Chapter Eighteen

"Thanks for coming out here, Tommy," Will said to the man as the two sat down inside of a booth in a Chili's just outside of Boulder. "I realize Colorado's not exactly your beat, but you said if I needed magic help, you were always happy to make new friends and do them favors. I just hope it's not gonna cost me too much."

Tommy offered one of his trademarked devil-may-care grins, turning lengthwise in the booth, sliding all the way in until his back hit the wall, giving him a complete view of the restaurant. "Kid, you've seen too many fucking movies. It's not like you're in the mafia or anything. Living behind the Veil, you're either helping people out or making waves. Sometimes both, I guess, but for the most part, you can take the measure of a person right from the start and not have to worry too much about it changing later. I'm not doing favors for you out of any expectations that you'll do any back, just the hope that if I need a hand, you won't be opposed to lending it."

"That sounds like a relationship I can get behind," Will replied. "Maybe it's all the paranoia Silversmith instilled in me in dealing with the fae folk."

The Green Wizard Captain rolled his eyes with a grin. "Yeah, well, that's also entirely merited, but I'm not fae folk, so you needn't hold me to their rules. You're well within your rights to distrust the faeries all the time. Even when they don't mean to, they're always angle-shooting, trying to play every person they encounter. That's a faerie specific warning. But we're getting off topic. You were going to ask me for a favor that I was going to probably agree to without asking for anything in return. So, let's get back to that, shall we?"

Will nodded. "Sure, let's. So, I had a run in with Merlin last week--"

"Stop."

"Okay."

"Not to go all Sean Bean on you, but one does not simply have 'a run in with Merlin' in any casual fashion. How did you encounter Merlin?"

"He came to use the sanctuary," Will said.

"Merlin doesn't need to use a sanctuary," Tommy said, "but I suppose it might make his life a little easier if he did. Who was he meeting with?"

"He claimed it was a dragon, but they looked human enough to me. Said his name was Chekire."

"Oh," Tommy laughed. "Oh okay! Then yeah, maybe him using the sanctuary actually was just a happy coincidence. Chekire's certainly skilled enough of a mage that Merlin wouldn't want to get into a scrap with him if he could help it. It hadn't occurred to me that Merlin's got a list of enemies as high up on the food chain as he is. Makes sense though. And Chekire's a big name in the spellslinger community. If we're talking people who could give Merlin a run for his money, well, I'd still probably bet on Merlin, but it'd definitely be a fair fight. That's the kind of dispute suited for a sanctuary sit down, just to guarantee nobody gets their temper riled up. Tensions can run high for those sorts of things. But now that we've established that, what did Merlin say that poked the wolf?"

"He said my partner, Lacey, is one-eighth fae, and so if she wanted to learn magic, she'd need to do so from a fae teacher."

Tommy's eyes narrowed a little bit. "One of your girlfriends is one-eighth fae? I mean, that's uncommon but it's not unheard of, times being what they are."

"What are they?"

"Indifferent," Tommy sniffed. "But that much is true. If she's even partly faerie, she'd have to learn faerie magic, because the very fundamentals of magic depend on where your heritage starts from. And while she may be seven-eighths human, the fae portion of her nature's going to take over any core principle work she does. Faerie blood is powerful stuff. But it's going to mean she's got a very volatile personality, and you're going to need to keep that in check."

"That's a good note," Will told him. "And I will. But confirming that is only part of the reason I asked you to come out and meet me."

"Okay, so, let's get back to where we started - why am I here?"

"I want you to do an investigation pass on all my current partners," Will said. "I want to know what I'm missing about any or all of them."

"You think they're hiding things from you?"

"No, I don't. I really don't. But I think there's things about them that even they don't know. There's something remarkable about all of them, and I think there's deep running secrets there," Will said. "Maybe it's strange, but I've got this strong sense that each of them fell into my life for a reason, like there's a guiding hand on the steering wheel of my fate."

Tommy laughed, rolling his eyes a little bit as he shook his head slightly. "Again, you've been reading too many fantasy books, kid. Fate is just somebody making an excuse so they can't be held accountable for the mess their life has become. That said, it's entirely possible you've been drawn to mates that offered you a stronger pack cohesion."

"That's a thing?"

"You believe in fate, and you don't believe in science?" The mage's grin kept on spreading. "You're crazy, kid. You know that, right? Yes, animal magnetism, pack cohesion, all that basic biology they taught you in school - that all applies to us too. We're drawn to the things that'll help us form a better pack, a better squad. The desire for self-improvement runs in all things. And you might have been tapping into your latent werewolf senses, trying to find better-than-average matches for you to get entangled with. But sure, I can look into all of them without them being aware of it. It won't be too hard to poke around their backgrounds, see where they come from and what makes them tick. You want me to include Trish in that?"

"No, I'll handle Trish on my own," Will said. "In fact, she's going to be meeting me here in less than an hour, so let's not take too much time talking this over."

"You don't want to be seen with me?" Tommy said, holding his hand to his chest, miming clutching pearls. "And by your soon-to-be blushing bride especially?"

"I don't want anyone getting ideas right now, especially since I've gotta figure out how to handle this whole new role in the Pack," Will said, idly pushing one of the saltshakers a little further towards Tommy's side of the table. "And I know I'm already asking a lot, but--"

Tommy was one step ahead of him, reaching into his leather satchel, pulling out a manilla folder about an inch thick, stuffed with papers, tossing it onto the space of table between them. "Kid, if you hadn't asked me for information about your father, I was going to think you were out of your mind. This one's on the house. Everybody should know where they come from. There's also a bit there about the Colts, but that's mostly in the fringes. I figured you'd want to learn about Trish and her family from her own lips, but there's plenty about where you come from that feels like everybody knows but you. I get that. Believe me, I get it much better than most. We didn't have massive files on your dad or the rest of the Capparellis, but the pact? That I could get a ton of information on. The Green Wizard House was helping out the Green Werewolves House during the scuffle, and lots of blowback spilled out over everybody. I don't think anyone came out smelling like roses, but your dad had the worst of the shit scattered over him. It's all in there."

"And his current location?"

Tommy's lips drew into a tightly drawn, almost cryptic expression. "Yeah. It's in there too, but if I can offer a bit of unsolicited advice? Let that one bone lay buried for a good long while. No matter what you think you're going to get out of it, it's going to leave its mark on you, and deep. Your dad's going to hear about your accomplishments soon enough, and if I were you, I'd let him come to you, rather than the other way around. You may not think you're lugging much around in the term of karmic weight about all of it, but as someone else who's never known his father, let me tell you, if my dad wandered back into my life, I'd want to take a piece out of him right from the start. Regardless if it's an hour from now or a decade from now, you're probably still going to feel that way when you finally meet him. There's no harm in doing your homework, reading up on him in advance and getting to know as much about him as you can before you finally meet the guy." Tommy patted his hand on top of the folder and pushed it over to Will's side. "Knowledge is the best weapon you can have in this kind of fight. Take the time. Read. Study. Consider. And when the inevitable showdown comes, you'll be all set to deal with it."

Will slid the folder over closer to himself and took it off the table, sliding it down to rest next to him on the booth bench. "Thanks Tommy. I hadn't planned to go give daddy dearest a visit, but it's good to know it'd be fucking stupid of me if I were."

Tommy gave the younger man a little wink. "I didn't go that far, but you know, take it as you will. You got a list for me for everyone in your Pack?"

"What, you don't just know who they are?"

"Do I look like Karnak the Magnificent?"

"Who?"

Tommy sighed. "Before your time. And mine too, I guess, but I end up watching a lot of reruns. Old Johnny Carson bit, about a mind reader?"

"Who's Johnny Carson?"

Tommy clutched at his chest like he was suffering a heart attack. "You're killing me here, kid... fine. I'm taking my leave of you. And I'm stiffing you with the bill."

"You had a skillet beef queso appetizer and a Coke, Tommy," Will shot back in a snarky tone. "I think I'll live."

"Even if you won't... smokebomb!" Tommy said and ducked down below the edge of the table as a plume of smoke puffed up almost pathetically. But, true to his word, half a second later, the smoke was gone and so was Tommy, and nobody in the Chili's seemed any the wiser for it.

He checked his phone and saw he still had a good amount of time before Trish was going to show up, so he decided to use his time wisely, and brought the folder up to rest on the table, flipping it open, seeing a picture of his father, Giovanni Capparelli a.k.a. Ivan Kozlov, for the very first time.

His dad wasn't anywhere near the behemoth he'd expected him to be, based on his Uncle Pavel's size and stature. He was only barely six foot tall, and while he did have dark hair and slightly olive skin, he didn't have any facial hair, the first thing that surprised Will. The second was that his Dad had a rather large nose, big and intimidating although not too big for his face. It was simply a commanding feature. His Dad was wearing his black hair not too long, but down to the back of his neck. There was a large scar that Will could see on one side of his neck. The photo looked to have been taken at some point in the late eighties, as his Dad was wearing fairly baggy pants and a flannel shirt that he had open to show off the massive thatch of dark hair on his chest.

It was easy to see why people would've bought his Dad being either Russian or Italian - he had a certain swarthiness to him, but his general demeanor seemed friendly with hints of a dangerous, bad boy energy about him. The fact that his father was smoking made Will scowl a little, but it was only one photo that was included in the file, so maybe it had just been a bad day.

The background on his Dad started at a rather strange place, when he first appeared in North America, already in his early twenties. He and two brothers had shown up, leaving 'the old country,' (although it seemed like nobody was entirely sure which country the old country was) to get a fresh new beginning with the Green Werewolf House. The reports listed his brothers as Angelo (the oldest, which would be Pavel) and the middle brother Dante (which would've been Fyodor, Will guessed) although neither of them seemed to have much of an interest in politics, and mostly backed their little brother's plays.

At this point, Will began scribbling additional notes into the file, because he felt like there was going to be a lot of conflicting information he was going to need to make sense out of. The Capparelli brothers had made it clear to the members of the Green Werewolf House that they were coming to find a new life, a better life, over in America, and that Giovanni wanted to stake claim at a shot of being a Hunt Captain, despite the fact that he hadn't grown up in the region.

This was the point where Tommy's file got a little bit strange. The Wizards were clearly trying to stay out of Werewolf politics, but it seemed from the tone of the notes that a civil war had sprung up in the Green Werewolf House and almost out of nowhere, Giovanni Capparelli had become Grand Captain, which seemed to put an end to the struggles for a time.

Then came the fight with the elves.

The first few years of Giovanni being in charge seemed to go well. Once the dust had settled from the chaos of the internal struggle, Will's Dad seemed to be a good and competent leader. He'd established good working relationships with all the other factions, and for a while, it seemed like Giovanni was going to take the Green Werewolf House into a new and better direction, one where they weren't perceived as the outcasts that they once were.

Everything went along swimmingly... except for the relations with the Green Elf House.

The file Tommy had given Will seemed very careful not to take sides in that particular fight, willing to straddle the line between calling the werewolves aggressive in expanding their territory and calling the elves xenophobic, in their attempt to keep the werewolves not only at bay, but at a sizable distance. There were a handful of reports of public arguments between elves and werewolves, with the elves calling the werewolves 'degenerates and abominations,' and werewolves calling the elves 'bigots and racists.'

Everyone held their breath and hoped for the best.

...In the end, they got the worst.

It had been a Captain's elevation party for one of the Green Elves when everything had completely turned to shit. The party had gotten a little out of hand and a couple of drunken rowdy captains had decided they wanted to go pick a fight, so they'd swaggered up to the first werewolf they could and attacked him with a few relentless blows. The werewolf in question, Trish's uncle, a man named Kenny, tried to avoid anyone getting hurt. Right up until the point where one of the elves stabbed him eight times.

It had been called The Loudest Two Minutes.

The next six months composed one of the bloodiest conflicts in the history of Veil, with each side taking catastrophic losses and nearly wiping both sides out. After it was over, it'd been dubbed the All Wrong War, because there had been nobody on the right side, at the start, the middle or the end. Trish's father had demanded retribution right from the start, and while Giovanni had wanted to get justice, the Colts were out for sending a message. 'Take one of ours and we'll cut down ten of yours,' had been the Colts approach, which the elves had answered in kind

Somewhere in the middle of that, Will realized that he'd been born, although none of that was in Will's father's file. But, based on the date of his birth, Will calculated that his mother's entire relationship with his father had occurred during The Conflict, as the time had come to be known. Despite the fact that he knew his mother and his father had hooked up, and his mom had given birth to him before the war was over, not a single scrap of that information was in the file he had in his hand. The death of his Uncle Dante (Fyodor), however, played large into things, and marked a distinctly violent uptick in the carnage. From that point on, his father's demeanor had changed, and he'd become much more bloodthirsty, and the war had grown increasingly more fatal.

In the end, two-thirds of both the Green Elves and the Green Werewolves were left dead, the body count in the tens of thousands, and Will's father had contributed a lot of the carnage. It was Trish's father, Dwayne Colt, who'd gone out and sued for peace on his own with the elves, and in doing so, had challenged Giovanni for leadership position of the Green Werewolf House. The duel had been witnessed by Captain Feng (before his elevation to Grand Captain) and it was here that Will realized he was reading Feng's notes about the matter.

A truce had been reached between the two Green Houses, dependent on a change in leadership for both factions. Dwayne Colt would step in as Grand Captain for the werewolves and Giovanni would step down. Agreed upon as part of this transfer of power was that the first eligible pairing of the Capparellis and the Colts would be married and would unite the bloodlines. From Feng's notes, it seemed like Giovanni had mostly agreed to such terms out of a sense of amusement. He claimed, "I shall leave behind no spawn, no legacy, nothing but dust in my passing." Which may have been why the agreement had been accepted so readily by Dwayne Colt. He'd assumed Giovanni wasn't going to have any kids, or if he did, they wouldn't be North American kids.

Will had to wonder at what point his father had found out about his existence.

Shortly after his deposal, Giovanni had returned to Europe, leaving behind his brother Angelo (aka Pavel), who wasn't part of the more refined and elegant upper echelon of the Green House, but also hadn't been entangled in most of the violence. The last thing in the file was a handwritten note from Tommy, stressing that the Capparelli name was going to carry with it a large chunk of baggage that he should be prepared to deal with, especially when it came to dealing with the elves. Despite the fact that they'd started the All Wrong War, the Elves blamed Will's father for escalating things to a level nobody felt comfortable with.

The bottom of the note simply said, "Sometimes, family sucks. -TC"

Will closed the file and tapped his fingers thoughtfully over the top of it as the waitress brought him a refill on his Coke. It was a lot to think about. The well of his blood ran deep, far deeper than he'd realized, and stepping into his father's shoes was going to bring with it a lot of baggage nobody had informed him about beforehand. Of course, he suspected nobody knew who he was early on, either. So he couldn't really blame them.

It was a shit sandwich, no matter which way you sliced it.

A couple of minutes later, Trish strolled in and slid into the other side of the booth, opposite him. "A horse walks into a bar," she said to him. "The bartender says to him, 'what's with the long face?'" She waited for Will to laugh, and when he didn't, she tilted her head at him. "C'mon, gimme a smile at least."

He offered her a slight smile, taking the file off the table. "Sorry," he said, lifting up the file to wave it around a bit. "Just some light reading that was more complicated than I'd expected."

"Let me guess," Trish said. "Family shit?"

Will nodded in reply. "Family shit." He placed the file down on the bench seat next to him then put his hands back on the table, only for Trish to immediately take one with her own.

"There's nothing you can change about the past, okay, Wil? So don't dwell on it. It fucking blows chunks, I know that better than anybody," she told him, a soft kindness in her eyes that Will hadn't really seen from her much before. "You do what you can, you pick yourself up and you keep going, despite whatever shit mommy and daddy left behind for you to clean up. The sins of the father aren't the sins of the sons, okay?"

"I get it, Trish, I do," Will said. "It's just... it's a lot of legacy shit left in the wake of a guy who didn't know his father's name until a few weeks ago. And now I find out he's got at least two. Maybe more. Who the hell knows what he's going by in Europe these days? I don't understand why he didn't come back and introduce himself when my mother died. Or check in on me when I was younger?"

"Veil politics is fucked up, Will," Trish sighed, squeezing his hand. "I try not to get mixed up in it, because to me, it just looks like an endless black hole of suckage, and Dad's never been happy when he's had to deal with it. Just let it wash all over you and worry about the shit that's more interesting than that, y'know?"

Will offered her his best warm smile. "You're too good to me."

Trish snorted in laughter. "You say that now, but just wait until I've got you doing box jumps for an hour at a time. Now, if you're gonna be my man, I'd better some time learning about not just you, but all the other women in our pack."

"That's wild, hearing you say that."

"What, that I want to get to know them?"

"No, just hearing you call them 'our' pack," Will said. "Sorry, I know I promised not to ask like a sap about it, but you gotta know that when you're walking in a room, every set of eyes is on you, right Trish?"

For just half a second, Will swore he thought he saw her blush before the shade of red matching her hair chased away from her face and she focused on him once more. "You know, for half my life, I would've killed to get that reaction out of people. I grew up mostly being the tomboy that no boy would look at twice. Then somewhere along the way, I got tall, I got tits and I got pretty, and then I went from nobody looking at me to everybody looking at me, and I went the other way with it. I got shy and I started covering up with as big and baggy of clothes as I could, but, well, when you're built like this, it's kinda hard to hide it."

"Why hide it?" Will asked her. "You're gorgeous. Revel in that."

Trish rolled her eyes and grinned, but it was clear she was trying very hard not to let Will's compliments get to her. "Not so easy to do when your Dad's the boss, and when everyone's looking at you, thinking how nice it would be to be with one of our own kind instead of having to pretend we're something or someone else. You know I lost my virginity to some random joe I picked up at a Mudhoney concert? Dragged him back to a hotel room and basically just made him my bitch, I was so fucking worked up." She turned her eyes to stare at him, and suddenly he almost felt like he was being challenged. "You're not gonna be like that, are you?"

Will felt his fight or flight response kicking in, and he dug in. "You got a safeword I should know about? I can get kinda rough sometimes, although if you're not into that--"

"I'm so fucking into that, you have no fucking idea," she growled hungrily at him. "And it's 'whiteboard.' Couldn't think of anything more boring and bland that that. Never had to use it, though."

"You want me to try and make you use it?" he said with a cheeky smile.

"Oh, I fucking dare you, Mister Bowland or Capparelli or whatever the fuck you want our last name to be," she said, openly licking her lips now. "I want to see you raw and carnal and not holding back in the slightest. I want you to fuck me up and dick me down and leave us both spent and sweaty and too fucking tired to lift a muscle. But I want our first time to be just the two of us."

"I don't have anything I have to do until tomorrow afternoon," Will said, almost daring her to give him the go ahead. "We could get a hotel room and--"

"I already have one."

"Some place that doesn't mind if we're a bit rowdy."

"As long as you pay for what you break, this place doesn't give a shit."

"Are you daring me to break the bed?"

"Are you telling me you won't?"

His nostrils were flaring a little, and he could smell the scent of her sex from across the table. Good god, he realized, he could actually inhale the fragrance of her dripping pussy from where he was, and that look in her eyes said she didn't give two shits that he could. In fact, it looked like the only thing bothering her was that they were still at Chili's.

The waitress walked by and laid the check down onto the table. Will calmly picked it up, glanced at it, saw it was $45.68, took out two fifties from his pocket, laid them down on top of it and then stood up along with Trish, seeing the spring in her step as she made her way towards the door, his arm around her waist and his hand on her ass, as he walked with her, hearing her giggle just a little bit.

"You better do this right, cowboy..." she said to him. "You only get one chance to make a first impression, you know..."

"Don't you worry, Trish. I'll make sure your exhausted enough that I want to have a second go at you before you leave, you'll just barely have enough voice left in your throat to say, 'thank you, more please...'"

"Walk faster..."