Page 109 of Cherish

The innkeeper blinks at us for several seconds, then slaps the table with a resounding thud. “No way. You are not asking my advice on how to bring the Shadow Queen down on this town again, are you? We’ve barely recovered from the last time that monster was here, and now you want to bring her back?” He shakes his head. “I can’t let you do that, Hudson.”

“Hey, believe me, no one wants to tangle with that bitch less than we do!” Heather tells him, hands up in a don’t-shoot-the-messenger stance.

Everyone else makes a sound of agreement.

“We don’t have a choice,” Hudson tells him quietly. “And no, we have no interest in provoking her enough to make her attack Adarie. That’s definitely not the end goal here. We just need to talk to her. And if we can get her attention, I believe we can make her an offer she’ll actually be interested in accepting—and all without fighting.”

“How do you plan to do that?” Nyaz crosses his arms over his chest and gives us a very unimpressed look.

“The goal is to get her attention—on us, not on Adarie,” I assure him.

“I still don’t see why you would want to do that. She wants to kill your man.”

I don’t have the energy to tell him that she will probably want to kill me equally as much if she ever remembers me. So I look to Hudson to explain, since heisthe only one here who Nyaz trusts.

As Hudson explains more of our problem to the innkeeper, I rack my brain for a non-aggressive reason to bring her out of hiding.

After Hudson’s explanation, Nyaz shakes his head again. “I’ll admit, you might be the only thing the queen desires more than freeing the Shadow Realm, Hudson. I believe shewouldcome out of hiding if she knew where to find you.” I start to get excited, but then he adds, “Of course, that won’t happen here. We have false Hudson sightings weekly because the townspeople are so eager for your return, so one more rumored return likely won’t get her attention in the slightest.”

“Good Lord,” Jaxon murmurs. “He’s like Elvis.”

“He’s just a hunka, hunka burnin’ love,” Flint sings in a fair imitation of Elvis, and we all laugh—even Jaxon.

The waitress arrives with a heavy tray loaded with our drinks, and Hudson jumps up to help her, which makes her blush and stutter, and she nearly drops the entire tray on Macy’s head. Eventually, we get the drinks sorted out and sip our waters in silence.

I set my glass down and roll my eyes. “Come on, people. We need ideas! Chop-chop!”

Immediately, everyone starts tossing out suggestions—the wildest being the gang doing a flyby and tagging her statue in the palace gardens with spray paint. I’ll admit, that one would be hilarious, but I’m not sure it would put her in the right mood for a calm discussion.

It’s not until Macy leans over to me and points out the window that a real plan begins to formulate.

Reaching into my pocket, I pull out the card I’d taken in jest earlier. “I’ve got an idea,” I tell the table at large.

“Oh yeah?” Nyaz doesn’t sound impressed. Then again, he is currently afraid we’re about to bring the full wrath of the Shadow Queen down on his little town, so I get it.

I turn to Hudson. “How’s your voice feeling?”

“My voice?” he asks warily. But then his eyes fall on the card on the table and the wariness turns to full-blown alarm. “Oh, fook no, Grace.”

Jaxon has obviously already caught on to the idea because he starts laughing like crazy. “Dude, that’s fucking perfect.”

“I’m not doing it.” As if to underscore his flat-out refusal, Hudson, too, crosses his arms over his chest—and goes so far as to look in the other direction from me.

“Pretending I’m not here isn’t going to make the idea go away, you know. Especially not when it’s this good.”

“It’s not good. It’s bloody terrible,” he growls.

“Actually, it’s bloody perfect,” Eden crows as she also figures out what I’m suggesting.

“Can someone fill me in on what’s so good-slash-terrible?” Nyaz asks as the waitress brings out our food. It smells delicious, and as she puts everything on the table, I realize that I haven’t eaten a real meal since breakfast.

Everyone else must be feeling it, too, because Flint, Eden, Heather, and Macy dig into the pachos and punnion pings with gusto.

I try to show a little more restraint, mostly because Nyaz is still waiting for an answer. But I still can’t resist grabbing at least one pacho and eating it before answering, “A concert promoter wants to put on awidely publicizedconcert during Starfall with Hudson.”

Macy grins—the first real smile I’ve seen from her in months—adding, “And there isno onemore equipped to make a Boomer stand up and pay attention than thousands of teenage girls.”

59

---