Grace of a Wolf - Chapter 239

Chapter 239: Grace: Dazed
I’m not entirely sure how I get to sleep, or how I even function the next morning, but after a few days of Bun being a traitor and clinging to Super Nanny she’s now glomped onto my leg and refusing to step more than two inches away from me, even forcing me to hold her when I use the bathroom.

Which I don’t.

Culminating in about a fifteen-minute temper tantrum over the thirty seconds it took me to go pee, and no, it wasn’t worth the fight.

Dylan… hasn’t returned, and Super Nanny isn’t explaining much. It leaves me a little off-kilter. I’d expected Sadie and the cat to return last night, and the kids—mainly Sara and Jer—are deeply upset, convinced they’ve come to some sort of irreparable harm.

“Dylan still hasn’t contacted you?” I push Rudolph. No, wait—Randy.

Right, his name is Randy.

Seriously, why is his name the only one I can’t remember? It isn’t that strange.

“Not since last night, ma’am. He might be out of reach of the pack link. I’ve sent him a text, so he should call when he gets it.”

Super Nanny—I’m just going to call him that because my brain keeps slipping with his real name—slides a plate of scrambled eggs with freshly grated cheddar cheese in front of me.

Bun immediately reaches out and grabs a handful, shoving it into her face with gusto. She’s wrapped around me like a koala and refuses to even let Super Nanny touch her.

Ron thinks it’s because he’s been gone the past two days, plus the animals now missing. Owen’s not around either, so it might just be Bun being a little insecure about people leaving her. Because of this, Ron is in the living room playing some sort of memory card game with Jer and Sara, trying to keep Sara from coming up with doomsday scenarios over what’s happened to the bodies of the cat and the dog.

The girl is obsessed with worst-case scenarios involving death, which I’m pretty sure is some way of coping with how horrible Fiddleback was in all aspects. I have no idea how to deal with it or treat it.

A child psychologist might help, but I’m not entirely certain a human psychologist is going to understand how very different life is here on the supernatural side…

I live in it and I’m still struggling to understand it.

Anyway, between Caine’s promise of a date later today, my missing supernatural pets-who-aren’t-pets, and a koala-like Bun who won’t even be bribed off me with her new favorite noodle-head music video, I’m a complete mess and utterly reliant on Super Nanny and Ron to keep the house, as it were, running semi-normally.

Which is why, when my phone buzzes non-stop in my pocket, I have a horrible sinking feeling in my gut as I check my notifications.

The App is back, as expected.

There are multiple messages from Caeriel.

And my mission’s finally updated.

I check the mission first, and the horrible feeling is justified almost immediately.

[ASSIGNED MISSION: Investigate the identity of the demi-god in region 20-L within 24 hours, or penalties will be assigned.]

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.

The mission wouldn’t worry me so much if it wasn’t for the time limit, and the time limit wouldn’t worry me quite as much if it was really twenty-four hours.

But the countdown the app has provided says something very different. It lists my remaining time at 12:32:53 which is not twenty-four hours, no matter how you look at it.

My head aches again as I look through the notifications, my eyes finally landing on the times associated with them…. Ah.

The App has only been up for a few minutes, but the mission was assigned a little less than twelve hours ago. Which means I’m basically being penalized for not having a working App up until then. How is this fair?

I’m starting to regret going with Lyre when I first met her. I bet if I didn’t, none of this would have happened and I wouldn’t have this stupid App giving me impossible missions and taking away an entire twelve hours despite me being the victim of whatever glitch they created in their own App.

Seriously. How. Is. This. Fair?

Another notification comes up as I’m death-glaring the countdown.

[CAERIEL: I know you’re online. You don’t have much time left. Are you really going to waste it?]

“…ma’am? Grace?”

My head jerks up before my brain’s fully rewound to realize Super Nanny’s been calling my name for a while. “Sorry, what?”

“Did you want waffles or pancakes?” He frowns a little, inspecting me with a little more care than normal. “You look pale. Is everything okay?”

“Uh—I’m fine. I’m not really hungry.” There’s another pile of pancakes on the counter, this time smaller than what Dylan made yesterday. Turns out all the food Dylan made was for Super Nanny, who eats basically a house and a half’s worth of food at every meal. Something about metabolism or… something. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.

But it does make me wonder how much the Lycan Pack spends in a single day on food. It must be astronomical. Dylan ate a lot, too.

Caine doesn’t seem to eat nearly as much, but now it makes sense how he had piled so much food on my plate the first time we ate together…

“…Grace?”

Shit, my mind’s wandering again. I blink at Super Nanny. “Sorry. I was just thinking about Caine—er, the Lycan King.”

“Ah.” He smiles in a way that’s a little too understanding. “I understand. I’ll leave you to your thoughts, then, ma’am. Please think of our High Alpha as much as you wish.”

My lips twitch a little. “Right. Thanks…”

Super Nanny returns to the kitchen with a cheerful whistling tune, and my cheeks burn a little with his enthusiasm.

I wasn’t thinking about Caine like that, okay?

But then my mind wanders to last night and his thighs and his hands and the tingling and how I was left unsatisfied, aching, and waiting with the promise of tonight…

Shit.

Okay, maybe a little like that.

But I wasn’t until stupid Randall brought it up, thank you very much.

Bun shifts in my lap, grasping another fistful of eggs and smashing them against her face in what I assume is her attempt at eating independently. Or maybe she’s just trying to get attention. It could be either, honestly.

“Do you want a fork?”

“Nuh.” A mouthful of eggs and cheese dribbles out of her mouth with her response. I’m going to need another shower.

I took one last night, after Caine left, for… reasons.

Nonparticular reasons.

It’s nice to have water hook-up again. I’ve been taking a lot of showers.

Deciding to give up on being clean, I let Bun do whatever she wants as I return my focus to my phone, forcefully yanking my brain out of the gutter into functional I Have Shit to Do mode.

The countdown on my phone continues to tick down, and I frown at the mission they’ve given me. Seriously, I have twelve hours to find the identity of a demi-god without any hint whatsoever. I guess I can go back to the laundromat, but…

Didn’t Lyre say the App doesn’t give us missions we can’t handle?

Lyre’s a liar.

Giving up on the brain-twisting requirements of this mission, I check the messages Caeriel’s sent me, already dreading what he’s sent.

But they turn out to be surprisingly… helpful.

It’s a list of locations with what he says are “elevated energy signatures”, finally giving me some direction to go with my mission. Which only makes it weirder still that they’re sending me to do something he can clearly do in a snap of his fingers, but I have to remind myself that this is training.

What seems hard to me is probably child’s play for any of the so-called Guardians this App has made.

I wonder how many are like me, drafted into the situation against our will. Or are they born into it, like Lyre seems to have been…?

Then my eyes narrow on the tiny, almost illegible text under all the messages.

[These messages are being monitored for the safety of all Guardians in the Trainee Program. Inappropriate Mentor activity can be reported via the help menu…]

Huh.

I swear I never saw this before.

Is this why Caeriel’s suddenly so helpful in the messages…?

“Pa cay!” Bun suddenly shrieks, and I glance up to see a dreaded plate of pancakes—with syrup—slid in front of us.

Her chubby little toddler hands go right for it before I can stop her.

Each pancake has even been helpfully pre-cut into squares.

“Here you go, Bun. Your favorite pancakes!” Super Nanny says cheerfully, either not hearing or straight up ignoring my groan as her fingers squish into a particularly syrupy section.

Is this revenge? It’s revenge, isn’t it?

But Super Nanny just pats an egg-covered Bun on the head before heading back into the kitchen to finish cooking, which makes it honestly impossible to tell.

“Bun, we should use a fork—”

Nope, pancake to the face, fist-style.

I groan, and sweet Ron comes out of the living room, holding out his hands. “Here. I’ll finish feeding her.”

Bun shrieks as soon as he reaches out, smacking at his hands with syrup and egg-covered hands of her own. “Nuh!” Then she wraps her arms around me and buries her sticky face into my neck, determined to stay glued to me.

If I didn’t know the child couldn’t read, I’d seriously suspect her of knowing I’m about to ditch her for the day to get this damnable mission done.

Sweet Ron grabs koala-Bun without changing his expression, completely calm as he says, “Come on, Bun-Bun. I’ll feed you all the pancakes you want, but you have to let Grace go.”

“Nuh!”

“Bun…”

“Nuh!”

It’s enough to make a girl wonder what exactly these penalties the App threatens might entail. Is it worth taking one to avoid a screaming baby?

Sure, it might seem like a silly question, but unless you’re the one with a koala baby clinging to you with a bunch of syrup and eggs covering her and the threat of another major tantrum—you won’t get it.

I know I wouldn’t have before I met these children.

But now I’m seriously pondering it.

“Come on, Bun. Grace has something to do today.”

My back stiffens as my eyes snap to Ron’s face. “Wha—how did you know?”