Roman ducked behind the couch and emerged with a phone.
“When some supernatural filth tries to carry off the children, call Roman so he can wade through blood and sewage to rescue them, but when it’s something nice like a wedding or a naming, oh no, we can’t have Chernobog’s volhv involved. It’s bad luck. Get Nikolai. When he finds out who I’m going to marry, he’ll have an aneurysm. His head will explode. It’s good that he’s a doctor, maybe he can treat himself.”
He plugged the phone into the outlet.
It rang.
Roman stared at it as if it were a viper.
The phone rang again.
He unplugged it. “There.”
“It can’t be that bad,” I told him.
“Oh, it’s bad.” Roman nodded. “My dad refused to help my second sister buy a house, because he doesn’t like her boyfriend. My mother called him and it went badly. She cursed him. Every time he urinates, the stream arches up and over.”
Oh.
Curran winced.
“You hungry? Do you want something to eat?” Roman wagged his eyebrows. “I have smoked brisket.”
My fiancé leaned forward, suddenly interested. “Moist or dry?”
“Moist. What am I, a heathen?”
Technically, he was a heathen.
“We can’t,” I told him. “We have to leave. We have Conclave tonight.”
“I didn’t know you still go to that,” Roman said.
“Ghastek outed her,” Curran said.
The Conclave began as a monthly meeting between the People and the Pack. As the two largest supernatural factions in the city, they often came into conflict, and at some point it was decided that talking and resolving small problems was preferable to being on the brink of a bloodbath every five minutes. Over the years, the Conclave evolved into a meeting where the powerful of Atlanta came together to discuss business. We had attended plenty of Conclaves when Curran was Beast Lord, but once he retired, I thought our tortures were over. Yeah, not so fast.
“Back in March, Roland’s crews started harassing the teamsters,” I said.
“In the city?” Roman raised his eyebrows.
“No.” I had claimed the city of Atlanta to save it from my father, assuming responsibility for it. My father and I existed in a state of uneasy peace, and so far he hadn’t openly breached it. “They would do it five, six miles outside of the land I claimed. The teamsters would be driving their wagons or trucks, and suddenly there would be twenty armed people blocking the road and asking them where they were going and why. It made the union nervous, so a teamster rep came to the Conclave and asked what anyone would be doing about that.”
“Why not go to the Order?” Roman said. “That’s what they do.”
“The Order and the union couldn’t come to an agreement,” Curran said.
The Order of Knights of Merciful Aid offered that aid under some conditions, not the least of which was that once they took a job, they finished it on their terms, and their clients didn’t always like the outcome.
“So the teamster rep asked the People point-blank to stop harassing their convoys,” Curran said, “and Ghastek told him that Kate was the only person capable of making it happen.”
“Did you?”
“I did,” I said. “And now I have to go to the Conclave meetings.”
“I’m there as a supportive spouse-to-be.” Curran grinned, flashing his teeth.
“So why did your father mess with the convoys?” Roman asked.
“No reason. He does it to aggravate me. He’s an immortal wizard with a megalomaniac complex. He doesn’t understand words like ‘no’ and ‘boundaries.’ It bugs him that I have this land. He can’t let it go, so he sits on my border and pokes it. He tried to build a tower on the edge of Atlanta. I made him move it, so now he’s building himself ‘a small residence’ about five miles out.”
“How small?” Roman asked.
“About thirty thousand square feet,” Curran said.
Roman whistled, then knocked on the wooden table and spat over his shoulder three times.
Curran looked at me.
“Whistling in the house is bad luck,” I explained.
“You’ll whistle all your money away,” Roman said. “Thirty thousand square feet, huh?”
“Give or take. He keeps screwing with her,” Curran said. “His construction crews obstruct the Pack hunting grounds outside Atlanta. His soldiers nag the small settlements outside the claimed area, trying to get people to sell their land to him.”
My father was slowly driving me insane. He’d cross into my territory when the magic was up, so I would feel his presence, then leave before I could get there to bust him. The first few times he had done it, I rode out, dreading a war, but there was never anyone to fight. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night because I’d feel him enter my land, and then I’d lie there gritting my teeth and fighting with myself to keep from grabbing my sword and running out of the house to hunt him down.