by Sierra Cross
What. The. Hell?
“You’ll both stay with me,” Asher said quietly. “Long as you want to.”
“Or with me,” Liv said. “Hell, we can take turns hosting you.”
“You guys are the best coven in the world,” I said.
Matt looked stunned. "But Emma likes me.”
“Sure, but she doesn’t like Mals,” Asher said. “Not now that she’s heard they blow up Fidei facilities. She’s afraid of you.”
Callie reached over and squeezed Matt’s hand. “I’m sorry, Matt.”
“Me too,” he said.
Our coven was drowning its sorrows in a shared order of chocolate lava cake—Sanctum’s most decadent dessert—when I looked up to see a familiar figure marching toward us. Agent Larch was all business—black Fidei uniform crisp, ceramic cutter in the holster at her hip. “I need you all to come with me,” she said.
“Oh, hell no,” Liv blurted out. “Whatever it is, please let us have tonight free. We just got back from being locked in literal cages.”
Larch blinked, looking puzzled. “Yes, I’m well aware of the El Diablo situat—”
“Great, so can this not wait till morning?” Asher said with an elaborate yawn. “Work-life balance and all that happy horseshit?”
“We haven’t even been home yet,” I said, careful not to look at Matt. Being alone with him was high on my priority list.
“Those of us who have a home,” Callie’s soft voice added. “The Splinter skipped town without paying rent. Pretty sure my stuff’s been auctioned off by now.”
Larch glanced from one of us to the next, nonplused. I couldn’t blame her. People simply didn’t say no to a summons from the Fidei. Sane people didn’t, at least. Finally, she said, “Bonaventura told me to say, ‘Please.’”
“You’re joking.” Matt half-laughed. Larch didn’t flinch. “You’re not joking.”
Liv rolled her eyes and gathered her jacket. “Craptastic.”
We piled into the armored Fidei van with the metal grids on the windows.
“Bonaventura explained what happened,” Larch said as the big black behemoth exited onto the 405 and headed east. “And I believe him. By all rights, you five should be recognized as heroes for ousting a Caedis from a Fidei stronghold. Problem is, our organization can’t admit to the world that it has a rogue faction—let alone one so corrupt it let a demon take over a facility.” She sighed. “In other words, there’s going to be a cover-up.”
Matt raised his eyebrows. “One thing I know is, every cover-up needs a scapegoat,” he said. “Please tell me that’s not our coven.”
“No,” Larch said, but in a voice that let me know we wouldn’t like her full answer. “That would be bad optics, an inexperienced coven breaking into a top-secret facility and cracking the lid on such a scandal. No, in fact, you’re being erased from the official narrative.”
“Which is?” Stop stalling and tell us, I thought.
Larch took a deep breath. “They’re pinning the blame for El Diablo’s destruction on the Mal detainees who broke out.”
“So…they’re blaming the real victims,” Asher translated.
We all took a moment of silence to digest the awfulness of what Larch was saying. I had no doubt this misinformation would lead to more hate against Mals and Deviants. How much would it hurt the kids from the Tennessee camp, keeping them in the shadows out of fear? How much would it cost families like Bethany’s?
“Guess I’m not all that surprised.” Matt’s voice was stone. “Some part of me thought this would change things, but…” He shrugged as if shaking off his own foolish hope. “All right,” he said, regrouping. “So if we’re not heroes and we’re not scapegoats, why does Ambrose want to meet with us?”
“You’ll have to ask him yourself.”
“Come on, at least tell us where we are headed,” Liv said sharply.
“You’ll see when we get there,” Larch ducked again.
“Ma’am, we have a right to know,” Matt said.
“You do,” Larch admitted. “But under these circumstances, I can’t say anything until we are in a secured facility.”
Larch threw us that bone, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.
Callie shivered the whole way, and I thought how unfair this was to her. She needed time to rest and recoup. I put my hand on her knee.
“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “My body’s just having a hard time taking back over the job of regulating temperature.”
I doubted that was all it was. At the bar, she’d said she felt cold and empty without the Splinter. How were we supposed to fix that? I swallowed the unhelpful question, hoping she couldn’t see how concerned I was.
“We could get a Lyft to take you back to my place?” Liv asked.
“No, that’s the last thing I want,” Callie said too quickly. “I mean, whatever the heck we’re doing, at least we’re doing something. That’s good for me right now.”
The car pulled up in front of a nondescript office building on the Eastside. The only thing that set it apart from all the buildings around it was the tall chain-link fence that surrounded the parking lot. And the excruciating ward we had to punch through to enter the grounds.
“Nice,” Asher said with a grunt.
We clomped down through the lobby, past at least a dozen guards—mostly of the vampire persuasion—up an elevator, down a dark hall to a double-wide, reinforced metal door with a keyless entry security panel. Great. Was it to keep others out or us in? Larch was hell on wheels, but she’d never been deceitful. I resisted my urge to blast her and run for the hills.
She centered her face in front of the security panel. With a clip, the door slid open. “Welcome to Operation Demon Takedown,” Larch said as she stepped aside to let us in first.
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the low lighting in the room. The front was a wall of gargantuan flat panel monitors. Tenebris’s Franco Carbrera skinsuit face was rotating in a 3-D window with technical speck floating in front of it. Next to it flowed an ever-changing sea of security cameras feeds—like the system was scanning the globe in search of his likeness popping up on the grid. There were even several views of the Mal kids in Tennessee and prisoners in labs who I assumed were Amalgams as well. Other monitors displayed maps with red dots blinking on and off. Though the sound wasn’t turned on, it looked like the system was also scanning for Tenebris’s voice signature.
On the massive, interactive-surface conference table in the center of the room were stacks of maps and surveillance photos and piles of data I couldn’t decipher. And around the table were seated the oddest collection of people I’d ever seen. Bonaventura was at the head, flanked by Wes and Griffin. Matt’s old guardian academy pal Chris and two other huge guardians sat to the right…next to Daria, who was sporting her own fancy new magical cuffs. To the left were Hayden, Charice, and Althea. And then I did a double take. And the end of the row were Aunt Jenn…and Masumi.
“Nice to see you here, Alix.” My aunt winked at me. “We Hill women always rise to the top, don’t we?”
I blinked, still astonished that the powers-that-be were accepting help from a dark witch. Then again, Aunt Jenn truly hated Tenebris. Not only that, she knew him—better than any of us did.
“About bloody time you arrived,” Bonaventura snapped, motioning for us to take seats. “We’ve got a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it.”
I looked at Callie’s arm, remembering her hidden tattoo of the vanquished demon.
“I will not rest until we destroy Tenebris.”
Neither will I, I vowed, and along with my coven, I took my seat at the war-room table.
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