyes fell on the pile of papers, and for a moment, I was lost in thought.

“You’re a historian,” I said, as an idea suddenly occurred to me.

“I am, yes,” Duggan replied. “I’m sure you knew that before you asked, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“Context,” I said. “History is all about context, right? Motivations, feasibility, those sorts of things?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose so. I wish my students caught on as quickly as you, but how does that affect anything going on here today?”

My brain was cranking in overtime. There was one book I had to read, something about the American Revolution, for college, a couple of years ago. I remembered the professor going off on this incredibly long tangent about motivations, complications and feasibility. Things, he said, you always had to have if you were going to make a plan.

There had to be motivation to do it in the first place, something to gain that you couldn’t get otherwise. Then there had to be sufficient complication that made other, similarly minded plans more difficult and finally, the plan had to be doable.

Erik was staring at me, obviously not sure what to do if I didn’t come through. Jamie had her normal quizzical, vaguely warm but still perplexing smile on her face. Even Clay wasn’t moving much, just fidgeting with his fingers.

“If there’s going to be a conspiracy, a plan, then you have to have motivations in the first place. Then there’s gotta be a way to complete the plan, and other plans have to be more difficult, or you’d do those, right?”

Duggan’s eyes just about lit up. “Very true. And I assume you’ve found these in that ledger?”

“In a way,” I said. My voice was starting to quaver a little, since I’d probably never spoken publicly as much in my entire life than I was right then.

Erik finished his lap around the table and sat down. I sat too, calming my nerves. He grabbed my hand under the table and squeezed, then put it on top where everyone could see. That one gesture carried so much weight and power that I immediately felt like everything was okay, that I could handle anything in that second.

“Go on,” Duggan said, leaning forward. “I want to believe you, Isabel, I think we all do.”