by Alyssa Day
Joe looked at Bob, who shook his head. “Nope. Might be those damn Russians, though. They’ve been following us around, trying to horn in on our jobs. Watch out for them. They hate shifters.”
With a parting gift of a nasty smile, Bob slammed the door, started the car, and peeled out of the parking lot. The second they were gone, Jack touched my arm.
“Tess. Are you okay? For a minute back there, you looked almost afraid.” He cleared his throat. “Of me.”
I started to deny it, but Jack deserved better. “For a minute back there, I was.”
He started to say something, but I stopped him. “I’d like to go visit my…Leona now. Will you take me back to the shop to get the truck?”
Jack looked unhappy, but I really didn’t want to talk about it. I think he figured that out, because he didn’t say another word until we were in the car, driving the wrong way.
“I need my truck, Jack.”
“No. I’ll take you to see your grandmother. I’m not leaving you alone when there are killers roaming the streets.”
There was no use arguing with him, so I didn’t bother. I just nodded and stared out my window, not seeing a thing. I was getting tired of overbearing men wanting to run my life, and suddenly the thought of listening to another one of Owen’s long stories about comparing brands of fluoride seemed like a small price to pay for a little less alpha male.
I also really needed to get another car, so I could quit borrowing Uncle Mike’s ancient farm truck, but car shopping was the last thing I wanted to do right now, with six kinds of killers invading my town.
Maybe when Molly got back from touring with her band. Scarlett’s Letters was enjoying national popularity, and my best friend had been gone for a while, playing bigger venues than they’d ever booked before. I suddenly missed her with a fierce ache, but I wasn’t going to call her and add more stress to her life. Her drummer, Dice, did a good enough job of that.
Leona and Ned were hard at work at the RV’s dining table when we arrived, as we saw after Ned unlocked the door and put down his shotgun.
“Precautions,” he said tensely, and I was glad. I wasn’t yet entirely sure how I felt about my…Leona, but I knew I wanted her to be safe.
If you’ve ever wondered what the inside of a three-hundred-thousand dollar RV looks like, it’s kind of a cross between the cockpit of a 747 and the interior of a corporate penthouse. Or so I imagine, having never seen either of those things. I gaped like a country mouse for a minute, and then I focused on the ugly elephant in the middle of the room.
They had set up a giant folding screen as a murder board. It looked exactly like the thing that cops and serial killers used in movies. Eight-by-ten glossy photos of six different people were posted at the top, and there were maps, notes, and newspaper clippings posted on it.
“We’re working on the case,” Leona said unnecessarily. She held out her arms to hug me, but I flinched away.
“These are the six who went missing,” Ned said.
“There were actually eight,” I blurted out.
Jack looked at me, and I shrugged. “Alejandro said keep it between us, and she’s my family, so that’s ‘us,’ right?”
Leona sank down on the bench, her face drawn and older than I’d ever seen it. This case was clearly too much for her. “Who is Alejandro?”
I filled her in on Special Agent Vasquez and what he’d told us. “So they are taking it seriously, they just don’t have any leads.”
“I want pictures of them. Names, dates, information about their lives,” Leona said. “It’s important.”
I sat down across from her. “Why? Why is it so important that you be the one to do this? It puts you in danger, and I don’t want you to be in danger.”
A smile of singular sweetness spread across her face, and I caught my breath. I recognized that smile. It was my mom’s smile; the same one that shined at me whenever I looked at the old photo albums.
“You’re so much like her,” Leona and I told each other at almost exactly the same time.
Then her smile faded. “It’s important that I do it because I know all about being erased. Trey erased me from my family, from the world, and even from myself. I stayed with him because he threatened to take my daughter from me, and even after she’d moved away and died, I stayed with him because he’d managed to destroy almost every part of me.”
Ned laid one thin hand on her shoulder, and looked at her with all the love in the world in his eyes. “He could never destroy all of you. You are tough, and you are a fighter. Steel is tempered by fire, my dear.”
Leona reached up and patted his hand, and then took a deep breath. “You’re right. I hope you’re right. But I have to do this for the ones who aren’t here to fight anymore. The ones who are probably in unmarked graves, with no one to find them or mourn for them. No one to bring them flowers.”
I swallowed the painful lump in my throat and reached for her hand—a leap of faith for me. Thankfully, my one-and-done history stayed intact, and I didn’t see any deaths. Not those she’d foretold, and not hers, for which I was doubly grateful.
“We’ll find them. We’ll bring flowers,” I promised, and it had the sound of a vow.
“See? You’re exactly alike,” Jack said gently to Leona. “Warrior women.”
When she looked at him, I know she saw what Shelley had seen in that burning shed—a super hero. It struck me, then, that of course he was dangerous. All super heroes were dangerous.
They couldn’t keep the rest of us safe any other way.
I smiled so brightly at Jack that he blinked, but the sadness that had clung to him since the incident at Beau’s dropped away, and I was glad.
Leona’s phone shrilled on the table between us, startling us all. She looked at the display and started to shake.
“It’s Everett again. He won’t stop calling.”
Ned pulled Leona up and into a hug. “Don’t answer it. We’ll get you a different phone.”
Jack grabbed the phone. “Oh, I think we need to have a chat with old Everett.”
He answered the call, put it on speaker, and nodded at me.
“Hello,” I said, trying to sound like Leona.
“It’s about time you answered my call, you nasty bitch. I know where you are and I’m coming for you,” a man screamed. “You took my father away from me and my mom. You hideous monster. Now I’m going to take everything from you. I know you’re in Dead End, and I’m coming for you.”
I started to shake, too, from the sheer level of toxic hate. Jack’s expression turned deadly, and he leaned forward to speak directly into the phone.
“We’ll be waiting, asshole.”
Everett was still sputtering when I hung up on him.
Chapter 12
We left Leona and Ned packing for an overnight trip to Orlando, since Jack wanted them out of the line of fire, so to speak. Then he went to find the commando currently watching them and have a quick word. While he did that, I caught up with Uncle Mike and warned him to be on the lookout for strangers. Then I left voicemail messages for Susan and Alejandro, letting them know about the impending arrival of Everett.
“What else can I do?”
Jack grinned at me. “You can go grocery shopping. The boys are coming over to hunt killers on the dark web for us.”
I thought about how much Jack, with his tiger metabolism, could eat, and I sighed. “Good thing I’m rich this week.”
“I have Atlantean gold, remember?”
“I forget, what is the exchange rate for that at Super Target?”
He laughed, but then glanced over at me. “Not scared of me anymore?”
“Nope. But remember, no capes.”
He was silent for a full beat, and then he shook his head.
“Tess, I might never understand you.”
“So few do,” I told him, turning on the radio. “What are you in the mood to hear?”
He winced. “Not including your singing, right?”
<
br /> Just to punish him, I played pop music all the way to the store.
I filled a cart with everything I thought I’d need, and Jack filled a second cart with beer and meat. We were almost to the checkout line when I remembered I was out of potatoes and told Jack I’d be right back. He nodded and started unloading groceries. Even he had to realize that nobody was going to shoot me at Super Target. I trotted back to produce and started piling bags of spuds in my cart.
“Hello, Tess,” a man’s voice said from behind me.
It was Oskar Wildenhammer, buying a cart full of sweet potatoes.
“Hi, Oskar. How are you?”
He looked tired. I knew he wasn’t anywhere close to forty, but he looked years older, and much thinner than I remembered, stooped over the handle of his cart. Caring for his dad must be taking a lot out of him. His dirty blond hair was receding from his forehead, and the hems of his pants were frayed, which I immediately felt ashamed for noticing.
“Not so good, actually. Dad’s not doing well at all,” he admitted wearily. “I can’t get him to eat anything but chicken broth and sweet potato casserole. The hospice nurse said it might be soon.”
“Oh, Oskar, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” I stopped short of touching his skin, but I put a hand on his sleeve, feeling a wave of sadness for Mr. Wildenhammer, who’d always been so kind to the kids who came to visit his magical toy shop. “It will be such a loss for the world to be deprived of his toys.”
He closed his eyes and bowed his head, and I felt terrible. I’d probably said exactly the wrong thing. “Is there anything I can do? I know Aunt Ruby will want to make him a pie—”
“No, no. He’s beyond pie. He just wants to live out his remaining hours in peace,” Oskar said. “I’d better be getting back.”
“Of course. Please call me if there’s anything I can do. Anything at all.” I watched him walk off and felt so useless. When it was really the end, there was nothing for the family to do but wait.
I’d text Aunt Ruby, though. I was sure that we should start some kind of dinner brigade. Poor Oskar must be living on broth and casserole, too, while he took care of his dad.
Comforted by the thought of at least doing something, I grabbed one last bag of potatoes and headed for the checkout, where I found Jack explaining the art of barbecue to an overly fascinated teen girl who was staring at him in awe.
When she saw me, she gave me a conspiratorial smile. “Isn’t he just so interesting?”
“Totally,” I said, plopping the potatoes on the checkout counter. “Leave. Now.”
She left.
Jack’s eyes widened. “Tess—”
“Oh, shut up.” He didn’t even realize why girls and women alike fawned over him all the time, which was just annoying. “That’s a lot of meat. How many of the guys are coming over? I might need more side dishes,” I said, starting to worry.
“Two.”
“Two? For all that? How much are you planning to eat?”
He grinned at me and added three candy bars to the pile. “I’m a tiger. I plan to eat as much as I want.”
Chapter 13
The scariest thing about hosting two former Army Rangers and a tiger shifter was how fast they could lay waste to fifteen pounds of barbecued meat.
I surveyed the carnage in my kitchen and sighed. Aunt Ruby would have been shocked, but I was ready to order my guests to clean up their own darn mess. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how I chose to look at it, Dallas and Austin Fox were also computer geniuses, and they were currently huddled over their fancy, shiny laptops with Jack, investigating the Darken. I wandered into my living room to see what progress they’d made (and, let’s face it, to escape the kitchen).
“I think I found something,” one of the twins said. “I wouldn’t have noticed it, because it’s hidden very, very well, but this pathway is labeled LGF, and those are our sister’s initials, so it caught my eye.”
I decided the kitchen could wait, and I plopped down on my couch next to the twins. Jack made a weird rumbling sound, but I ignored him.
“You have a sister? Is she older or younger? What’s her name? No, wait. Let me guess. Dallas and Austin, so she must be El Paso, but with the initial, so L Paso.”
Even with blank looks on their faces, the Fox brothers were pure eye candy. They had enormous muscles, high cheekbones that belonged on super models, and skin so dark it gleamed. Put that together with the crisp white shirts and khakis, and it was a wonder every woman for miles around wasn’t lining up at my door.
“No, ma’am,” Austin—or Dallas—said. “Her name is—”
“Lubbockina? It has to be a Texas city name, right?”
Dallas—or Austin—sighed. (Really, when twins were this identical, they should wear name tags all the time. It’s only fair to the rest of us, right?)
“Louise. Her name is Louise.”
Jack cleared his throat. “You were saying? Did you find something about the banshee murders?”
“No. Unfortunately, nobody is talking about those, even in the Darken. I thought we had a shot, because sometimes the psychos like to brag about their kills, but no joy.”
“Well, thanks for trying, Dallas,” Jack said.
So the one closest to me was Dallas. Got it. Although how Jack could tell was beyond me, unless it was some mysterious shifter thing.
Austin tapped a finger on his screen. “I did find a lot of buzz about a new assassin, which might have been what those Russians were talking about. But why they were here, I still don’t understand.”
I jumped up off the couch. “Russians? The bad guys we confronted at Beau’s were talking about Russians. This is it. A clue, at last!”
Dallas and Austin both gave me wary looks, but Jack knew what I was talking about. He grinned at me, but then Lou leapt at him and he had to focus so he could catch her. When he started to scratch behind her ears, my heart did a squooshy gurgle at the sight of the big, tough man cuddling my sweet little cat.
I told my heart to shut up.
“I agree. I think it just might be a clue,” Jack said, oblivious to all squooshy heart dilemmas. “Where did you guys see Russians?”
“At the Pit Stop, when we were getting gas,” Austin said. “They were talking about how piss—annoyed they were at having to come to such a, um, rural town to look for such a high-level assassin.”
“Ha. Like we care what a bunch of killers think of our town,” I scoffed, but inside I was miffed. Hometown pride, and all. “But how did you know they were Russian?”
Dallas stopped peering at his computer screen and glanced up at me, his forehead furrowing. “They were speaking Russian.”
“Oh. Right.”
I sometimes forgot that people who could get out of Dead End and see the world might know more than one language. I gave myself exactly three seconds for self-indulgent wallowing and then moved on. “So if everybody is looking for some high-tech assassin who they think is based around here…”
“And the banshee killer’s last known victim’s phone ended up here…” Jack continued.
“Then we might have one killer doing two different things,” I said. “Killing strangers for profit, but killing banshees out of some twisted personal agenda.”
Dallas and Austin were following our conversation by turning their heads back and forth like they were at a tennis match. “But why Dead End?”
I threw my hands in the air. “Who cares? What matters now is catching him. Is there a way to put out a fake call for a hit man on the Darken, and see if we can catch this guy in a cyber trap? I mean, I don’t know anything about any of this, but—”
Jack put Lou back on her perch and grabbed my hands. “Tess, that’s brilliant.”
“No problem,” Dallas said, his fingers already dancing across the keyboard. “We need an amount that will make him take notice.”
“Five million,” Jack asked.
“You’ll need proof of deposit,” Austin said. “Trust me, any
body at this level will check your bank accounts first.”
“I have it,” Jack said grimly, leaving me wondering exactly how much Atlantean gold he really had.
“Done,” Dallas said, hitting the ENTER key with a flourish. “At that amount, we should hear back in seconds.”
Seconds passed. Then minutes.
An hour later, we still hadn’t heard anything.
“Maybe he’s too careful for this kind of trick,” I said, dropping my head into my hands. “Maybe we’ll never find him.”
“We’ll find him, Tess. But for now you should get some sleep.”
He stood up and ushered Dallas and Austin—I could never think of them as the boys again—out to their truck, where they stood talking for a while. By the time Jack walked back inside, I was three-quarters of the way asleep on the couch, dirty dishes or not. I didn’t even open my eyes when I felt the dream-soft sensation of Jack carrying me to my room. I just drifted on a cloud of exhaustion into a peaceful sleep.
Until the roar of a tiger in my room yanked me into instant, terrified, wakefulness.
Chapter 14
Jack!
I switched on my bedside lamp and immediately wished I hadn’t. Jack roared again and knocked the lamp—and the table—clear across the room. Then he leapt on top of the bed—on top of me—and breathed hot tiger breath in my face.
I was too scared to move, but Lou didn’t have that problem. She hissed furiously and shot out of the bed and out of the room.
Jack flinched as if struck by something sharp and painful, and then he roared again and leapt off my bed and took off down the hallway after Lou.
I lay there, still frozen in shock for an instant, and then I broke free of my paralysis and ran after him, shouting, “Don’t you eat my cat, or I’ll kill you.”
Jack ran right past Lou and gathered himself for a giant leap. I saw where he was headed and I screamed.
“Jack. No! You’ll hurt yourself!”