for him whenever he needed help, and left him to it.
What did surprise Stuart was that Michael wanted to stay.
“I’m a Collarless Shifter,” Michael explained when Stuart asked. “And I hurt and pissed off a lot of your friends. If you take me back, Dylan will get his hands on me, and either kill me or shove a Collar on me. Screw that. If I stay here, I can keep my eye on the Shifters who have joined the other side. Maybe catch some, beat sense into them. Who knows?”
He shrugged and turned to another hurt Shifter. Michael was good at field doctoring, Stuart had already seen. He’d probably had to learn it while leading feral Shifters.
Stuart would never forgive the ass for what he’d done to Peigi, the women he’d sequestered, and their cubs. But at least Michael might do some good, if Cian kept an eye on him, to make up for part of it. Peigi winning their domination fight had also subdued him a bit, Stuart could already tell. Noelle was right—Peigi was awesome.
Matt and Kyle also wanted to stay in Faerie, to both see what it was like and attack a few hoch alfar for the fun of it, they said. Graham told them a firm no.
This time, he used a tone that Matt and Kyle obeyed. They slunk next to him, dejected, but perked up again as soon as they marched with Graham toward the ley line gate. They were going home.
Stuart and Peigi walked behind them, the two of them holding Noelle’s hands between them. Neal, downcast from dispatching so many Shifters today, followed with a bound and shivering Crispin.
Peigi had kept Crispin’s silver medallion. She’d tried to relinquish it to Ben, so he could return to the human world when he wished, but he’d waved it off, saying he had his own talisman. She remembered the light in his hands when he’d dragged them home from Cian’s garden, and wondered if it had been he who’d opened the gate outside their bedroom window. She’d started to ask, but Ben had gazed at her as though he had no idea what she was talking about.
Sure, he didn’t. The gleeful expression on his face when he’d turned away had confirmed her suspicions. He’d known they were needed and somehow sent them back.
Neal opened the gate this time, the Sword of the Guardian leading the way. The mists parted and Peigi walked into her own kitchen, which was full of Shifters. Not only her cubs, but Nell, Cormac, Shane, Eric, and with him, Dylan Morrissey. The cubs’ yelps of gladness drowned out any questions or hope of conversation.
Crispin waded through the throng and stood in front of Dylan, the chains around him clinking. They’d have to be cut off, as Stuart was no longer an iron master on this side of the gate.
Dylan studied Crispin for a time, his blue eyes dark. Crispin returned the gaze, head up, though he trembled.
Then Dylan abruptly reached for Crispin and dragged him into a tight, heartfelt, Shifter embrace.
“Thank you,” Dylan whispered, his eyes misting. “It’s a brave, brave thing you did, lad.”
Crispin returned the hug the best he could, and when Dylan released him, he was smiling, his eyes also full. “No problem, cuz. Give me a harder assignment next time, will you?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“So he was Dylan’s plant?” Peigi asked. She and Stuart lounged on the back porch in the moonlight much later. It was still cold, but Peigi wanted the night and its silence—as silent as it ever got in Shiftertown. “Damn, he had me fooled.”
Stuart, in the porch chair drawn next to hers, sipped the coffee he’d brewed after they’d fed the cubs’ dinner and at long last convinced them to go to bed. It had been a task getting them to settle down, but finally, they’d ceased listening to Noelle’s tales of her brief adventure and dropped off in exhaustion.
“Dylan told me before he left tonight that he sent in Crispin to give him the rundown on the Shifters who’d defected,” Stuart said. “How many, who they were working for, what they were expected to do—basically any intel he could gather.”
Peigi pulled the afghan Misty had given her closer around her. “Crispin was good at making us believe him a disgruntled Shifter at the bottom of his clan.”
“He is at the bottom of the Morrissey clan. Dylan decided he’d be perfect for the job, because no one would question a Shifter low in the hierarchy running