“Esther, were there any other things in Illeana’s belongings? A personal computer, flash drives, anything up to date, basically?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Sirens are pretty old fashioned. I don’t think she would have kept stuff like that in her house, although, she was keen on her gadgets. I’ll check the headquarters and see if I can find anything, but I’m pretty sure someone cleared everything out. Maybe they left something behind.”
“Or maybe they took it,” Carl said. We all turned to him. “Think about it. Someone put her on to this stuff. Someone high up. Someone was actually able to steal from Eddie, and he hasn’t retaliated. Why not? Because he suspects it’s someone with more power than he. But if they’re that powerful, they wouldn’t want any evidence lying around.”
We all absorbed the idea, and it made a whole lot of sense to me. “Who then? Fionnuala?” The starkly terrifying head of the council was fae, so in theory, she would know the right thief. Fae magic was the most powerful.
“Maybe. She’s the highest you can go here, and it can’t be Erossi. He would want everyone to know what he was doing, the cocky git,” Peter said.
“What about Koda?” Esther asked.
“He’s not exactly on top form,” Peter said.
“What about… another consultant,” I said, mulling it over. “Someone Eddie owes a favour to, maybe.”
“The witch?” Carl suggested. “She’s always in the shop, so she had the opportunity.”
“And he seemed pretty agitated the other day when I saw her there.” I sipped the drink, made a face, and put it back down in a hurry. Damn Finn.
“What about the other consultants?” Peter said. “It’s hardly Aiden, unless he specifically wanted to keep Esther out of this to protect her.”
“If he did, I’ll kill him,” she hissed. “But that leaves us with the hottie and the ancient vampire.”
I raised a brow. “The hottie?”
“Elathan. He’s fiercely hot.” She made a face at Peter’s look of disgust. “Demons can be attractive, too.”
“Demon, as in from Hell?” I asked.
She fidgeted at a beermat. “He was kicked out of Hell.”
I stared at her, wondering what on earth someone had to do to get kicked out of Hell.
“I doubt it’s him anyway,” she said.
I shrugged. “But you don’t know for sure. This is getting too complicated. Too many possible players, and no way of us knowing who’s in on it. No matter where we step, it’s likely to be on somebody’s toes. Gabe didn’t have a clue what Illeana was doing, and Eddie seems to be a victim of theft, so we can probably rule them out. But both could be covering their tracks, so we’re stuck at square one.”
“We could ask them,” Esther said, but her heart wasn’t in the suggestion.
“And risk all of us getting killed?” Peter asked. “Isn’t worth it.”
“All we can do is keep working on it,” Carl said. “And watching out, because as soon as anyone has an inkling of what we’re doing, they might want to shut us up.”
We discussed our options for a while longer. Callista wasn’t working that night, so Esther figured it would be better for me and her to confront Callista in her own home. Esther would dig a little deeper into the mystery of Illeana’s potentially missing belongings, and Carl and Peter would keep trying to come up with leads on possible witnesses, or any kind of information that might help. Esther was still working on the hacker in the Council headquarters, and she seemed confident that he would come up with something. Eventually.
I wanted to talk to Gabe, but he seemed busy, so I left early.
Peter followed me outside. “Wait.” He grabbed my hand. We walked together for a few minutes in silence. “Thanks,” he said at last. “For showing up here.”
“You didn’t give us much choice.”
“Everyone has a choice.” As if to illustrate his point, he pushed me against the closest wall and gripped my chin between his finger and thumb. “You could kill me if you wanted to. I could kill you, too. But we don’t. Even if we should.”
His mouth fell on mine hungrily, but I pushed him away. “What are you doing with me then?”
“You ask me like I ever know what the fuck I’m doing,” he said, leaning in to whisper in my ear. “Maybe you’re the ultimate forbidden fruit.” His lips grazed my jaw, and he reached for my mouth again, forcing my bottom lip down with his thumb. “Maybe I like getting close to the mouth of danger.”
I jerked my knee upward, pulling the blow just in time, but he caught his breath all the same.
He laughed softly. “Maybe I like the unpredictability.”
“Maybe, maybe, maybe.”
The laughter fell from his face, and his eyes turned earnest. “Want some truth?”
I frowned. “Always.”
“Truth is, I like to be around you because I don’t have to worry about you. No matter what happens, you defend yourself. Nobody is going to come in the night and take you away. And even if they did, I wouldn’t ever let myself feel enough for that to make a huge difference to me.”
“Wow. You’re so romantic.”
He laughed, but there was no humour there. In fact, he looked unbelievably sad. “Everything about you is almost ordinary, but all together, it makes up something… interesting. You’ve brought something out of me that I lost a long time ago. But I can’t offer you anything. I have nothing to give you. You have to understand that I don’t have anything left.”
“I’m not asking you for anything. I’ve never asked you for anything, Peter.”
“I know.” He leaned his forehead against mine, and I laid my hand on his chest to feel his heartbeat. He gave a little moan. “I should keep away from you,” he said, his expression hollow. “But I’m not that good a person.”
His words were a cold sword through my stomach. Out of everything he said, I knew that last bit would stick.
The moment ended. Peter made some excuse to go home alone, but I only felt relief.
On the way home, all I kept thinking about were the numerous ways things could end badly with Peter. And after I finally fell asleep that night, I awoke with pain searing my arms.
I turned on the light reluctantly and checked out the damage. More brands. Straight lines ran from my wrists up to my inner elbows, ugly, sore scars that I would never be able to forget. I didn’t need the reminders; I couldn’t forget the twins if I wanted. My dreams were full of them getting hurt and attacked because I didn’t get there in time.
That awful sensation of time running out weighed on me, and I sought comfort in my home. It was the one place I felt safe, even though nowhere was safe from the deal I had made with the twins. Nowhere kept me safe from the brands that would keep coming. The twins didn’t scare me, but a lot of other beings certainly did, and my home was the only place I felt even the slightest bit secure.
I still kept my windows open, still fearing Dita’s father would return and hurt them both. I needed to speak to Anka again at some stage and find out more of whatever information she had on the slave markets. There were so many lost people in the world, displaced because of things out of their control. I was starting to see what Mrs. Yaga meant about lost souls finding their way to her. After all, I was still a lost soul myself.
Chapter Seven
I spent the next day in front of a computer screen. First, I had to keep an eye on my phoenix of a business. It had been dragged through the dirt, but was beginning to sprout again. Also, I still had to find out about the Féinics and the rebels, if they even existed.
But Lucia, the half-fae twin with somewhat psychic powers, had been certain she and her brother Lorcan were meant to find the Féinics, and as I owed her my humanity, and likely my life, I trusted every one of her visions. The silence surrounding the slave markets was strange, and even weirder, I could find nothing beyond allusions to the supposed rebellion. The myth was beginning to sound like wishful thinking, and that got me pondering. Who would
have the most to win and lose from a full-on rebellion?
I had been hearing rumours about conflicts in the rest of Europe: vampires fighting against their imposed quotas, groups of beings refusing to toe the line. It seemed unlikely, and distant enough to be someone else’s problem, but then there was the UK. I had met the leader of the BVA, and I was sure Winston and the rest of his vampires were more than willing to start something huge to get whatever it was they wanted. I knew they wanted power, a higher place in the pack, but what if they had alliances with bigger, badder beings?
My head was a mess of speculation, but the theories were a distraction from what I was really supposed to be doing that day, like finding witnesses from the rather substantial amount of murders and kidnappings that had occurred in a similar fashion to Peter’s family’s tragic ending.
I had a list of incidents, and they all seemed to have gone down in eerily similar ways. They started with silent break-ins, usually with no outward sign of disturbance. Adults would either be found with their throats slit or their necks broken. All of the families had one child. The body of the child would never be found.
I chewed the top of my pen as I prepared to mark out yet another family on the list. No survivors. Not a one. Why had they left Peter alive? Not enough time? Did someone disturb them? Did someone save Peter? It didn’t make sense. The one person prepared to die for his vengeance had survived when it seemed as though nobody else had.
The incidents themselves were scattered throughout the country and appeared to run on a random timeline. The same county was never hit twice in a row, perhaps to avoid suspicion. The major newspapers never picked up the stories. All of the information came from local newspapers, which rarely mentioned similar occurrences in the rest of the country.
The Gardaí hadn’t seemed to connect most of the murders either, but that might have been down to a supernatural influence. Ireland was a relatively small island. How many incidents were elsewhere? We might not find Illeana’s witness, but maybe we could come across another.
For the next couple of hours, I scoured the internet for articles depicting similar incidents in the UK. Before long, I had more than I needed. But again, case after case, there were no witnesses and no major media coverage. How many people had died because some creature wanted their child?
I almost wished Daimhín was around so I could question her child vampire. Eloise had been taken from her home because she was a psychic. She might have some answers, some insight into where I should look. Not that Daimhín would willingly allow her to speak to me about it.
Before I could get to the end of my new list, Esther arrived. She jumped from one foot to the other, her eyes bright with excitement.
“Come in for a minute,” I said, and she frowned. “Steady on, Esther. We’re only going to see Callista.”
“I just feel like we might be getting somewhere.” But she followed me into the living room.
“Speaking of getting somewhere, I haven’t. At least, not yet. I’ve moved my search to the UK. Thank everything for the internet. There’s a chance we’ll never find Illeana’s witness, but we might come across another survivor somewhere else.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. The odds are probably against us. But if you could find someone in England, I could make an extra stop on my way to check on the BVA.”
“I don’t like that you’re going over there. People keep talking about bad stuff happening. You getting in the middle of it doesn’t give me sweet dreams.”
“I have no choice. Guardians go wherever they’re sent.”
I gave her a wry look. “Number one, you chose this mission. Two, your brother would absolutely make sure you didn’t get sent over there if you let him.”
She flashed a grin. “I have to be a good influence on the new recruits. Besides, you need me to check on your new friends. Although, I think you might be suicidal the way you’re handing out life favours.”
I slipped on a light jacket. “We can’t stand around when bad things happen, right? So I don’t. And I’ve decided I’ll do whatever it takes to survive the night, because there’s always revenge.” I grinned when she raised her eyebrows. “Besides, I think the vampires have bigger fish to fry right now. They didn’t exactly get good use out of the twins.”
Esther shivered. “Do you think all of the children are half-breeds?”
“Eloise wasn’t,” I reminded. “I think us mongrels are just a safer bet.”
“Nobody to care about us,” she said wistfully. “It just makes me wonder what could have happened to you and me. Or rather, why it never happened to us. I mean, my father didn’t have a clue what my mother was. The whole shape-shifting thing shocked him enough to get rid of us. Yet nobody came for us.”
“Your mother must have known,” I said. “She might have been protecting you by keeping it a secret when you were young. Who knows? As for me, Nancy kept me well hidden.”
“She didn’t do such a great job of it, though. That woman at the trial, the one the vampires made talk for them against you, she managed to find you. And she smelled human to me.”
I felt a pang at the memory of Helena. “When I was leaving England, Lucia sent me an image. Probably accidentally, but it was Helena. She’s been on my mind ever since. Ever feel like there’s something a lot bigger going on around us, Esther? Like someone else is pressing all the buttons, and we’re just running around doing whatever is expected of us.”
“That’s basically my job description,” she said with a grin. “Come on, we should get a move on. I promised Aiden I would be home for dinner tonight.”
“Wouldn’t want to give the big, bad alpha a reason to hate me. Whoops, too late.”
“Shut up.” She jostled me as we headed to her car. The vehicle wasn’t exactly discreet, being practically miniature and the colour of purple Smarties.
Dita and Anka were returning to their home, loaded with shopping bags. Looking strained at the sight of a Guardian, Anka nodded at me, while Dita stared at Esther’s car with longing.
“They the ones?” Esther asked when we got into her car.
“Yep. Any idea what happened to him?”
She shook her head. “He wasn’t taken by us. Old Mrs. Yaga is a bit mysterious, but from what I hear, you’re okay as long as you’re in one of her houses. She protects her properties, and everyone inside them. I don’t know what kind of deals she’s made, but she’s untouchable, as far as us Guardians are concerned. Either way, we couldn’t have helped your neighbour, of course, what with her big bad being a human. We don’t deal with humans.”
I wanted to ask why not, but I knew the answer. Humans were even further down the food chain than us ‘mongrels.’
“I feel bad for the kid,” I said after a few minutes, although my mind was still on Mrs. Yaga. I had been afraid to look too deeply into what she did, and I kept finding myself wondering if Dita had actually seen her father since that night.
Esther drove away too fast. The sun was still warm, but a sharp breeze came through the car window. I had to keep it open because being in Esther’s car felt a little claustrophobic.
“Kids are resilient.”
“Oh, I forgot. You are resilient, aren’t you?”
She stuck her tongue out without looking at me. “Hilarious. Every single time you lot say it.” She pressed the horn as a teenage boy strolled across the road in front of the car. “Idiot. I think some of them actually want me to hit them.”
“They think they can sue,” I said, smiling as she revved the engine to scare the boy.
“They can try. What were we saying? Oh, yeah, the kid. She’ll forget about it. She’ll probably grow up determined to never allow a man to lay a hand on her. No need to think the worst.”
“The mother insisted Dita is better off with her father, even though he’s a crap person.”
“That’s a bit… off. I couldn’t imagine being around my own father would be good for my self-esteem.” She glanced at me. “Maybe you’re letting
yourself get too involved.”
“Maybe.” I knew why I tended to get overly involved with everything going on around me. It was because I had distanced myself from the real world for so long, and I had that weird hole inside of me, empty because of loss, of unanswered questions. My parents couldn’t have put me through worse than my grandmother, but even if they had, part of me was still curious to know what they were like.
Traffic ran smoother than usual, so it didn’t take long to get to Callista’s home in an affluent part of Dublin city. The house was a large building contained by a gated entrance. Private enough, but no magic surrounding it. No windows were open, and no curtains covered them—nothing that said it was lived in.
“Esther, I don’t think she’s here.”
Esther frowned but pulled in anyway. The gate opened easily when we tried, and we both walked up to the front door together.
After rapping on the front door impatiently, Esther peered in the windows. “You’re right.” She lifted her hand to chew her thumbnail. “Damn it.”
I jerked her hand down from her mouth, earning a wry smile from her. “She warned us she wanted to leave,” I reminded.
“I didn’t think she would be this quick. The place is cleared out, which means she’s taken everything of Illeana’s with her. Another dead end.”
“Maybe your hacker bloke will figure something out. And we’re still looking for witnesses. Don’t worry.”
She brushed her hair from her face. “It’s just so frustrating. We’re getting nowhere fast.”
“Illeana didn’t figure everything out, either. We just have to keep pushing.”
We walked back to the car. The wind picked up and blew Esther’s loose hair all over the place. We sat while Esther fumed silently for a few moments.
“We’re going to keep looking while you’re gone,” I said, trying to cheer her up.
“It’s not that. I’m just… what if we find out something big? About someone in the Council or something. I mean, how do we even start accusing them?”
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