Too Late for My Shifters' Regret novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Warehouse

Cassius was already at the kitchen door.

"Tonight," he said.

"Not alone," I said.

"Briony."

"You'll walk into a dock warehouse with horns on your head and no idea which crate. I've seen you look for a spoon in this kitchen."

The cook snorted into her pot.

The griffin girl put down her bowl.

"I know which crate," she said. "I know the roof. There's a hatch over the cage where they kept me. The bolt's rusted through."

"You can barely stand," I said.

"I'm standing now."

She was.

Her hands had gone from gray to pale, and she was looking at Cassius the way he'd looked at the egg in my father's cellar.

"Four eggs," she said. "I watched them every night for a month and couldn't do a thing. Let me do a thing."

The cook took a basket off a hook, lined it with a folded blanket, and pushed four hot bricks from the oven into the bottom.

"Bring them back warm," she said. "And bring yourselves back."

At supper I found Jory at the window table and told him.

He put down his fork and stood up.

That was all.

We went out the kitchen gate after dark, four of us and a basket.

The docks were fog and tar and the slap of black water under the boards.

The warehouse stood at the end of the last pier, long and windowless, with a lamp over the door.

A black badge was nailed under the lamp.

A key, painted on iron.

Two watchmen sat on crates by the door, passing a bottle.

Jory looked at me once and went down on all fours.

The black wolf slipped away along the pier into the fog.

A minute later, from the far end of the docks, came a howl that made the hair on my arms stand up.

Then the sound of barrels going over.

Both watchmen grabbed their lamps and ran toward it, swearing.

The griffin girl was already climbing.

She went up a drainpipe like a cat, with her ragged wings folded tight, and Cassius boosted me after her.

The roof was slick with fog.

The hatch was where she'd said.

The bolt broke off in Cassius's hand.

He lowered me down through the dark by both wrists, and my feet found the top of a crate.

Inside it smelled like wet fur and smoke.

A stove glowed red at the far end.

Bundles of furs hung from the rafters.

There was an empty iron cage under the hatch, with straw in the bottom, and I didn't let myself look at it for long.

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