He scraped a dry finger against my cheek. His hand smelled so strongly of acetone and lotion it momentarily dispelled the repulsive scent blistering the air.
I bristled away from his touch.
“Take every right turn from now on. At the center of this maze, you’ll find the cage in which I keep my glorious pets. What you’re looking for is inside.”
A cage? Was that the source of the squawking and revolting reek?
Julian handed me a little key. “You will be needing this.”
I closed my fingers around the gold key and started walking away when Julian called out to me.
“After you were born, your father came to me.”
I didn’t turn around, but I waited, spine tight.
“He asked if I could enlighten him as to why he’d been given a daughter.”
“He must not have drunk the celebratory concoction,” I said drily.
“Perhaps. Anyway, at the time, I didn’t have an answer for him. I told him he should ask his Alpha. He told me that he had. Would you like to know what Heath told him?”
“He instructed him to kill me and try again. Oh… and he also suggested a paternity test.” My tone dripped with acid.
The ensuing silence told me Julian hadn’t expected me to answer.
But then his voice rose again. “I know you feel guilt, Ness. I sense it weighing heavily on your shoulders. Cast it away. Heath Kolane was not a good man. Besides, think of your father. Think of what a victory it would’ve been for him to see you, his strong, beautiful daughter, rise to the highest rank of a pack who cast her away because of her gender.”
My heart hardened to steel. My resolve too. I didn’t delude myself into thinking Julian was my friend. He was an oily, manipulative man, but he’d just given me two tools-courage and knowledge-to right one of the many wrongs inside my pack, and for that I was grateful.
I started up again and took the first right.
The first of many rights.
Even if Julian hadn’t shared the directions to his birdcage, I would’ve found it from the smell. His vibrant-colored and cacophonous parrots reeked. As I approached their cage, eyes prickling from the aggressive stench, I lifted a hand to block my nose.
No wonder he’d hidden the fossilized wood inside. The birds’ awful stink would cover up the artifact’s. I wasn’t sure what the old thing I needed to find would look like and regretted not having asked what color it was or where it rested in the cage. When Julian had mentioned a cage, I’d imagined a smallish thing, not one I could step into without hunching over.
The birds turned their beady black eyes toward me, growing still and quiet at my advance. I uncovered my nose and sniffed the air for what I needed to find. My eyes watered, but I kept sniffing, strolling slowly around the cage. I caught a whiff of cold rot and stopped. Both parrots had swiveled their neckless heads to watch me, their sharp beaks buried deep in their puffy red chests.
I crouched to see if the smell emanated from the wood-chipped floor. My nose burned. The rancid odor was definitely worse below. In the pale light of the moon, I tracked my gaze over the woodchips until I found a disturbance in their evenness. Something glinted among the dull carpeting like polished bone.
Pressing one palm over my nose, I made my way back around the cage to the door and slid the key into the lock. When the latch clanked open, I pushed the door open and slipped inside, shutting it back quickly so Julian’s prized pets didn’t flock out. Keeping one eye out on the quiet birds, I moved toward the irregular patch of flooring and dug out what I’d seen.
Thick. Yellowed. Shiny. Putrid.
The key to gender selection.
How had anyone been able to swallow a drink sprinkled with this was beyond me. I would’ve thrown up at the mere smell.
Perhaps that’s what had happened to my father. Perhaps he’d thrown up the vile thing.
I wrapped my fingers lightly around the disgusting object and exited the birdcage. The parrots hadn’t fluttered a single feather. I turned the key, then buried it in the palm that wasn’t holding the Boulder relic.
As I turned, I bumped into a body.
A tall, broad body with glowing yellow eyes.
Liam stood in front of me, jaw so hard it could cut glass.
My pulse raged from his presence, from his nearness.
“You found it.” The low timbre of his voice rolled toward me. He was angry. Terribly angry.
I pressed the key harder into my palm. “I did.” I should probably have dropped the key into the grass and prayed he wouldn’t see its shine, but I didn’t drop it. I didn’t dare move. “You’ve arrived too late.”
“You wouldn’t have had any help, would you now?”
“Would it matter? The rule of the game was to find the artifact. They didn’t specify our method for finding it.”
A rough smile perched on his lips. “You’re good, Ness. Sneaky, even.”
I tried to step around him, but he blocked my advance. “Get out of my way, Liam.”
“You cheated.”
I glared up at him defiantly. “I used my connection to find it. How is that cheating?”
“Your connection…or your mouth?”
I uncurled my fingers from the piece of wood. It tumbled onto the grass at the same time as my hand flew into Liam’s jaw.
How could I ever have considered letting him win? “I’ve never ever touched a man that way!”
“Then why is Julian helping you?” he asked, rubbing his jaw.
“Maybe because he thinks I’d make a better Alpha than any of you.” I crouched to pick up the fossil. Woodchips had caught in the hem of my dress, but I didn’t bother brushing them off. My hands trembled too fiercely to do much more than focus on clutching the key and the wood.
I shook my head as I rose and passed by him, knocking my shoulder into his chest on purpose.
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“It’s away from you, so it must be right.” My vision had tunneled from anger and adrenaline. I’d find my way outside of this maze eventually. I was in no rush. I walked briskly, my heels poking into the ground and popping out. I took every left turn I could find. Instead of finding myself on the great lawn, I found myself back in front of the birdcage.
I growled out of frustration.
At least Liam was gone.
I tried again, this time focusing. I remembered I’d emerged from the maze on the side facing the cage door, so I walked back that way, and then I took a left, and another left, and another. On the ground beneath my feet I spotted the spindly branch Julian had ripped. Bolstered by the knowledge I was heading in the correct direction, I concentrated on recalling how I’d gotten to that point. It took me three attempts to figure it out.