Dog Eat Dog World: Limited Edition Bundle (Black Dog)

by Hailey Edwards

  I entered the interrogation room, and the victim didn’t bat an eyelash. Circling the desk, I sat in the chair positioned across from hers, propped my elbows on the tabletop then pressed my fists into my cheeks.

  “I’m Cam.” I started swinging my legs. “What’s your name?”

  Elizabeth’s pale brown eyes lifted, but she didn’t speak.

  “I live in Tennessee.” My elbow slipped. “Where are you from?”

  “What are you?” she asked quietly.

  “I’m fae, like you.”

  Her head tilted. “You’re not really a kid.”

  I pressed my palms flat to the table. “How can you tell?”

  “Your eyes.” The fabric slid off the back of her head to reveal burnt-auburn curls. “They look old, sad.”

  Perceptive girl.

  My toes skidded across the floor. “You’re right.” I sat up straighter. “This isn’t how I usually look.”

  She leaned forward, and the blanket shifted down around her elbows. “Are you a shifter or something?”

  “Kind of.” I played with the strap of my nightgown. “Have you heard of Geminis before?”

  Flattened curls bounced around her shoulders when she shook her head. “What are those?”

  I stuck out my arm. “Let me see your hand, and I’ll show you.” She hesitated. “I won’t hurt you.” Skin-to-skin contact worked for this particular trick. Blood was only required when I wanted to initiate a change. “I give you my word.”

  Tiny white teeth pressed into her bottom lip, and she clasped palms with me. A hot rush of energy stung my fingers.

  “Let me guess.” I screwed up my face like I required concentration. “You’re a…phoenix.”

  A phoenix wearing a fifth-tier glamour, one who had, without a doubt, been touched by Charybdis’s magic.

  “Am I right?” I prompted when the girl’s face crumpled.

  Her species explained her perception. She had an old soul. She might have been reborn hundreds of times before this life. Perhaps it also explained how she had survived Charybdis. The wisdom of previous lives resided in that tiny head of hers. What it didn’t explain was her reaction.

  “How did you know?” She touched her arm. “Can you see through my glamour?”

  I always knew when glamour was in use, but I couldn’t see beneath it so much as guess, depending on species, what features a particular fae might want hidden.

  Phoenix were flawless, human in appearance until they embraced their inner firebird. I bet myself a dunk in the lake Elizabeth hadn’t required glamour prior to meeting Charybdis.

  “It’s just something all Geminis can tell.”

  “That’s cool I guess.” She studied me. “So what do you really look like?”

  “Like this, but older.” I wanted to smile at the chipped purple paint on my fingernails. “This is how my sister looked the last time I saw her.”

  “When was that?”

  Thirteen years ago. I had been splintered longer than Elizabeth had been alive. “A long time ago.”

  “Did something happen to her? Is that why you’re so sad?”

  “She…” Hot tears prickled my eyes. “She drowned when we were about your age.”

  The little girl shrugged her blanket back up around her neck. “I almost drowned too.”

  Yanking my thoughts away from Lori, I pushed out the right questions. “How did you get away?”

  “I set the marsh on fire.” The blanket wriggled higher until her hair vanished beneath it. “The monster screamed, and it ran away.”

  Adrenaline dumped over my head. “You saw it?”

  An ID on the killer would crack the case wide open. The surveillance tip was good, but this would be gold.

  “It was so pretty,” she whispered. “I just wanted to pet it.”

  Pet it? That was not what I expected her to say. “Tell me everything you remember.”

  “We were on a camping trip with my Junior Conclave troop. There was swamp on either side of the path we were hiking, and Mrs. Dial said not to go out there or the gators would eat me.” The blanket shivered. “But I heard… I thought the gators were after it. I didn’t want it to get eaten.” Her fingertips vanished into the folds of material. “I waited until Mrs. Dial stopped to help a kid tie his shoes, and then I sneaked into the swamp. That’s where I saw it.”

  “It?”

  “A white horse.”

  Chills swept down my spine. That piece of evidence was damning on so many levels. “Did you?”

  “I didn’t see any gators, but I thought maybe its foot was stuck in the mud. That happened to my friend Jenny’s pony once when it got out of its pen.” Her breathy voice trembled. “I walked over, and it nuzzled my arm like it wanted a pet. So I did. I petted it, but its fur was sticky. I couldn’t get my hand back. I started yanking hard, and the horse got mad. It started walking toward the water.” Liquid eyes peered out at me. “It was a trick. The horse wasn’t stuck in the mud at all.”

  Confirmation of his hunting pattern was as good as confirmation of species. I knew what he was, or what he pretended to be. How could Charybdis be both the humanoid fae in the surveillance video and the horse? Kelpies—and she had just given me a textbook description of one—weren’t shapeshifters. “Is that when you set the marsh on fire?”

  Elizabeth stared into her lap. “I couldn’t let go of it.” Her eyes filled with tears. “It couldn’t let go of me either, but the fire scared it, and…” She raised her left hand, the one she had touched earlier with sad eyes.

  Magic peppered the air, and her personal glamour vanished. Her hand did too. She had been amputated at the wrist. Her fair skin was puckered and pink where it disappeared into a bandage capping her arm.

  Dull shock roared in my ears. She had survived, but gods it had cost her. “Can you show me where you found the horse?”

  “No.” A violent sob wracked her body, and she dissolved into tears. “P-p-please don’t make me go back. Please. I don’t want to see him again. Please.”

  Heart breaking, I rushed around the table and wrapped my arms around Elizabeth. At first, we were of a similar height. Then pain radiated down my limbs as the bones elongated and skin stretched. I smoothed her hair and rocked her while jagged magic buzzed through my body, transforming me until the world took on a different perspective. Lori was gone—my hold on her had slipped. I was Camille now, but the girl didn’t care. She just wanted to be held and told everything would be all right.

  As much as I wanted to speak the words, I kept them in where they couldn’t make me a liar.

  The door burst open behind us, and a couple smelling of burning leaves charged into the room. The woman’s hair smoldered, red and glittery, as she scooped up Elizabeth and cradled the girl against her chest.

  A thin crimson rim flickered around the irises of the brown-eyed man who must be Mr. McKenna. When he spoke, smoke poured from his mouth. “She’s suffered enough.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “She has.”

  The couple exited with their daughter nestled tight in a blanket I was now willing to bet was flame-retardant. I stood there, expecting Vause to bustle in behind them and critique my performance in her detached way. When she failed to appear, I sat back down and braced my forearms on the table that was much easier to reach now.

  I must have dozed off, because when a deep throat cleared, I jerked upright and wiped drool off the corner of my mouth. Time had passed, but I wasn’t sure how much. A minute. An hour. However long it had been, it hadn’t been long enough to rid my eyelids of their sandpaper texture. “What?”

  Graeson set a paper cup of steaming chai on the table and scooted it toward me with a finger. “Drink that.”

  After our morning spent inhaling carbs together, I didn’t argue. I wrapped both hands around the paper cup and let the warmth thread through me. I brought it to my lips and moaned while knocking back the best latte I had ever drank. He watched me lick my lips with unsettling attentiveness. I tapped the
rim with my fingertip. “You didn’t have to do this.”

  “I know,” he said, a world of meaning saturating those two words, but I was too exhausted to ring the intent from them.

  With the cup drained, I searched for a trash can but came up empty. “Where’s Vause?”

  “Otherwise occupied.” He took the opposite chair, the better to lock stares with me. “This is why you were grieving.”

  There was no point in lying. He would smell that too. “Yes.”

  His jaw clenched. “Vause had no right to ask you to do this.”

  “We got our ID.” I wasn’t ready to discuss Lori with him yet. “Now we know Charybdis is a kelpie.”

  Kelpies were water spirits who most often appeared in the guise of a black or white horse. They lured victims to them by faking injury or some other poor me ploy. Once there was a foal born of a kelpie father and siren mother that ensnared victims with its song. Regardless of the mechanism, the stories always ended the same way. Kelpies coaxed their victims onto their backs, carried their riders into the depths of the lake or river where they hunted, and then feasted on them.

  The problem being Charybdis was roaming, which wasn’t normal kelpie behavior. Neither was wasting a kill. The only damage these victims had sustained was the loss of a hand or forearm. He was allowing them to touch him, hauling them into the water to drown them, and then leaving the bodies. Why?

  “Don’t stonewall me,” he growled. “For gods’ sake, Ellis, look at me.”

  Compassion waited for me in his gaze, its weight pressed me down until I couldn’t have lifted my head if I wanted. Instead I picked at the cardboard cuff around my cup. “How much did you see?”

  His silence told me he had witnessed the entire production.

  “What do you want from me?” A mirthless laugh died in my throat. “What do you expect me to say?”

  “Does it get better?” His voice scraped up his throat. “Does it ever…?”

  “No.” The unshed tears in my eyes fell. “The hole in your chest is always gaping. Nothing else will fill it. No one who didn’t know the one you lost will understand.” I took a slow breath. “People will tell you how to grieve, what to feel, and how long you’re allowed to hurt. A few weeks, a couple of months, and that’s it. The empathy runs dry. Your grief becomes the elephant in the room that tramples anyone who tries to take that pain away.” Harsh laughter burned my chest. “Then you move on, or you do such a damn fine acting job others think you have, and then they sigh with relief. Tears get packed away, the hurt gets hidden.” I cut my finger on the drink’s lid then pressed it against the cardboard until it stopped bleeding. “Everyone supports your loss until they’re tired of how lost you really are.”

  A warm thumb swiped across my cheek, smudging the wet streaks. “You can’t heal until you let yourself grieve.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath. I hadn’t seen him move. “I can’t go back to that place.” My lungs forgot how to expand until he lowered his hand. “I might never climb out again.”

  Shadows darkened his eyes, but he nodded. He understood. His pain was fresh enough for him to feel the same ragged scars on his heart as those decorating mine. Though he did a better job of concealing them than I had at this stage.

  “What happened to Lori?” He braced a hand on the back of my chair, close enough his heat radiated through my spine. “How did she die?”

  The raw ache in his voice, a mirror to my own, caused me to come undone for the first time since I sobbed on my mother’s lap, salt burning the cut on my foot, blood smearing her bare knee, and I found myself talking without making the conscious decision to confide in him.

  “The ocean…” I rubbed my throat like it might loosen it. “Every summer my extended family gathered, ditched the RVs and hiked through the Great Smoky Mountains. It was tradition. Lori and I—we loved it.” The weight of him at my back made speaking easier. “One summer Mom got a wild hair to see the ocean. It had been so long, she said, and everyone ought to see the Gulf at least once.”

  “What happened?” A soft question with rounded edges that still managed to slice through me.

  “We sneaked out of our parents’ trailer and ran down to the beach. It was late. Past midnight. We were alone.” My voice trembled. “I cut my foot on a shell. Lori was running ahead of me. I couldn’t catch up to her. She was always faster than me.” I had to try a few times before the rest came rushing out. “She splashed into the surf. I told her not to, but she waded out into the water. I didn’t go in after her because I didn’t want my foot to burn.” Fresh tears welled. “She was standing there. Right there. In front of me. And then she was gone.” I wiped my hands over my cheeks. “I couldn’t see her, but the screams…”

  “Ellis...” His hands curved around my shoulders. “That’s enough. You don’t have to share any more.”

  Too late. It was too late to stop the torrent of memory from spilling between us. The story wanted to be told, like spitting out the words would somehow absolve me for my part in Lori’s death. “I ran to find my parents.” I stared at the empty seat in front of me, picturing Lori sitting there bundled up and safe instead of Elizabeth. “I left her alone. I didn’t even try to help her. I just…ran.” Her screams had chased me back to the campsite. “Mom had already noticed us missing. She always checked in on us during the night, like she was afraid we might vanish if she didn’t make sure we were tucked safely into bed each time she passed our room. They saw me and heard Lori. They ran to the beach, but she was gone.” I wiped my nose. “We never recovered her body.”

  A hard note entered his voice, and it sounded dangerously close to a reprimand. “That’s why you’re working these cases.”

  Admitting it made me sound even more broken, even more screwed up, because I refused to let go of the past. Rationally, I knew no matter how many faces I stared into none of them would be Lori’s. She was gone, her body claimed by the sea. Nothing would change that. I wasn’t sure which was worse. Living with the memory of her corpse or living with the lack of resolution. Inventing her face became easier as time went on, as I saw more dead bodies claimed by unforgiving waters. Greater familiarity with her method of death meant cobbling together her final moments and the end result became as routine as signing my name on paperwork.

  “Goddamn it, Ellis.” He pulled a hand through his thick hair. “What I said to you in Wink—I had no right.”

  “Survive a loss of that magnitude and then we can talk about acting rationally.”

  “It’s fine.” A pleading note entered my voice. “I’ll forgive you if you get me out of here.”

  “Vause will be pissed if she comes looking and can’t find you.” Mischief glimmered in Graeson’s eyes, and I glimpsed the man he had been before losing his sister, who he might be again one day if he fought hard enough. “Come on. Let’s go. It’s not like she can’t find you if she needs to.” He traced the bruised skin under my eyes with his finger. “You can catch up on your sleep.”

  “That sounds…really good.” Even better than chai.

  “We’re having dinner.” He helped me stand. “I want you to be awake for it.”

  “D-dinner,” I spluttered. “I didn’t agree to—”

  “I mentioned you, me and dinner in the same sentence this morning.” He took my elbow, and warmth spread from that small contact. “You didn’t refuse, which is the same as accepting.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I tugged against him. “Why do you care?”

  “You aren’t taking care of yourself,” he rumbled. “These girls need you—I need you—at your best. If that means force-feeding you and rocking you to sleep at night, I’ll do it.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Heat roasted my cheeks until they would have scalded his hands if he touched them again. “I can take care of myself.”

  “We’ll see,” he said so dismissively I knew he had already made up his mind to be my keeper for the duration of the case…whether I wanted him to or not.

&
nbsp; Chapter 8

  With two statements due, one on the boy in Wink and one on the interrogation of the girl from Falco, I had spent the last hour curled up in a club chair in my hotel room typing up my mental notes so I could send them to Vause and hopefully avoid another face-to-face meeting with her. The shift into Lori earlier, the sensation of being in her skin, had me avoiding eye contact with myself in reflections. I was too afraid I might glimpse her again, which was the fresh wave of guilt talking, but there you go. Until the old wounds had time to scab, the last thing I wanted was to face the magistrate responsible for picking at them in the first place.

  Graeson had been MIA since dropping me off at the hotel. Something about visiting the local wargs. Not that I’d had a lot of time to examine how I felt about his absence since I had tumbled face-first into my bed as soon as I cleared the threshold into my room. Thanks to the power breakfast he fed me, I was upright again four hours later with hangover-like symptoms, but it was a huge improvement over my utter incapacitation in Wink. The big problem now was that my stomach had also woken up, and my dinner date was nowhere to be found. Not that it was a date. I just meant we had plans for dinner. Not plans, but a mutual understanding we would dine together. That sounded official. Like it was business. Like he was hanging around for non-personal reasons, which he was. Right?

  Sliding the laptop onto the low coffee table, I stood and stretched my arms over my head. A stack of accordion menus crammed a container by the phone, and I walked over, picking up the two I had skimmed earlier. I didn’t have Graeson’s cell number, if he carried one, and the phone in his room rang without answer. Harlow wasn’t in her room when I checked either, but I got the feeling she was working or else she would have visited. I wasn’t worried she might have knocked and I slept through it. She had already proven she had no trouble convincing people to assist her with breaking and entering into places she shouldn’t be.

  I was deciding between a charbroiled hamburger and pit barbeque when a knock sounded on the door. Graeson. A bubble of anticipation rose in my chest. I didn’t bother checking the peephole before tugging on the latch. “What sounds better to you? A piggy potato or a fully involved All-American stacker?”