“Watch your step.”
My head jerked up, but I stumbled over the knotted clump of vines anyway and fell against Graeson’s chest when he turned to catch me. Our forearms locked together while he fought to keep me from face-planting, and I recoiled to avoid touching more of his sweaty, muscled skin than necessary. I ended up smashed between him and a tree with him gripping my wrists at shoulder height, both of us breathing hard and fast.
“You can release me now.” Being pinned against the trunk by a naked warg seemed like a dangerous place to be. “Any day now.”
The warg gazed down at me with expectation that made my cheeks burn, but he let me go, and we resumed our hike into the marsh. It took a while for us to reach the darkly glittering body of water where the kelpie had hunted the McKenna girl, and Graeson ended up steadying my elbow when my feet bogged in mud more than once, though we managed to avoid another tree incident. I didn’t thank him. I shrugged him off and trudged on, looking for an indication of where Harlow had gone into the water, but the sand hadn’t been disturbed by a sometimes-mermaid. All I had to tell me we were on the right track was Graeson’s nose, and that seemed more interested in sniffing me than the ground.
“Why don’t we split up?” I suggested. “You can search by scent, over there near the water, and I’ll head deeper into the woods.”
Farther away from you was implied.
“No.” He didn’t entertain the thought longer than it took to shoot down my idea. “We stick together. There’s something off about this place.” He stopped to rub a leaf through his fingers then sniffed them. “We know Charybdis was here, so was the McKenna girl, so were the chaperones who answered her cries for help and the search crew the conclave dispatched, and so was Harlow.” He stepped forward and repeated the process. “Yet I haven’t picked up a single scent that isn’t coming from you or me since we left the area surrounding the van.”
“Could it be an erasure spell?” Fae scents often frightened local wildlife. Several fae species were custodians of the earth, and they advocated such measures in order to do no harm to the animals. Erasure spells created sensation voids, which spooked animals too, but not as much as the predator smells did. Over time, after a good rain, the antiseptic magic washed away to be replaced with more natural aromas. “Can you tell if it’s charm based?”
“They’re too good for that. The absence is telling, though. I don’t like this. Someone wiped the entire lakefront. That shouldn’t have happened until all support personnel had cleared the area.” Pointing to the deer trail I had been following, he ordered, “Stay close. I’m going to try tracking by the water.”
Magic and water didn’t mix. If we had walked into an enchantment, wading into the water might break it. I was fine letting him play the guinea pig. I preferred being head blind to waterlogged.
Graeson kept to the sandbars as we circled the perimeter of the lake while I traversed the solid ground, walking beside him but six or seven feet away from even the barest hint of moisture. Every so often, I caught his head tilting back, tracking our progress by the moon.
“Is it true what they say about wargs?” I peered through the canopy of pine needles overhead. “Can you only change during full moons?”
“That’s personal.” He seemed to consider it a moment. “But I owe you one, so I’ll answer.” We walked in silence for a few minutes. “The more dominant the wolf, the easier the moon’s song is to ignore. New wolves get moonsick and fly into rages. Older wolves have better control. Some wolves—” he cut his eyes toward me, “—don’t need the moon to change at all.”
Trees flashed between us as I kept pace with him, and each flicker revealed a subtle shift in his expression. “What does it feel like when you change?”
A hitch in his stride was the only indication I had struck a nerve. “How does it feel when you change?”
The bite of his words stung, but only a little. I had expected him to lash out, maybe even wanted his irritation to clash with mine. It felt more authentic than his oh-so-helpful facade. “It feels like being turned inside out.” I waited for the lump in my throat to subside. “It’s worse for me because Lori is much smaller than I am now. It’s a lot of Camille to cram into such a tight space.”
Had I glimpsed pity in his gaze, I might have spun around and marched back to the car, Harlow be damned. His eyes held only moonlight, and to my surprise, he answered a second question.
“Every bone breaks. Skin tears. Ligaments are shredded.” He leapt from one sandbar to the next. “You want to know the worst part? It’s the fur. Most folks think it’s the bones, but hell, kids break bones.” Though not on the scale he endured. “Having thousands of thick strands of fur pierce through your skin like needles through cloth? Now that hurts.”
A shudder rippled through my shoulders. “Okay, you win.”
“It’s not a contest.” He shot me a halfhearted smile. “Physical pain can be overcome with enough practice. There are worse ways to ache.”
I let my silence stand for agreement. “Are you picking up on anything yet?”
“There are multiple scent layers. Humans mostly. A few dogs.” He rubbed his nose as though to rid himself of a tickle. “Those smells are old. Nothing fae yet.”
We must have circled almost back to where we started when I shoved through a dense layer of brush, and my next footstep sank into powdery sand, the kind trucked in to create manmade beaches. “It looks like we’re headed into a picnic area.”
Graeson didn’t respond. The warg was nowhere in sight.
I shoved aside a tangle of thorny smilax vine and found him squatting over an indentation in the sand. “Graeson?”
“It was here,” he growled, fingers piercing the grains to produce a luminescent scale he held aloft, one too large to have come from a mermaid of Harlow’s stature. He stood in a fluid motion and vanished in a blur of flexing muscle.
The calm waters mocked me. A jump down to the sandbar would save me time chasing him, but I couldn’t do it. Instead I turned on my heel and bolted for the picnic area. Splashing noises interrupted the still night. I followed the ruckus, keeping a few yards between me and the edge of the lake.
I stepped on a pinecone camouflaged by decaying leaves and rolled my ankle. My back hit a nearby tree, but this time there was no one to catch me. I grunted on impact and leaned against the trunk, shifting the weight off that foot. I lifted my leg to inspect it, and the ground roiled under my heel. More pinecones emerged from the detritus, shaking off their spiny backs while marching toward me, circling me.
“What the—?”
Tiny eyes gleamed in the faint light. For the love of pancakes. Those weren’t pinecones. They were igel, and the twerps had learned from our run-in in Wink. This time they hadn’t come alone. Two dark shapes glided forward. Only the glittering rims of their outlines gave them away. Umbras. Shadow servants. Light bent around the figures, blurring their features into masklike smoothness.
A throaty howl raised gooseflesh down my arms.
Graeson.
“Can we talk about this?” I asked the nearest umbra. He rustled a response that probably meant no, because he swung a long arm at my head. I ducked then popped up kissing-close to its maw. “Graeson?” I shrilled. “Feel free to jump in at any time.”
One of the shapes peeled away from the other and drifted into the shadows. Great. I had set him on the warg’s trail.
I struck out, but my fist shot through the smoky creature. Perfect. It was going to be one of those nights. The billowing mass inched forward. I backed up a step, stumbled on an igel that was quick to burrow under my heel, and lost balance. The blackness enveloped one of my flailing arms in a chilling embrace and hauled me closer.
Snarls rippled over the water. Limbs snapped and leaves rustled as the second shadow located its prey. A yelp sounded, and the creature billowed toward me with a silver and white wolf writhing in its stomach.
“Graeson,” I breathed, and his golden eyes lifted to mine
.
“Tonight just keeps getting better,” a sultry voice announced. “Who have we got here?”
The angry woman I recognized from the hotel hallway in Wink, the widow who had jumped Harlow, stepped into a beam of moonlight. I had been wrong. She wasn’t just angry. She was so far beyond pissed there wasn’t a word for her volatile state. Violent energy radiated from her, and my pulse galloped once she got near enough for the tendrils of her insidious powers to caress me.
“She’s not an igel.” I had no idea if the wolf understood me, but I had to warn him. “She’s a Fury.”
Her nearness suffocated. Foam slid past my lips, down my chin. I vibrated with so much rage, my eyes rolled back in my head. Dragging myself out from under that torrent left me sweating.
“You came to find the mermaid.” Her black gaze burned through me. Her big toes dragged twin trails through the sand, but her feet no longer touched the ground. “You’re the one who left the messages on her phone.”
Well that explained why Harlow had been out of contact. “Where is she?”
“You should leave,” she told the slavering wolf. “I have no quarrel with you or yours.”
“She…is…mine.”
The sound of Graeson’s rasping voice snapped my head toward him. Suspended inside the shadow’s gut, he had managed a partial shift without drawing our attention. Sweat beaded his skin, and his bones glided under his muscles, distorting his proportions from that of a wolf into a man.
“Is that true?” The shadow holding me squeezed as Letitia considered me. “Do you belong to the wolf?”
Accepting his claim stamped my ticket out of danger, but Harlow wouldn’t be as lucky. She had screwed up in Wink, and if found guilty, she would be punished for her actions, but it wasn’t up to the grief-ravaged Fury to decide her fate. That’s what magistrates were for. We had a justice system for a reason.
“What happened in Wink was my doing.” I lifted my chin. “Harlow was struggling, and I rushed in to help. The others followed my lead. Your husband’s death was my fault. Not hers.”
“Ellis,” Graeson snarled through his contorted jaw. “Don’t be…a hero.”
Ignoring the warg was easy with a pissed-off Fury breathing hatred in my face. “You.” It was the only word she managed to get past her trembling lips. She made it sound like the worst insult imaginable. “Bring her.” The shadow holding me bobbed in her wake, riding the heat waves streaming from her skin like a hawk soaring on a thermal updraft.
“Ellis.”
“Kill the wolf. I can’t risk him or his pack coming after her.” The Fury appreciated the glistening water. “Drown him in the lake and leave him there. Let the creature finish him off.”
The shadow rippled then stuffed a smoky hand down the wolf’s throat to quiet him.
“The kelpie?” I struggled against my captor. “You saw it?”
“It drove the mermaid from the lake.” She pointed to the spot where Graeson had burst into a ball of fur. “She was flopping on the shore. All I had to do was scoop her up.”
Flopping meant Harlow had been wearing her fins. Why this time? What made her change for this dive? In order to beach herself, she had been in mermaid mode when she confronted the kelpie. At least this confirmed she had survived the encounter.
“Was anyone else out here?” I swiped my arms through my wispy captor while getting my feet under me. “Did you see anyone with the kelpie?”
“A small girl,” she said in a somber voice. “I sent the umbra to check. She was already dead. I couldn’t help her.”
My eyes crushed shut. That meant Charybdis had claimed its victim in this state after all.
That hairline crack in the Fury’s armor compelled me to add, “If you don’t release me, other girls like her will die.”
“Girls like her will grow up without a father thanks to you and your friend.” Her earlier anger expanded tenfold. “You’re expendable. That’s what the conclave taught me with Jasper’s death. You’re all disposable. You and your friend will die for your crimes, and others will take your place. You’ll be reduced to a name on a memorial wall that your coworkers walk past, seeing but not seeing.”
Vicious snapping noises preceded the splashing of water. No matter how Graeson fought, he was hauled into the lake by the second shadow as sure as if he were captured in a silver mesh net.
“Let him go.” I screamed my frustration. “He wasn’t in Wink. He has nothing to do with this.”
“He cares about you,” she seethed, “and that’s reason enough for him to die.”
Telling her I barely knew Graeson—or Harlow—wouldn’t save them. Letitia existed in a space beyond reality, beyond rationality, where vengeance and pain were the only flavors she tasted and blood was the only way to erase the cosmic debt she had attached to Harlow, and now to me.
“Keep her quiet,” the Fury ordered my personal umbra. “She might have brought more agents with her. We’ll have to handle those too.”
A chill embraced me. “Where are the other marshals?”
“Where all good marshals go when they die,” she said coldly and turned her back on me. “Come, pets. Let’s go home.”
The shadow crammed its wispy fist down my throat until I gagged. I bit down, tasting air. The creature had no blood to draw, no skin to read. I had nothing to mimic. My talents were useless against it.
A gurgled yelp fueled my thrashing. The creature clamped down harder, crushing me in its embrace. Wet snarls were the last thing I heard before the shadow squeezed out my consciousness.
Chapter 10
I woke with the earthy taste of mold in the back of my throat and a stiff lower back. I pushed myself upright off the poured concrete slab floor that radiated with cold and stank of mildew. Cinder-block walls supported the unfinished ceiling over my head. Pipes and wires hung exposed and within easy reach. I briefly wondered how the umbras might like the taste of electricity before deciding I was as likely to fry my brain as theirs and dismissed the idea as more dangerous than my current circumstances. At least for now.
Rolling onto my feet and shaking out my tingling limbs, I made a quick visual sweep of the room. No window. One door missing its knob. A fist-sized hole had been punched through the plaster beside it so that a chain could be looped through the circular cutout and locked on the opposite side. No handy tools had been left out so I could pick the lock, or lever against the chain to snap it. No food or water or blankets. Scrape together everything in what appeared to be a basement cell, and I had a whole lot of nothing.
Disjointed memories of my abduction sank back into my skull in bits and pieces.
The grieving widow. The shadow creatures. Those damn igel.
And Graeson.
He couldn’t be dead. He was a warg, practically bulletproof unless the rounds were silver.
I picked crusted saliva off my chin and out of the corners of my mouth while listening for signs of life. Worst-case scenario, I had been crammed into a storm shelter or detached cellar of some kind. Best-case scenario, I was holed up in the basement of the Rebec family home. Letitia had said Let’s go home after all. Neither option gave me the warm fuzzies.
As my eyes adjusted, I distinguished a set of figures drawn on the wall in sweeping pink and blue lines. Sidewalk chalk. A booming noise startled me, and I crept to the door and peered through the hole. Cases of soda were stacked against the wall near what might have been a set of stairs. Beside those a washing machine hopped as it struggled with its load. It jumped hard to the right, and a basket filled with equal part toys and laundry spilled onto the floor. Rebec house it is.
If I was here, then where was Harlow? And if this was the Rebec home, then was here in Wink, Texas?
Air whistled through the crack where my eye had been, and I recoiled as the room filled with familiar dense smog. I didn’t waste time swatting at it this time. I let it coalesce undisturbed, and as I watched, two silver gashes that must have been eyes blinked open. The umbra appraised me
through the churning blackness with suspicion, confirming my fears that it was far more sentient than I first thought.
“Where’s the mermaid?” I demanded.
Spears of white light flashed in a skeleton grin.
Is Graeson alive? That was the question I meant to ask next, but the words stuck in my throat. Graeson and I weren’t friends. He’d wrecked that possibility when he decided to use me. But I didn’t want him dead. We had gazed into the barren craters where our chest cavities ought to be and known one another, and I didn’t want to be alone in my grief again so soon.
The creature fluttered on my periphery, waiting, its ominous fingers unfurling through my hair. I stood unmoved, challenging it. “Where is Mrs. Rebec?”
Its fleeting amusement snuffed in a blink, and the eyes vanished along with the rest of its expression.
Metal scraped. I whirled as the door opened, and the man from the hotel hallway entered the room. If memory served, he was Letitia’s brother. He also appeared to be catnip to the umbra, who vibrated with pleasure at the sight of him, curling around the man’s torso like an inner tube made of smoke. He patted it absently as he appraised me through muddy-brown eyes puffed from lack of sleep. A plain white T-shirt was tucked into his jeans. Boots crusted with muck left prints behind him. His appearance was as bland as the dirt-colored hair on top of his head.
“Where is Harlow?” The unanswered question thing was getting old.
“She’s been taken to the gully.” The man hooked his thumbs over the umbra and slid it down to the floor, where he stepped out of it. The shadow puddled forlornly across the concrete, spilling long across the cement until he approximated the man’s shape. “Letitia asked me to bring you,” he said to me. “You can walk, or I can have you carried.”
Whatever the gully was, he made it sound like the last place he wanted to go, which couldn’t bode well for Harlow or for me. I shifted forward a fraction, until my shadow overlapped the umbra. It peeled off the floor and rose in a vaporous column that drifted between me and the man, who cast no shadow at all. That explained how Letitia came by at least one of her servants. “You can’t let her do this.”
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