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

by Hailey Edwards

  Hunting wasn’t my thing. Fae didn’t need guns or permits. Their teeth and claws worked just fine. But I was pretty sure humans were allowed to hunt in certain tracts of national forests, which Charybdis frequented, and I had no clue if I should expect armed campers or not based on the season. Wolves weren’t on the menu for humans, I didn’t think, but I wasn’t about to take a chance on Dell getting hurt in case they mistook her “tame” behavior as sickness.

  Picnic benches cozied up to simple black grills cemented into the ground on thick metal posts. A gleaming RV had claimed one slot in the modest lot marked with six parking spaces. A battered truck with a ratty camper shell occupied another. At the far end a boxy red subcompact car took up a space beside a simple dome tent pitched in the spot next to it.

  A teenager with sleep-matted hair bulldozed me. “Have you seen a young girl?” Her fingers dug into my forearms. Delicate magic tickled my skin. Her classification popped into my head. Sylph. “This high? Brown hair? No? Did you see anyone in the water?”

  Dread sent my stomach crashing into my toes, and I proceeded carefully. “Did you lose someone?”

  “No. I didn’t lose her.” She blinked rapidly. “She knows we’re leaving this morning. She probably went to the lake to look for her stupid fish.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “Her mask is here. She never goes anywhere without it.”

  I kept my voice level. “Her fish?”

  “My sister caught a brim yesterday. It was her first catch. When she saw the hook in its mouth…” The girl heaved a long-suffering sigh. “She wanted to release it, but I’m not great with getting them off the hook. Its cheek tore. She begged me to let her keep it. She wanted to take it to a vet. The fish was hurt, and I didn’t want to deal with tears if it died, so I tossed it back before she could stop me. She’s been trying to find it again to check on it. I had to pull her out of the water last night.”

  “I need you to take a deep breath, okay? I’m here to help, but I have to ask you a few questions. Did you hear anything strange last night?” The pitiful cries of an animal in distress… “Did you see anything unusual?”

  “N-no.” She wiped her cheeks dry, and her red-rimmed eyes focused on me for the first time. I saw the moment she processed I wasn’t just another camper. I was too calm, and I asked too many questions. Ones she knew instinctively involved her missing sister. “Who are you?”

  “Camille Ellis. I work for the Earthen Conclave.”

  “I’m Daphne Tanner. My sister is Veronica.” Her voice went soft. “Roni.”

  Roni Tanner. Another name etched into my memory. I hoped like Elizabeth McKenna, I would remember her as a girl who survived, and not one who was fallen.

  “Are you familiar with the area?” I guided the young woman toward a composite bench, the type made from recycled plastic, and we sat across from one another. “What brought you out here?”

  “I’m attending college out of state. I came home for the weekend, and Roni begged to go camping. Just us girls. Our folks come up here all the time, but they have an RV. It’s not really camping when you can watch TV and walk around in your bathrobe, you know?” Her gaze lit on their tent. “I can’t drive the RV anyway. It’s huge, and the roads out here…” Her bottom lip trembled. “Roni was guilt-tripping me about never spending time with her, so I borrowed a tent from a friend.” She glanced over at me. “One night. That was it. How did this happen?”

  I took her hand and squeezed her fingers. “Walk me through what happened last night.”

  “We ate around six. Roni was bored, and she wanted to search for that damn fish one more time before bed, but I was tired. I told her no. She wouldn’t listen when I said it had swam off to be with its family.” She made a wriggling motion with her hand. “I was scared it might be floating belly-up on top of the water if she went looking. I’ve been studying for finals, so I was wiped. I didn’t want more drama. We went to bed around eight. I should have heard her when she left the tent. She had to step over my head to get out, but I don’t know. She must have sneaked past me.”

  Working under the assumption the kelpie’s actions were being orchestrated by a magic user, it made sense they might also be casting sleep enchantments on the victims’ families. All the better to lure the young and curious without getting caught.

  “Is more help coming?” Daphne scanned the road behind me with a hopeful expression.

  “I dropped my cell,” I lied. “I’ll have to wait for my backup to find me.” Her crestfallen acceptance forced me to act the part. Even if it got me in hot water with Graeson. “Unless… Do you have a phone I can borrow?”

  “Sure.” She whipped it from her back pocket and pressed it into my hand. “I disabled the password so Roni could play games. Just swipe the lock screen and then dial.”

  Possibilities and repercussions cascaded through my head as my fingers closed over the slim phone. This gave me an out if I wanted one. It meant I could call a cab and go home, leave the conclave to tidy up their own messes. Dialing in also meant placing a grief-stricken warg who had taken his vendetta too far into custody until the magistrates decided on a punishment for abducting one of their own. Graeson wasn’t in his right mind, kidnapping me proved that, but he was thinking clearer than Vause seemed to be. As tempting as it was to steal that promised call to Aunt Dot or leave the wargs to their scheming, I had to see this through. I was done running when others needed my help.

  “Do you mind if I walk up the road a bit?” I propped my lips into a smile. “I’d prefer some privacy to make the call.”

  “Oh. Sure.” Her brows pulled into a deep V in the center of her forehead. “I’ll go wait in the car.”

  “Great.” I swiped my thumb and dialed random numbers. “I’ll handle this as quickly as possible so we can get more eyes out for your sister.”

  Nodding, Daphne turned and started walking back to her vehicle. I took the road and made a beeline for the trees where I last saw the golden wolf. I needed Graeson, and his wasn’t a number I could dial. It wasn’t like wolves carried phones in their fur suits. We’d have to do this the old-fashioned way, through a howl-o-gram.

  “Dell.” I rustled a shrub with my foot. “Dell.” I shook a tree limb. “I need to get in touch with Graeson. Can you do that mind thing and send him a message?” Pitiful whimpers lured me deeper into the undergrowth. “Dell?”

  “Right…” a drawn-out grunt, “…here.”

  A pale figure curled into the fetal position rocked on the damp carpet of the forest floor. I shoved through the dense undergrowth and knelt at her side. “Are you all right?”

  Her stiff limbs extended one by one, joints popping into alignment, until she managed to roll onto her back. Sweat slicked her skin, and her bare breasts jiggled from her shortness of breath. “I’m good.” She sprawled nude in the dirt without a hint of modesty and picked a skeletal leaf from her hair. “I can ring up Cord from here.”

  “You’re going to howl like this?” The shock of finding her naked popped the words out of my mouth before my brain caught up to them. Unlike with Graeson, whose nakedness inspired bone-deep female appreciation, Dell’s nudity called my protective instincts to the fore. I would have offered her my jacket to cover herself if I’d worn one today.

  “Um, no. That’s not how we operate.” She snorted. “Besides, we need to keep a low profile until the others arrive. Howling in wolf form would announce our position. Howling in human form, well, that’s not something that happens without four or five cases of beer involved.”

  The pack bond. A ping of thought bounced off the inside of my skull before I realized I had reached out on reflex to grasp that golden highway before slamming into a roadblock. Damn it. One taste of their connection should not have left me starving for more.

  Dell lifted her arm, clearly reading my mind without help from the bond, a smile dancing on her lips. “Or…you can tell him yourself.”

  I stared at her hand and wet my lips. What if it didn’t work this time? What
if the first spark had been a fluke? Such decadent inclusion could become addictive to a loner like me. It was no replacement for the twin bond, or for the parents who had abandoned me. Even in the presence of many, I ached with their absence. I always would, and no amount of warg blood could change that. All it could do was show me exactly what I was missing.

  “No.” I wiped my damp palms on my pants. “You can handle this.”

  I didn’t think I could endure the loss of that blissful state of communion if I achieved it again.

  “Oh.” She pushed herself upright. “Okay.” She blinked and stared at me, waiting. “I got him. What do you want to pass along?”

  “Tell him we’re at a campground near the lake.”

  “Give him a minute.” She flushed. “He’s exhausting his vocabulary of curse words.” The idea of Graeson losing his cool over my audacity to ignore his orders coaxed a grin out of me. Dell cleared her throat and lowered her voice to a suitably masculine octave, the better to mock him with. “I’m not above cuffing you to the bed, Ellis. Don’t defy my orders again.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” I rolled my eyes and ignored the bed comment.

  Dell smothered a girlish laugh then switched back to Graeson. “Can you be more specific?”

  “Hold that thought.” I hiked back to the path and glanced around for signs. Bingo. Someone had used a scroll saw to write Upper Branch Campground into a weathered rectangle of wood nailed to a tree trunk. I returned to Dell and relayed the information. “That’s as specific as I can get without a phone or a compass.”

  Dell’s gaze latched on to my hand where I clutched the cell, but I cut her a murderous glare and hoped she could keep Graeson from plucking the mental picture from her head. I wasn’t sure how deep he was dug in there, but I didn’t want to be chewed out later.

  “We’ll be there in five minutes,” Dell-as-Graeson said.

  “I’m going to stay with Daphne until the pack arrives,” I told them, eager to wipe my prints off the phone and return it to its rightful owner. “I don’t want the sight of wolves to spook her.” Or to give her the wrong idea about her sister’s fate.

  Leaving Dell to wait for Graeson and the other wargs, I sought out Daphne. I found her sitting in the driver’s front seat of her car with the door propped open. Red-and-white tennis shoes were planted firmly on the ground. She had braced her elbows on the armrest built into her door. Her shoulders were jumping with the force of her muffled sobs.

  Each of her pitiful cries drove the knife deeper into my chest. I had been here before, been the sister who survived, the one who had to face down expectant parents and explain what happened to their other daughter, their baby. I hoped Daphne’s mother and father were more understanding than mine had been, and if we failed to save Roni, I prayed they were more forgiving.

  Tragedy was losing one child by chance. Travesty was losing a second by choice.

  Chapter 14

  Lunch at the bait shack consisted of hamburgers, wings, footlong hotdogs, fried chicken and, oddly enough, bologna. A buffet of the finest fried foods available in Abbeville. The pack wolfed down the meat and gnawed the marrow from the bones, in human form, but the extra crispy thigh I had picked apart with my fingers never made it past my lips.

  Two pack members had escorted Daphne home after Graeson assessed the situation. A male had packed her things and driven her car to the address listed on her driver’s license, and the female whose name I hadn’t caught gave Daphne a ride in the van because she had no longer been speaking or doing much of anything but staring into the distance while tears rolled silently down her cheeks by that point.

  The female borrowed my badge and a business card, and then memorized my cell phone number so if the Tanners had questions they would dial her—me—instead of hunting down a representative from the local marshal’s office. The quieter we kept this, the better. Even with the Tanners assured we were doing our best, we had a tiny window to produce results before Mrs. Tanner raised a ruckus over her missing daughter. A sobering thought considering how it was my name and badge number she would recite if questioned about the phony marshal visit.

  Across the room, Graeson sat in a far corner staring out a broken window into the marsh. A paper plate piled high with food rested on his knees, but he hadn’t eaten a bite. The others pretended not to notice, but I stared, hoping the weight of my gaze would turn his head and we could talk about where to go from here. But his attention belonged to the swaying grasses, not to me.

  Slurping noises brought my attention back to Dell, whose face was smeared with hot sauce. A wing bone stuck to her bottom lip, and she chewed one end the way a farmer might grind a wheat stem between his teeth.

  The makeshift table wobbled when I nudged my plate across it. “I need to clear my head.”

  The bone fell onto her lap. “But the food will be gone when we get back.”

  “That’s okay.” Careful not to jar the others at the table, I stood and inched past them. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, I am.” She grabbed a handful of napkins and wiped her face. Most of the sauce had dried and stuck to her chin. “Come on, Camille. Ten minutes. Just long enough for me to go for fourths. I’ll never make it to fifths with this crowd.”

  The itch beneath my skin intensified the longer I stood there with the wargs staring at me. The pack bond at work no doubt. Gossiping about the kidnapee where she couldn’t hear them. How polite. The female warg tucked her plate to her chest and released a warning growl. Before the nearest man could stop me, I snagged an entire untouched bucket of chicken, thrust it into Dell’s arms and started walking.

  “Hey,” he protested.

  “Haden.” One word from Graeson ended the quarrel before it began.

  I withered Haden with a glance and then hit the porch as though the pack were nipping at my heels. Or worse, its beta. The muggy air stank of old house and wet dog. The wolves had been in the water again, scenting the sandbars for fresh signs the kelpie had passed through. When the kelpie’s scent trail had vanished at the edge of the parking lot, the Garzas suspected magical intervention, but there was no handy Fury to blame this time.

  The longer we chased Charybdis the more convinced I became he and the kelpie were two separate entities working toward a common goal. Catching two killers was a daunting prospect since I had only ever registered one magical signature at the crime scenes. We had blamed the erasure spell in Alabama on the Fury, but maybe we were wrong. Maybe it was Charybdis scrubbing his presence from the kelpie’s kill sites so the conclave focused on the killer responsible for the wet work.

  A whiff of jasmine and honeysuckle hit my nose. I descended the steps and set off in search of the origin. Why not? I had nothing better to do. No books. No TV. No Internet. No phones. Wargs didn’t need them to communicate, but I was getting twitchy without my cellphone and its distracting apps.

  Paper shredded, and I heard Dell inhale over the bucket. “I’m ready to go home. My meemaw’s chicken is so much better than this.”

  “I know what you mean.” Not the chicken part. Aunt Dot wasn’t allowed in the kitchen unsupervised. The poor woman could burn water. The going-home part? That sounded good right about now. Graeson still owed me a phone call, but last night was riding us hard today, and I wasn’t ready to do battle for that promised trip into town.

  I was starting to regret not using Daphne’s cell while I had the chance. Paranoia had warned me the conclave might trace her phone records to corroborate her story, and the last thing I wanted to explain was why I hadn’t reported the incident or checked in with Vause. Letting Aunt Dot worry a while longer seemed the lesser of two evils.

  “Where’s home for you?” she asked around a hunk of breast meat.

  “Tennessee is where I live now.”

  A thoughtful crunch. “You’re not from there originally?”

  A twinge rippled through my chest. “No.”

  “Do you live alone?”

  “Yes and no. Home is
an airstream trailer.” I smiled thinking of its cozy quarters. “My aunt and cousins live in the same RV park as I do. Aunt Dot bought it, actually. It looked like I would be stationed there for a while, and she wanted a new project. She kind of collects real estate from all the places we visit.”

  “Huh.” The bucket rattled when she jogged to catch up to me. “You mean your whole family goes where your job sends you?”

  “Gemini are nomadic by nature.” We also tended to band together in family groups. “With Aunt Dot getting older, it’s easier to have time to plan our next move and coordinate.”

  “Are you seeing anyone?” Dell munched thoughtfully. “All that travel has to be rough on relationships.”

  “I don’t date, so it’s not a problem,” I assured her. Dell’s chicken must have gone down the wrong pipe, because she started choking. I whacked her on the back, and she caught her breath after a minute. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she wheezed. “I just— That sounds lonely.”

  Lonely I was used to. Having company outside of blood relatives…now that was weird. First Harlow and now Dell and the ever-present Graeson. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  “No.” With a grunt of effort, she hurled her chicken bone into a tree trunk. “My last boyfriend found his lifemate at the grocery store. I sent him out for frozen custard, and he came home with a leggy brunette named Petra.” She selected a wing. “The worst part? He forgot the custard.” She bit down hard. “Bastard.”

  “Don’t you want the mated thing?” I assumed all wargs would be excited for the hunt. “That whole fated soul-mate connection?”

  “Eh.” Another bite. “The idea of a random stranger walking up to me one day and saying, ‘Hey, baby, you smell like forever. Let’s do it,’ isn’t all that appealing honestly.”