I eased upright and slid off the mattress. No sooner had I tiptoed across the room and pressed my back to the paneling beside the door did the knob twist. I held my breath as a slice of light from the hallway cut across the room and bisected the pillow where I had been sleeping.
All I could see from this vantage was a black leather glove, fingers splayed against the veneer as it nudged the crack wider. The ornate tattoo binding his wrists would have given him away as fae even if his scent hadn’t. I summoned my wolf without thought, the two of us fitting seamlessly together as we stalked our prey.
Silent as a whisper, he eased inside, his pale eyes dialing wide when he spotted me leaning there, watching him. Before he snapped out of his surprise, I slammed my elbow into his gut. He bent forward on a grunt of pain, and I fisted his hair, using my grip to fling him over my shoulder. He hit the floor on his back and coughed in shock while I shut the door quietly and locked it. The iron tang of blood from a scratch on his temple, courtesy of the sharp edge of the heavy wooden bedframe, whet my appetite.
Down, girl.
“Magistrate Vause sent me to fetch you,” he grunted.
“Is that right?” My jaw had gone tender as the wolf fought to surface, and my words slurred. “Prove it.”
“I’m going to get my phone out of my back pocket.” He rolled his hips and pulled out a slim, black cell then punched in a speed-dial combination. “Magistrate, yes, I am with Agent Ellis now.” He extended his arm toward me. “Talk to her. Get your proof.”
Warily I accepted the call. “Magistrate Vause?”
“You attempted to contact me.” Her clipped tone and cool delivery were as familiar as Aunt Dot’s hugs. “Consider this your callback.”
“I tried your private number. Magistrate Martindale answered. He seems to believe you vanished and that foul play was involved.” I slid my attention back to the deadly fae lying on the floor. “He mentioned one of your guards was killed.”
“Yes.” An uncharacteristic low note imbued the word. On another woman, I would have named it remorse, but Vause regretted nothing in my experience. “He attempted to kill me, and we couldn’t allow that to stand.”
“Why would he do a thing like that?” I drawled, making it clear I could imagine several reasons.
“He was taken as a host.” Deftly, she deflected my sarcasm. “Oisin had been with me since he was forty. He died at eighty-nine. A mere babe.”
Familiar with her habit of slipping away without notifying her Unseelie counterpart of her itinerary, I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Is it safe for you to be on your own?”
“I was attacked in my office, by one of my own people.” Her haughty scoff further reassured me she was, in fact, Vause. “Is it safe for me anywhere? Now, what was the reason you called? Understand I won’t be reconsidering your leave, so I’ll save you the breath for asking.”
I was so far past worrying over my job and performance record I couldn’t spot them in my rearview mirror if I squinted.
“Charybdis has taken my aunt and cousin.” I ground my teeth to keep from snapping at her. “He’s threatened my parents and attacked members of my pack. I called to ask for your help.”
“Can you stop making that noise?” She managed to sound offended by my growl. “It’s quite distracting and sure to draw unwanted attention.”
I throttled back the rumble in my chest. “Better now?”
“Marginally,” she allowed. “I am sympathetic to your plight, but I’m not certain how much I can help you. I have my own oaths to uphold and my own safety to consider.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
Silent moments ticked past, and I imagined Vause deciding which version of the truth to share.
“For the good of the organization, the conclave keeps meticulous records on our employees and their families.”
I bit my lip and managed an “Mmm-hmm” that sounded a few degrees less murderous than the roiling in my gut.
“I expected you to reach out to your parents,” she said at last. “Their last-known whereabouts were in the Butler area.”
“I see.” There. That sounded civil. “Are you saying the conclave lost track of them? My own resources have confirmed they’re keeping a low profile.”
More silence lapsed. This time it was deafening.
“Your parents were kept under surveillance from the time you entered marshal academy until a few short months ago.”
“Why?”
“You’re an anomaly. A mature Gemini without a twin. We were curious how your skills would manifest over time, and I must admit, I was wrong about Cord Graeson’s influence on you. Thanks to your connection to him and his wargs, we’ve gained valuable insight into the workings of Gemini physiology.”
My back hit the wall. It was all that propped me upright. “You’re saying I’m a science experiment. That you’ve been tracking my family, Graeson, the wargs, all of them. Do you honestly not get what a huge invasion of privacy that is?”
Not to mention how pointless it was to surveil my parents when we had no relationship. Unless she thought their particular combination of DNA was the cause for my survival.
“You signed the paperwork,” she reminded me. “You gave us freedom to complete a thorough background search, among other things.”
“A background search is not the same as ongoing surveillance,” I gritted out. “Why waste the resources? I’m not that interesting. Gemini avoid the conclave. It’s not like cataloguing me will help your recruiting efforts.”
Employment with the conclave had been the first stepping stone on my path to atonement. I joined because I was broken and lost, and they promised me meaningful work and a place to belong.
“I made an oath, Camille.”
The simple, unadorned statement gave me chills. “What can you tell me?”
“A rotating detail was assigned to monitor your parents.” The click-click-click of a retractable pen button being pressed filled the line. “When the last marshal scheduled to report for his six-week shift failed to arrive, I sent agents to their last-known address.” Click-click-click. “The marshal was found dead, and your mother and father were gone. No evidence could be obtained from the scene due to a series of cascading erasure spells set off at the time of his death.”
“Erasure spells?” I thumped my head against the wall, sifting through everything I knew about Charybdis, about my parents, but it did nothing to jog my brain. Piecing the timeline together, I finally hit on a connection. “Wait.” I pushed off the wall. “Marshal Ayer had receipts in her pockets from a trip to Butler.”
“I won’t ask how you came by that information since it would require me to dismiss you from the Earthen Conclave.”
That was not a no. It bolstered me to make an investigative leap. “Ayer killed the other agent.”
“Yes.”
“Is she aware of what she did?” Our time with Harlow had been too brief to determine how much she retained of what she’d done. “Is that why she turned herself over to the mental hospital?”
“Marshal Ayer was catatonic when she was discovered at your parents’ home. The marshal responding thought she was a victim too, a survivor, at first, until she attacked him. She had been there for so many days prior to discovery, she was half-starved, and the temptation of a fresh blood supply proved too much for her. She had to be restrained and sedated at the scene.”
“I want that address,” I found myself saying, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted it at all.
“I expected as much. I gave Fionn permission to share it with you.” Her chair groaned as she readjusted. “Regardless of how cognizant Ayer was of her actions, I made the decision to admit her to Edelweiss so that she couldn’t be used against us again.”
A sense of foreboding slithered through me that perhaps what Mai and I had done was far riskier than we had imagined at the time.
“What she knows or does not know is uncertain at this point. She’s being kept sedated to p
revent Charybdis from revisiting that host.”
I drew myself upright. “Sedation prevents Charybdis from reentering a host?”
“We believe so, yes. Even after contamination, he seems to require consciousness to seize control of his victims.”
Meaning this might be the solution for taking down Harlow the next time we met. Or, gods forbid, any family and pack mates he might have infected.
The guard who had kept his composure all this time raised his head off the floor. In one lithe movement, he sprang to his feet and prowled closer. “The time for questions has come to an end.”
Shoved into the spotlight, I wracked my brain for the most pressing questions. “How is Charybdis taking hosts?”
“Oisin and Fionn never left my side on days when I was scheduled for meetings. Not all fae are as respectful of their magistrates as they should be. That day Fionn remained in my chambers while Oisin positioned himself at the outer door. Before he attacked, he frisked a man who came bearing a package for me. One we have since determined to have been stolen off a mail cart on one of the lower floors. The delivery was a ruse. The man in question was nonresponsive when Fionn questioned him, much as Marshal Ayer was.” A weary sigh sifted through her. “I believe that was the point of contact.”
Twisting my bottom lip between my fingers, I pinched until it hurt to jumpstart my sleep-addled brain. “You’re saying Charybdis infects people by touch.”
Thinking back to the clerk at the gas station, even farther back to when he took control of Bianca, he had almost admitted as much, hadn’t he?
“That is the theory the evidence supports.” The pen clicked again. “Camille, I know it goes against your nature, but I must advise you that, should you encounter a host, you must kill it before it touches you. Otherwise you’ll never cut out all the rot.”
Too late, I almost admitted while my gut plummeted into the soles of my feet. I hadn’t touched Harlow, but Graeson had. Not that it mattered since I had tackled both Ayer and Bianca. That meant we were both at risk of infection.
“I can’t kill his hosts,” I growled. “They’re innocent people.”
“Who will harm other innocents until they are stopped. Consider your pack’s wellbeing if you care so little for you own. Until Charybdis is dead, your wargess can’t be left unsupervised. Certainly not while she’s pregnant. The temptation would prove too great for Charybdis to resist. He would have her kill the babe to feed off the agony—hers, the pack’s…yours. As attuned to the pack bond as he would be in her body, he could harvest the pain easily.”
Of all the wargs in our pack, he had targeted the softest and most fragile of us all.
“You’re a new pack. The babe represents a new hope. Wolfborn pups are rare, and you’ve already confirmed that’s what hers will be.” Confident in her information, the depth of her knowledge of us astounded me. “By harming her, he wounds the entire pack. By taking her mind, he’s infected your pack bond. It’s a conduit for him now.”
“Can he feed off the emotions of those who are connected to her?” Another idea chilled me. “Can he infect another mind while joined with it through hers?”
“Both are distinct possibilities.”
“That’s why you had your guard killed.” Despite her obvious attachment to him, Vause hadn’t hesitated to put him down when it came to his death or hers. “You couldn’t afford the risk.”
“One touch, and he could have taken me. Imagine the damage he could have wrought if he controlled a magistrate. I can’t be compromised. He has already killed to learn what I know, but what he’s gained is but a drop in an ocean of secrets. Things I would—and have—killed to protect.” Reading into my silence, she softened her tone. “Fionn would have killed me had he failed to prevent my contamination. It is the only way. Harden your heart to it now. This can only end one way, and that is in death.”
Harlow had survived Charybdis the longest. But Aunt Dot? Isaac? Mom and Dad? How did I earmark any one of them as an acceptable loss? I couldn’t. Even though my parents had broken my heart, they were still my family. As long as we were all alive, there was still hope we might reconcile in the future. Death was permanent.
“You don’t trust me—” she began.
I couldn’t stop the scoff burning my nose. “I can’t imagine why.”
“This union of yours with Cord Graeson is not an alliance I would have chosen for you, but I respect that you do have genuine affection for him, and him for you.” The other shoe hovered for a full minute. And then it dropped. “That doesn’t change the fact you must not return to him. Stay as far away from the pack and that poisonous bond as you can.”
Why further proof of her prejudice surprised me, I have no idea. “Graeson is the one person who has never lied to me, and you’re asking me to repay him by walking away.”
“Marshal Ayer was one of the guards for your parents, as I’ve mentioned.” The clicking pen returned with a vengeance. “We have reason to believe that first contact between Marshal Ayer and Charybdis when he stepped out of the portal in Wink is the reason why he targeted you.”
The shift in her narrative threw me enough I didn’t question the connection.
“As your recruiter, all reports on your family were to be given to me in person. Marshal Ayer had ended her six-week commitment and was required to check in with me prior to returning to her family. I was attending a mandatory meeting in Wink and granted her permission to visit me there despite the risk of discovery.” Her voice tightened. “I was in a meeting with the other magistrates when the portal breach occurred. Charybdis caught her on her way to my temporary quarters, and her knowledge gave him access to every piece of information we had on you and your family, and I’m sorrier for that than you can ever know.”
The room whirled. My ears rang. Air solidified in my lungs.
Happenstance? Serendipity? Fate?
That was her answer?
How many times had I combed over crime scenes or sat in on autopsies only to be present when the poignant answer to “why her?” was inevitably wrong place, wrong time? How often did the killer have no previous knowledge of the victim? Or swore he had subdued his dark urges until they combusted and devoured the nearest person?
The simplicity of that answer, the implication that any person, no matter how moral or just, could lose it all in a blink of unprovoked malice, had never satisfied. It sure as hell didn’t now.
A sharp crack perked my ears. I stared dumbly at the phone as it spun across the floor. A heartbeat later, my knees buckled and I joined it.
“Agent Ellis, are you all right?”
The guard’s question was drowned in the white noise rushing through my head. I had been so fixated on the why, I hadn’t absorbed the how. How Charybdis snared my attention in the first place. How he tailored his methodology to fit his target. How he hooked me, right from the start.
Charybdis had been in Ayer’s head. Possibly even Mom’s or Dad’s. He might as well have been in mine the way he had selected my worst fears and pitted them against me. Adding his own gruesome signature, he all but recreated Lori’s death with each victim the kelpie had taken.
All those girls were dead…because of me.
Marie’s blood was on my hands.
I drew my legs against my chest, wrapped my arms around them and dropped my forehead to my knees. I had come so close to having it all—a mate, a home, a future. All of that was gone, snatched from my outstretched arms in the span of seconds it had taken me to lose Lori, my parents, my family.
Graeson would hate me when he figured out I had cost him his sister.
I had cost him everything.
The honor of being chosen as his mate, the pride at being an alpha, left a cold place in my chest as those accomplishments withered. I would lose the place I had been carving out among the wargs, and my warg aspect would shrivel and die along with those dreams. A ragged howl tore through my chest, but I clamped my mouth shut over it. The she-wolf wasn’t real. She was jus
t as much a figment of my imagination as the idea I could ever deserve to belong with a man like Graeson.
Rocking back and forth, I kept my jaw locked and swallowed convulsively to hold the acid at bay.
Vause’s guard squatted in front of me, a safe distance away. I watched him through the crack of my legs as he signed off with the magistrate and pocketed his phone. Lips mashed into a firm line, he scanned the ceiling as if hoping for divine intervention. None came. None ever did. I could have told him that.
“I must go.” He went down on one knee. “I have left the magistrate alone for as long as I dare.”
Flicking my wrist, I shooed him on his way, hoping he would be quick about it so I could get my head on straight before guilt pumped my stomach contents.
“Forgive me.” He struck so fast his hand blurred. “I have my orders.”
The downy blanket of oblivion beckoned, and I curled into its embrace. The hard edges of the world went soft and muzzy until I could breathe again. There was no shame here, only acceptance and warmth. The swaddling blackness enveloped me, and the rest fell away.
Chapter 12
Waking up on the carpet in my hotel room, muscles sore and hip aching, was not a great start to what promised to be a long day. I gritted my teeth, rolled over and pushed to my feet. An itch brought my hand to my cheek, where I found a ragged sheaf of notebook paper adhered to my skin. Using the bathroom mirror to guide me in its removal, I flipped it over and read the information written in elegant script. The words pierced my grogginess and made my heart pound faster.
I sent Theo a text to meet me at the Waffle Iron, the restaurant we had scouted for breakfast, then changed into fresh clothes and ran my fingers through my hair. I grabbed my phone, wallet and the paper and headed across the street.
Turns out I hadn’t sent him a wakeup call. He was digging into a stack of pancakes when I shoved through the doors. I strolled right up to his table and slapped the scrap of paper down beside his plate before collapsing on the bench seat across from him.
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