“I accepted the deal.” I prowled closer, until the toes of our shoes touched. “I stand by my word.”
Kapoor didn’t have to send thugs like Wu to twist my arm when I had already shaken his hand on the bargain to join a demon taskforce spearheaded by the National Security Branch of the FBI and made my peace with its cost. Namely, my career.
“Forgive me for not trusting your nature.” Wu searched my face, and a frown knitted his brow. “Your kind are not known for their honesty. Otillians are a vicious breed, their females in particular. That you are one of the four in Czar Astrakhan’s cadre does you no favors in my estimation.”
I smiled at him, flashing my own teeth. “Good thing I don’t care what you think about me.”
“You will.” Wu leaned down until our faces were on the same level, until he could look me in the eye, and the scent of his sun-warmed skin hit the back of my throat. “I’m your new partner.”
Wu pivoted on his heel and left me swaying toward him. New partner? Wu thought he could replace Rixton? Ha. No chance. I marched after him, slapped the plastic sheeting aside, and stepped out onto the front porch. I was about to light into him when I noticed his attention was focused off in the distance where a plume of dust whirled down the main road. I squinted past the mailbox, and my heart gave a hard thud as a familiar black SUV rumbled up the driveway.
Three men exited the vehicle, and none of them were smiling.
“Cole Heaton, Miller Henshaw, and Thomas Ford.” Wu rattled off their names without a hitch. “To what does Ms. Boudreau owe the pleasure of this visit? The house carries no scent of her coterie. How long have you left your mistress unguarded?”
Cole ignored Wu and his accusations, his meltwater gaze fixated on me. “Are you all right?”
The black stubble covering his scalp had been trimmed recently, and his face was freshly shaven. As usual, his square jaw bulged as he ground his teeth against words he would never speak but that seemed forever on the tip of his tongue. The zigzag pattern of his nose, each kink a reminder of the violent life he led, no longer startled me. Neither did the missing tip of his left ear. They were simply sums that made up the whole of Cole Heaton.
I had to moisten my tongue before I could speak. “Fine.”
“Who’s your friend?” Thom tracked Wu with sharp interest, his narrowed eyes glinting bright emerald, the turn of his head causing a hank of dark blond hair to tickle the golden skin on his wide forehead. All ropey muscle and lightning reflexes, the man looked more like a cheetah than the boxy tomcat lurking under his skin. “He smells… delicious.”
Leave it to Thom to make things weird. Well, okay, weirder.
“Everyone, this is Adam Wu.” I gestured around the gathering. “Adam Wu, this is everyone.”
A frown gathered in the tight folds between Miller’s eyebrows, and he rested his hand on Thom’s shoulder to halt his silent prowl forward. Thom hissed at the restraint but quit his stalking behavior.
“We need to talk,” Cole rumbled to me. “In private.”
“Sure.” He had avoided me like a biblical plague since the night I cost him one of his people, and one of mine too. “We can go around back to the picnic bench.” I wasn’t sure I could handle being in an enclosed space with him, not after the way we’d left things. “It’s in the shade, so it won’t be as hot.”
“Stay put,” he ordered Miller and Thom. “Keep an eye on Wu.”
“They aren’t yours to command,” Wu reminded him. “Neither am I.”
Leaving them to finish their pissing match, I circled the house and headed toward the lone oak overhanging a picnic bench in desperate need of sanding and refinishing. I was too fidgety to sit, so I leaned against the tree trunk and waited on Cole to join me.
“The house looks good,” he said into the tense silence. “You didn’t have to do this alone. You could have asked for our help.”
“Miller and Thom are the only ones who have reached out since that night.” I shrugged like the snub didn’t hurt, like going back to playing human hadn’t made me feel like my skin was stretched too tight over my bones now that I knew the truth. “I figured that must mean the rest of you wanted things to go back to how they were before.”
“There is no going back.” His long gait swallowed the distance between us, and he braced one wide palm on the bark over my head. The snap closure on the thick leather band concealing the metal under his skin glinted in the sunlight. “You don’t get to pretend you don’t know what you are anymore.” He leaned in close. “War is here. Famine will be soon. You can’t hide from your birthright.”
“I’m not.” I had been… adjusting. Absorbing. Making peace with the fact my entire identity was a lie. Seven days to stitch the rips in my psyche back together sounded more than fair to me. “I’ve been here, at home, this whole time. You could have visited. If you didn’t want to see me, you could have called. If you didn’t want to hear me, you could have texted.” I met his gaze and held it even when his cold fury gave me chills. “Who’s really hiding here, Cole?”
A growl pumped through his chest, and he didn’t bother smoothing its ragged edges. We were past all that. “We are your coterie, your strength. You don’t get to abandon us again.”
“So that’s what this is about.” The rough bark tugged on my hair as I angled my face toward him. “You’re not just mad at me for avoiding you, you thought I would ditch you again.” Cole had explained how the coterie waited years for me to find them, but I hadn’t known to look. “I wanted time alone to get my head on straight, okay, I’ll cop to that, but when you didn’t call, I assumed you were angry over…”
The deal I’d made with Kapoor. Over Portia. Over Maggie. Everything.
“I’m not mad.” The lie flattened his lips into a harsh line. “I don’t have the luxury of anger.”
“Keep telling yourself that, big guy.” I blasted out a frustrated sigh. “Why are you really here?”
“Thom and I are working a case up in Ludlow.” He straightened from his lean and lowered his arm. “We found something you ought to see.”
“I have to work in a few hours, and I can’t go tomorrow. That’s when the crew arrives to install the new bay window.” I tucked a sticky curl behind my ear. “How about the next day?”
“How about now?” He glanced over his shoulder toward the driveway. “I brought it with me.”
I followed his gaze. “Is this something Wu should see?”
“Who is he to you?” Cole sharpened each word until the next question cut deep. “Why is he here?”
“Kapoor sent him to check up on me.” I wet my lips. “He’s my new partner.”
Cole folded his fingers into his palms, clenching his hands into meaty fists at his sides. “I see.”
Out of my depth, I sidestepped his quiet anger and returned to the driveway to find the Mexican standoff still in progress. I winked at Miller then grinned at Thom on my way to the rear of the SUV emblazoned with the familiar White Horse logo of a muscular white warhorse stamping its left front hoof. Wu, whose presence I had chosen to ignore, sidled up to me at the exact same moment Cole arrived, and they locked glares over my head.
“Cole,” I prompted him. “You said you have something to show me?”
“Brace yourself.” He opened the hatch and reached for a lumpy towel. “This is the third one of these we’ve found.” He peeled back the fabric to reveal the mummified remains of a cat. I might have believed the corpse was decades old except for its modern collar with the owner’s Twitter handle engraved on its tag. “Natural mummification takes forty plus days depending on environmental conditions. This is the work of forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Two of the animals were chipped, so the identifications are positive, and the timelines are solid.”
I got a bad feeling about where he was headed. “Any ideas what caused this?”
“An ubaste is my guess,” Wu cut in.
I swung my head toward him. “A who-what-now?”
Cole answ
ered for him. “An ubaste is a low-level charun that feeds on the life force of small animals.”
“That’s good, right?” Stark relief swirled through me. “That means it’s no danger to humans.”
Wu pinched a fold of the cat’s brittle skin between his fingers, and the desiccated flesh crumbled. “Humans are animals.”
“Not you too.” I popped his hand before he ruined more evidence. “You’re with the NSB. Doesn’t that mean you value human life?”
“No.” He dusted his hands. “All it means is I value my life.”
A twinge of conscience almost had me apologizing to him, for what I wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t my fault he was here. He had made his choice to cozy up to the NSB the same as me, and now both of us had to live with our decisions.
“You’re saying this thing is a danger to small people.” I checked with Cole. “As in, children.”
Grim certainty darkened his mood. “Yes.”
“What can we do about it?” We couldn’t let it run free.
“We hunt it.” Cole bared his teeth in a feral smile he aimed at Wu. “That’s what the NSB expects, right?”
“Charun who can’t be rehabilitated must be killed.” Wu didn’t sugarcoat his truth. “That includes you, him, and the rest of your coterie.”
Brittle ice swept through my chest as the cold place surfaced in response to his threat. Demanding that my coterie participate in a spay and neuter program for demons, like they were little more than animals, was bad enough. Hinting any insubordination would result in their deaths was a step too far. “Raise a hand against him or any member of my coterie, and I will be forced to put a bullet through your brain.”
The smug grin Wu gifted me was somehow worse than his calculated jabs, as though he were rewarding me for giving him the reaction he had hoped to provoke all along. “Ah. There you are, Conquest.” His warm fingertips brushed my cheek in a glancing caress. “I thought I saw you in there.”
“My name is Luce.” I recoiled from his touch and bumped into Cole, who wrapped his heavy forearm across my collarbone and hauled me tight against the protection of his solid body. “I am not Conquest.”
“I can smell your Otillian blood.” Wu flared his nostrils. “Blood never lies.” His eyes dilated. “Ask me how I know.”
“I am more than a birthright I had no claim to until a week ago.”
“I hope you’re right.” The corners of his eyes tightened. Disappointed, maybe, that I didn’t take the bait. I didn’t ask. “For all our sakes.”
Wu dipped his head in a shallow bow and left me alone with my coterie and the uneasy certainty he had been right all along. I did care what he thought. Maybe my competitive nature was to blame, or maybe it was sheer desperation. Wu might be right about my blood, but I was determined to prove he was wrong about me.
CHAPTER TWO
Habit had me raising my arm and knocking on the bright red door of the tidy cottage I was calling home these days. A beanpole of a woman with dark skin and warm, brown eyes greeted me with her fists anchored at her narrow hips. Flour dusted the front of her bright purple shirt, and the mouthwatering scent of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies perfumed her skin.
“Tater tot, how many times do we have to go over this?” Aunt Nancy tapped one bare foot on the welcome mat. “You’re our guest. You don’t knock on the door of your own house, do you? Of course not. So why would you knock while you’re living here?”
I ducked my head and scuffed the toe of my shoe. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Get your cute little buns in here.” She waved me in, and the red silicone bracelet on her thin wrist caught my attention. Must be a holdover from vacation Bible school. “We’re air conditioning the whole neighborhood standing here like this.”
Once I’d shuffled across the threshold, I lingered in the short hallway until she joined me. “How’s Dad?”
“He’s watching TV in the living room, some program on the mating habits of ducks, which I will never feed at the pond again.” A shudder rippled through her. “He ate a salad for lunch and napped on the sofa, but he hasn’t spoken since you left.”
Nodding, I raked my upper teeth over my bottom lip. “Thanks for keeping an eye on him for me.”
“You and Eddie are family.” She took my hand and squeezed with conviction. “We’re happy to help for as long as you need us.” A heavy sigh collapsed her birdlike chest, and not for the first time I hoped we weren’t the cause of her recent weight loss. Stress was a real appetite killer. “The doctors warned us the risk of a recurrent stroke was higher during the first year. He recovered from the first one, and he’s going to beat it this time too.”
The reassuring smile I meant to offer her was so brittle it shattered before reaching my lips. I hated lying to her. I hated lying to Uncle Harold even more. But hearing the truth about what had happened to Dad, that he had been attacked by the same demons who had done their best to level our home, was a no-go for several reasons. Starting with their deep Christian faith and ending with me carted off to the loony bin. Dad’s symptoms, which mimicked a recurrent stroke, were the result of an allergic reaction to Thom’s saliva as near as we could tell, but admitting that was the equivalent of lacing my own straitjacket.
“Yeah,” I agreed a beat too late. “He will.”
The ding of a timer rescued me from another pep talk.
“Oh, that’s me. I have a batch of cookies in the oven. There’s a fundraiser at the church Sunday, and I promised them six dozen.” She hustled into the kitchen. “Only two more to go.”
Sucking in a deep breath, I ventured into the living room where Dad sat in a pair of ratty sweats, a T-shirt with a hole in the armpit, and a pair of slippers with #1 Dad embroidered across the toes. His rumpled hair was mashed flat on one side, and a line of drool had dried to crust from the corner of his mouth across one cheek. He stared beyond the TV at the blank wall and didn’t turn his head when I entered the room.
“Hey, Dad.” I stepped between him and the show he wasn’t watching. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” he mumbled without inflection. “I’m fine.”
“I finished framing out the wall where the new bay window will go.” I watched him for signs of interest that never manifested. “The installers are coming out tomorrow to handle the heavy lifting, but I’ll be there to supervise.”
With visible effort, he pulled me into focus. “That’s great, baby girl.”
The moment of lucidity passed all too quickly, and he resumed his staring contest with the sheetrock.
“I need to grab a shower.” I pressed a kiss to his damp forehead. “I’ll raid the kitchen when I get out, and we can have cookies and milk before I head into work.”
There was no response, but then again, I was learning not to expect more than two in a row.
On my way to the sewing room acting as my temporary bedroom, I texted Miller an update on Dad’s condition. I had to step over the air mattress to reach a basket of clean clothes, but I gathered what I needed without tripping and made a beeline for the relative privacy of the house’s only bathroom. Miller must have read more into the message than what I typed, because my phone rang a heartbeat later. “Hey, I didn’t mean to bug you.”
“We’ve been over this,” he chided. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“Are you sure?” I sat on the closed lid of the toilet. “I must be driving you crazy with all the questions.”
“You’ve had a big shock. The things you’ve learned are stretching the fabric of your reality. It’s perfectly normal to want answers, and I’m happy to provide them. But what I can’t do is continue acting as a buffer between you and…” his hesitation stretched to make room for a name, a single syllable he didn’t speak “… the others.”
“That wasn’t my intention.” I toed off my shoes. “You’re easier to talk to than —” my tongue tripped over the same word, and I finished lamely “— the others.”
“We’re kindred spirits,” he
mused. “Both afraid of who we are, and both terrified of what we’re capable of doing under the right circumstances. Our self-awareness binds us in ways the others don’t understand.”
“Yeah,” I agreed in a rush. “That.”
A knock on the door startled me to attention.
“Luce?” Uncle Harold called. “How much longer will you be in there?”
“Twenty minutes.” I peeled off my socks. “Fifteen if I hurry.”
“Hurry,” he urged. “This old bladder ain’t what it used to be, pumpkin.”
Footsteps shuffled down the hall as I shimmied out of the rest of my damp clothes.
“Ah, the joys of a one-bathroom household.” I chuckled with Miller. “I gotta run. The clock is ticking.”
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