Gunthra picked up her tea. “Payment does not need to be monetary.”
Of course not. “I’m not trading away my soul, so forget it. I’d have no more use for the information if I paid that price.”
“I have no interest in your soul.”
My hand twitched with surprise, and I knocked the remains of my scone on the floor. “Well, that’s a refreshing change.”
“Indeed.” A devious smile slipped over Gunthra’s face. “Your soul is useless to me.”
Was she serious? I didn’t trust her in the slightest, and yet my heart beat faster. “Just to you? What do you mean? Because I’ve never heard of a pred turning down a soul trade, even if they can’t use the soul immediately.”
“That was a teaser. The answer to that question is the answer to all your questions. And we are back at the original impasse. How badly do you want to know?”
I gawked at her. Badly now. Very, very badly. She’d played me well. Damn. “If I can’t afford to pay you with money, and you don’t want my soul, then what are you suggesting?”
“A favor.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know yet. The information I’m offering you is no secret, technically speaking, but nor is it widely known. So I demand a favor of equal value from you in return. A favor to be named later.”
As if it were that simple.
Cold fear cooled some of my burning desire for her information. Deals with goblins were dangerous. Open-ended deals with a goblin, a goblin Dom no less, could be tantamount to suicide. Bad idea. So bad I shouldn’t even be hesitating, yet I was.
“Too loose,” I said, finding my willpower. “What you think this is worth might not be what I think—”
“Take it or leave it. No difference to me.”
Bitch. Maybe I was overestimating her. Maybe she really didn’t have something specific in mind. But still, bad idea.
Since I’d started soul swapping, I’d gotten better at making deals with goblins, but I loathed trading with them. They were greedy bastards. They’d swindle, cheat and trick you, but technically they didn’t steal. They weren’t even con artists, though people had tried accusing them of it. They were merely devious and skilled negotiators with a way with words that would make politicians jealous. Which meant that the last thing I should do was owe a goblin an unspecified favor. Gunthra’s information might be worth a lot, but I’d walk away from this deal the loser. Guaranteed.
I exhaled slowly, trying to release some of my disappointment. Gunthra’s teaser hung in the air between us. My secret, my riddle. So close, so far.
Screw it. Some debt was too high.
“Then I leave it.” I stood.
Gunthra’s eyes opened wide. Guess she hadn’t seen that coming. “Sleep on it.” She rose as well and clapped.
The door-goblin returned.
“Good day to you, Miss Moore.”
“And you.” I thought I did a fabulous job of keeping the annoyance out of my voice, for all the good that did.
Chapter Fifteen
Lucen and Devon had already arrived when my satyr bodyguards and I got back. I trudged down the stairs to the bar, looking forward to getting my hands on my charms and praying Lucen had actually brought them. Turning down Gunthra’s bargain left me listless even though I was certain I’d made the right decision. I needed good news in the form of a protective charm and Scumbag’s ID.
I didn’t make it two steps inside the bar, though, before Lucen rounded on me. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Only what we’d already discussed. Trying to get information.”
“After how hard we’re working to keep you alive, you went and walked right into Gunthra’s house without any protection.” He threw a duffel bag at me.
I caught it, barely. “It’s not like she’d have let you in. The babysitters you left me had to wait outside.”
Devon snorted at the babysitters line. Lucen, however, glared at me, and my whole body flushed with desire. His eyes practically glowed, and it was both alluring and scary. Damn, when he got riled up, he threw off a ton of power. I was wicked tempted to keep goading him to see which of us would break first. Me, no doubt. But that would be okay because I could imagine the make-up sex.
And imagine and imagine…
I bit my tongue and snapped out of it. Pissed-off preds, even satyrs who might not want you dead, were bad news.
Hugging my bag closer to my chest, I carried it to the end of the room, as far from Lucen as possible.
“Did you get anything out of her?” Lucen’s voice was calmer, but he continued to watch me with an expression that suggested he’d been envisioning the same things I was.
I had to not think about that.
“No. I wouldn’t pay her price.”
Devon propped his feet up on a chair. “Really? Let me take a wild guess what that would be.”
“Not my soul. She wanted an unspecified favor.”
Lucen frowned as I unzipped the duffel bag in the ensuing silence. He glanced at Devon, but the other satyr merely wiggled his eyebrows at me.
“Try not to take it personally,” Devon said. “You don’t end up a Dom by taking any soul that comes your way. Gunthra needs people with power. I mean political power. Not your unusual kind.”
Your soul is useless to me. I froze, rummaging through the bag. Was that all her mysterious comment had been about? Had she been trying to trick me, dangle nonsense in front of me in the hope that I would think her secret was bigger and more important than it was, and that it would make me cave?
My fingers clenched around one of my knives. Goblins didn’t lie when they made deals, and Gunthra had also said her teaser was related to the rest of the information. So it couldn’t be that simple. Could it?
“Little siren?”
I shook myself out of my thoughts. “Trying to untangle her words, that’s all.” I dropped the knife back in the bag and pulled out a pink lace thong. “This is what you bring me for underwear? I didn’t even know I still had this piece of butt floss.”
The males grinned. Fabulous. I wasn’t going to get any apologies, and the rest of the underwear they’d brought wasn’t any better. Lucen and Devon laughed at my annoyance, but at least they’d brought me the other, more practical things I’d asked for. Including my protection charm.
“I’m assuming you got the ID,” I said, putting the anklet on.
Lucen nodded. “Brought your whole pack of them in case the Gryphons return to do a more thorough search of your apartment. For sin’s sake, Jess, you’ve been busy. There’s a lot of names in here.”
“There’s a lot of assholes out there.” And I was supposed to catch one while picking a pink lace thong out of my butt. Stupid satyrs. “Can I go take this up?” I held up the bag.
Lucen tossed Scumbag’s ID at me. “This the right one?”
“Yeah.” Pete Donovich. I hadn’t done more than glance at his ID when I took it, but I remembered his face. That was him all right in the bad photo. Nerves, or perhaps just bad memories, sent my skin tingling. I chucked the ID back at Lucen.
Devon glanced at the clock. “I’ll try to get his number and see if he’s around. If he is, I’ll call Dezzi and get some reinforcements so we can pay him a visit.”
Reinforcements? Seemed to me like two satyrs could take one human pretty easily, but that wasn’t my problem. That was Pete’s.
“You going to let me go with this time?” I asked, trailing Lucen into The Lair’s kitchen.
“If you like.”
“Good.”
“Not good, but I don’t feel like fighting with you about it.” He unlocked the door into his apartment. “The Gryphons had someone staking out your place, as we expected. It was a good thing you didn’t go.”
“Maybe. But not such a good thing for getting practical underwear. And that reminds me.” I dumped the bag in the living room and pointed my finger at him. “You can withdraw your power, can’t you? You don’t
need to be blasting me with it every time I see you.”
“This again? Little siren, didn’t we cover this earlier? If I was blasting you with my power—”
“Yeah, yeah, I’d know it. But you can rein it in more than you do. Can’t you? Tell me the truth for a change.”
Lucen cocked his head from side to side. “We sort of can. It’s partially unconscious. With effort, I could hold back more, but would it make a difference?”
“Yes!”
“Really?” He stepped closer, and I started to have déjà vu from this morning. Lucen might not be angry with me anymore, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t enjoy making me suffer.
My body trembled. I should have kept my mouth shut. You’d think I’d wanted to risk my self-control this way. Wanted to keep poking Lucen until… Yeah. My eyes closed involuntarily.
“I’m pulling back on my power as much as I can.” His breath caressed my face. He must only be a couple inches from me, but I didn’t dare open my eyes to find out. “I don’t think it would make a difference, do you?”
I gripped the doorjamb to keep from falling over. “It’s your pheromones then.”
The floor creaked, and the warmth of his breath disappeared. Warily, I opened my eyes. “You wound me, little siren. Just pheromones.”
I struggled for a retort and was saved by Lucen’s cellphone ringing. Devon’s voice came through loud enough for me to hear.
“Get your clothes on and get down here. Pete’s home, and we’re leaving in five.”
Actually, it was closer to twenty minutes by the time we figured out how to get to Pete’s place and got on the road. Devon drove, leaving me stuck in the backseat, squished between two male satyrs. I recognized them as being part of the posse Lucen had gathered when we left Wenda’s Wishes a few days ago. My body didn’t care about that. Being stuffed in such a confined space with four satyrs was a kind of exquisite torture, and a damn good reminder that although I might be acclimating slightly to satyr power, I was still just human cattle to them.
I sat on my hands to keep them from doing anything my brain would regret.
Although afternoon was beginning to bleed into evening, the sun was high. The satyrs looked particularly menacing in the head-to-toe clothing that protected their sun-phobic skin. Hoods or hats covered their heads. Sunglasses hid their eyes. Only I—in my jeans and T-shirt—ruined their street cred.
Scumbag lived on the right side of a dilapidated duplex. The vinyl siding was worn, and large sheets of white paint peeled off the door. Beer cans littered the patch of dead lawn, and on the sidewalk, glass shards sparkled in the light.
Devon knocked.
I heard male voices inside. It would be so nice, so convenient if Note-writer was here now too. Then we could wrap this party up, go home and figure out a way to explain it all to the sylphs and Gryphons. I could be back in my bed by tonight.
Instead, the door was thrown open and a pudgy guy stared us down. Well, stared the satyrs down. He acted as though he didn’t see me, which he probably didn’t given that all his attention was directed at my companions. As would be the attention of most people if four badass-looking guys knocked on the door.
A cigarette dangled from between his lips. “Yeah?” He didn’t bother to remove it, and it stuck there, glued to his lip with spit.
“We’re looking for Pete,” Lucen said, taking a step forward.
“Hey now.” The guy thrust himself between Lucen and the doorway. “What you—”
But Lucen pulled off his hat, revealing his goatlike horns, and the guy didn’t merely shut up—he blanched. Lucen grabbed his arm. “Tell you what. You bring him to the front door, then you leave out the back door. Got it?”
The guy nodded, murmuring something in Spanish, and backed up. “Pete! You got friends here!”
Pete appeared around the corner, the same as I remembered him. Though the satyrs stole most of his negative emotions before I could sense them, I could nonetheless taste a weak burnt oil oozing from him. He made my skin crawl, just as he once had. My fingers curled around the knife handle against my thigh.
But Pete, like his roommate, didn’t see me. His gaze took in Lucen’s horns and the three other men with him, and he came up with the only sane idea. He spun and fled.
He didn’t get far. With inhuman speed, one of the satyrs closed the distance between them and slammed Pete into the wall.
“Motherfucker!” Pete shook his arms violently, trying to dislodge the satyr, for all the good that did.
Devon closed the door behind us. The roommate had vanished.
Lucen pulled Pete’s ID from his pocket while the other two lugged Pete, who was now cursing in something that could have been Russian, into a folding chair. “You lose this a week or so ago?”
Pete’s fear mixed with the lust the satyrs aroused, and the combined emotions washed over me in great tangerine-chocolate waves. I leaned against a cluttered table for support, feeling my heart pound. After being trapped in Shadowtown all day, the heady rush of Pete’s emotions woke some part of me up. It was the part whose existence I despised, but I couldn’t deny that feeling so alive again was a welcome change. I hadn’t noticed the emptiness inside until now.
“Where did you get it?” Pete asked.
“From me.”
Finally, Pete spared me more than a token glance. Then he shook his head. “I no know you.” His accent thickened with his increasing fear.
“I gave him a suggestion to forget me,” I explained to Lucen’s inquiring look. “Nice to know how strongly it took.”
“Not bad.” Lucen swung his legs around a second chair and turned his focus back to Scumbag. “Not recognizing her is the least of your problems. So, Pete, you like murdering women?”
Pete’s pale blue eyes opened wide. “No, I didn’t murder women.”
“Ah, so you just raped them and left the killing to your partner?”
“No, no. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And there it was—burnt toast. Pete was lying, and my theory had been correct. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
Lucen scratched his chin. “You see, Pete. The problem with lying to people like us is we can tell.”
Devon rested his hands on Pete’s shoulders, and the human’s face slackened. I shuffled back. Even if it was Pete, even if Pete was a serial rapist, I did not like seeing a satyr or any pred exert their power over a human. It was too much a reminder of my own vulnerability.
“Talk now, Pete,” Devon said. “Tell us what you know.”
“Who’s killing the women?” Lucen asked.
“Don’t know his name.”
“Then what do you call him? How do you contact him?”
Pete drew a deep breath. “He said call him Empath. But I don’t contact him. He contacts me when he finds someone we like.”
“Someone you’d both like?” Lucen glanced at me. “What does he do, your friend? How does he choose?”
“I don’t know. He picks women. We’re team. He said he is looking for someone like me, someone to have fun with. He tastes their pain, he says. He claims he is like you. That is why he is Empath.”
Empath, my ass. This asshole had as much empathy as a, well, a pred.
Someone to have fun with. Note-writer had said something similar to me. Would he have ditched Pete for me if I’d been up for some rape and torture? Or had he hoped we’d carry on like a ménage a trois from hell?
I squeezed the knife handle again.
“Your friend kills the women?” Lucen raised a tentative hand in my direction, probably sensing my disgust and wondering if I was about to do something stupid. It was certainly tempting.
“I don’t know. I guess. I’m no interested in that part.”
“Really?” I rolled my eyes. “Aren’t you the compassionate sort.”
Lucen made a shut-up-Jess gesture in my direction. “When’s he planning on contacting you next?”
“Don’t know.” Pete’s gaze darted
toward the table. “Today or tomorrow. In time to plan for weekend.”
I picked through the jungle of trash on the table, which included beer and soda cans, empty takeout containers and a pizza box with a half-eaten pizza in it. Next to a crumpled twenty-dollar bill and a T pass was a cellphone.
I showed it to him. “This yours?”
Pete nodded.
“He call you on this?” Lucen asked.
Another nod.
“Find us his number then.” Devon took the phone from me and tossed it at Pete’s head.
Pete found the number from the incoming call list and dialed it at Lucen’s instruction. I held my breath, but Note-writer didn’t answer. Pete left a quick message that Devon dictated.
“What do we do with him while we wait for the other guy to call back?” a satyr asked.
“We need to turn him over to the Gryphons.” Five heads, Pete’s included, turned to me. None of them seemed thrilled with this suggestion. Not even Pete, whose panic spiked like lemon juice. “Look, I led you here. We know he’s the key to finding the real killer—” I pointed at Pete, “—so now we need to hand this over to the Gryphons, explain what’s going on and let them take care of it so I can get my life back.”
Lucen stretched and ran his hands through his hair. “This isn’t just about your life anymore.”
“Like hell it isn’t.”
“We take him with us,” Devon said. “You heard Dezzi. This is a Shadowtown issue, and it’ll stay that way.”
“No.”
But Lucen agreed with Devon, and the others fell in line. I gritted my teeth but held my protests because I knew there was nothing I could do at the moment. I seethed the whole drive back to Shadowtown instead, confident that my emotions made it clear exactly what I thought of Devon’s plan.
From his spot in the trunk, I was pretty sure Pete would have taken my side in the argument after all.
Chapter Sixteen
The satyrs wasted no time hauling Pete toward The Lair. I got the sense that they’d rather not run into any sylphs with such a valuable key to the mystery—literally—in their hands. As for Pete, they hadn’t bothered to bind, gag or blindfold him. There was no need. Regardless of what happened with Note-writer, Pete’s ass was crispier than a salamander’s turd. I very much doubted he’d see a courtroom’s justice unless I could scheme a way to get the Gryphons involved.
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