I blinked, bringing my magic vision up. A faint mint green rippled over his coat. Fuck.
The wolf took a step forward, bathed in moonlight.
My hands went cold. A bitter metallic taste coated my tongue. I blinked the magic colors away and reached for my bow, attached to Tulip’s saddle.
Step.
Another.
I raised my bow. Everything came into crystal-clear focus. My breathing was deep and even. The world shrank down to three things: the wolf, my bow, and the distance between us.
A third step.
I plucked an arrow from the quiver.
His black lips stretched, showing me a forest of fangs.
Keep smiling. You’ll look really funny with an arrow sticking out of your mouth.
His silver fur tore. In an instant, bone melted like wax, reshaping itself, muscles stretched, snapping over the new frame, and human skin sheathed the new form. A man with golden eyes stared at me, tall, broad-shouldered, corded with muscle. The moonlight played over his face, highlighting the network of thin scars.
Derek.
My heart stopped. It couldn’t have, because I would’ve died, but it felt like it had.
His eyes were ice-cold. He looked at me as if this was his land and I’d trespassed.
Derek opened his mouth.
I had to run. Now. Before I heard his voice.
I sent a mental scream to Tulip. Go!
The magic command whipped Tulip into motion. She reared, pawing the air. The faint outline of a horn shimmered on her forehead. Tulip spun, surged toward the rubble, leaped, landing on the broken concrete like a gazelle, and dashed over the fallen overpass. For a moment we went airborne, and then we were galloping down the road at a breakneck speed into the night.
9
I paced back and forth inside my sanctuary.
Why did I run? I’d been in battles that had lasted days. I had dived into Eagle’s Nest Sink, a cave so dangerous, it had a sign with a grim reaper on it and a warning “There is nothing in this cave worth dying for,” because I had to talk to a mermaid. I visited my grandfather every couple of weeks, for crying out loud. And the moment Derek opened his mouth, I turned tail and ran.
All the fights I’d been in, all the torture I’d braved, all the magic I’d learned, and that’s what undid me. Meeting the guy who used to be the center of my universe until I turned eighteen.
Stupid. So stupid. Was I thirteen again? What the hell had happened?
He hadn’t recognized me. The look he gave me was so cold.
It hurt.
Some fragile part of me must have been convinced that the moment he saw me he would magically know who I was. But he didn’t.
It wasn’t him. It was me. I made myself run away.
I thought I’d buried that crush. I was no longer an adolescent who kept hoping Derek would realize I was growing up and fall in love with me. I didn’t say goodbye to him before I left because I was too chicken to chance it. If he’d asked me to stay, I might not have gone through with it, and if he hadn’t, it would’ve crushed me. None of that was his fault. He had to know how I felt. He never took advantage of it. He never even gave me a hint that he was waiting for me. In all the time I was gone, he hadn’t tried to find me. After that initial phone call, I called home every week when I could. Kate and Curran knew where I was. If Derek wanted to see me, all he had to do was ask them. For the first couple of years I had held on to a fragile hope that one day he would just show up unannounced, but he never had. And then Kate told me he left Atlanta.
I waited. I was so sure he would make his way to me in California. He hadn’t.
I gave up. It hurt too much, so I let it go. Atlanta had stirred up memories, and I had thought of him more than once in the last couple of days, but prior to that I made myself abandon him. Sah akin tonar erani es. His shadow didn’t darken my mind.
Eight years had passed. Everything about me had changed, but I was still in love with Derek Gaunt. How was this possible?
I sat on a plush azure divan. In front of me, a bronze statue shimmered softly with reflected light. A winged serpent winding around a slender pole, her swan-like wings spread wide, as if she were about to take flight above the white gardenia blossoms and burgundy star-shaped hoyas dripping from their trellises. At once delicate and ferocious.
One of Erra’s artists had created this statue and offered it to me as tribute. That’s how she’d seen me, the princess of this new age always ready to spill blood in defense of the new kingdom’s people, beautiful and deadly.
Thank you for the reminder, Gemeti.
I was no longer Julie. These feelings were a ghostly echo from someone else, and that girl was gone. Derek didn’t know the new me. There was no connection between us.
I didn’t know the new him either.
The Derek I knew had been born into a religious household deep in the mountains of Appalachia, where families were money poor but land rich. They guarded their land and their independence with “Trespassers will be shot” signs and meant it.
When Derek was fourteen, his father caught Lyc-V at a tent revival. He went loup fast, drowning in the brew of runaway hormones. Loupism had no cure. It turned shapeshifters into psychotic, sadistic spree killers. Derek’s father was no exception. Every repressed urge, every dark desire forbidden by religion and law, bubbled up to the surface and exploded.
The neighbors and authorities minded their own business. Nobody had helped. Derek’s mother and sisters became his father’s hostages and slaves. His mother caught the virus from his father and killed herself, leaving Derek, his brother, and his five sisters alone with a loup.
The nightmare lasted almost two years. Everyone became infected within months. They tried to fight their father, but loups were freakishly strong. Two of Derek’s siblings died from starvation, chained by their father in the basement. Three of his sisters died from their injuries. One went loup and turned on her brothers and sisters, reveling in their father’s demented cruelty. The day Derek found the half-eaten body of his youngest sister, he couldn’t take it anymore.
The local authorities finally took notice when a column of smoke rose from the top of the mountain and called in the Pack. When Curran arrived with a group of shapeshifters, they found Derek sitting by the burned-out husk of his house, his father’s blood on his hands. He’d finally stopped the nightmare, but it was too late for everyone else.
Derek didn’t resist. He made no effort to explain what happened. He didn’t speak at all. He’d ripped his father apart and that’s all he cared about. Jim, the current Beast Lord, thought Derek would go loup and wanted to kill him. Curran forbade it. He took Derek with him to the Pack and slowly coaxed him back to life.
That was my Derek, and he held himself in a steel grip. Everything that influenced shapeshifters affected him stronger than normal. The moon made him half-crazy. When he locked onto a scent, nothing else mattered. And when he fought… Derek had a hard time sparring. He was worried that if he let go of his control by a hair, he would fall off the same cliff his father had.
He never felt comfortable around other shapeshifters; their presence made his struggle for control worse. But he was fanatically loyal to Curran and Kate. He stayed in the Pack for their sake, and when Curran stepped down, Derek was right behind him. He didn’t hesitate for a second.
After the separation from the Pack, Derek fully embraced his Lone Wolf of Atlanta status. He worked for Cutting Edge, but he seemed most content when he was working on his own.
Old Derek was a loner. The new Derek had a pack. He had landed with his back to them, and they had positioned themselves to protect him. I had no doubt that if he growled a command, they would have tried to tear me apart. That was his pack. Not Desandra’s, not a Pack crew. His.
Old Derek was grey. Large, by shapeshifter standards, but still within normal range for a lupine shapeshifter. The new Derek was silver, bright uniform silver, without any black or brown, and he was huge. I�
��d never seen a werewolf that large before.
Old Derek emanated strong hunter green, right in line with the rest of the Pack. The new Derek left a trail of mint-green magic.
Old Derek’s eyes glowed amber. The man I saw tonight had eyes that shone with gold. And it wasn’t just the shine. It was the way he looked at me. He’d stared at me as if I had intruded into his territory and he had the right to punish me. He’d given me the alpha stare. You couldn’t buy one of those. You couldn’t steal or borrow it. You could learn to imitate it, but most natural leaders were born with it. It was one of the most effective means of control for a pack leader. Curran had raised it to the level of art, and Conlan was doing his best to catch up.
In all of our years together, I had never seen Derek give someone the alpha stare. He focused on them and he had what I used to call his “death glare,” but it wasn’t an alpha stare.
What the hell had happened?
It was Derek. The scars were unmistakable.
Perhaps that was all that was left of the Derek I used to know.
Ascanio must’ve realized Derek was back in the city. That time when he had tried to take the cookie from me, a shapeshifter, one of his people, had run up and reported that she saw “him” and then she waved her hand in front of her face. She must have been indicating the scars. Besides our family and the Medranos, Derek would be just about the only person for whom Ascanio would drop everything and go chasing into the night. The rivalry between them started the day Ascanio tried to put his hands on me, and Derek had shown him the error of his ways. It never got better, only worse.
Derek had returned to Atlanta, and now he and Ascanio both were somehow tangled up in Pastor Haywood’s murder. Why had he left in the first place? Something had occurred, some seismic shift must have taken place for him to abandon Kate and Curran and disappear.
Maybe it wasn’t Derek at all. Maybe something was just wearing his body. The thought brought me up short.
If something dared to take his body, I would kill it.
Magic flashed in my mind. Someone had just crossed my outer ward. I jumped off the divan, picked up my spear, and marched to the front door.
It couldn’t be him. I had used wolfsbane, and then Tulip and I swam through Lake Adair for half a mile, dodging water snakes and snapping turtles living on the drowned trees left over from when the lake had been Adair Park. It would take him and his people ages to find my scent, if they ever did.
Someone knocked on my door. I flung it open.
Knight Stella Davis took a step back. “Easy now. I just came to borrow a cup of sugar.”
The tension went out of me. “White or brown?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really bake.” Stella looked over my shoulder. “That’s a textbook shithole you’re living in. I admire your commitment, but just so you know, we don’t take a vow of poverty in the Order. You can live somewhere nice. With furniture that hasn’t been gnawed on.”
Ha. Ha. “It’s after midnight. Did you need something, or did you just come over to insult my house?”
Stella narrowed her eyes. “Aren’t you curious how I found you?”
“Let me guess, someone from the city called you about the phone service?”
A little of the excitement went out of her. “Yep. Funny thing, when you wave around an Order badge and a wad of cash, people still want to check you out and see if you’re legit. Great job staying off the grid. You should teach covert work at the academy.”
“Would that be before or after your class on surveillance, with an emphasis on how to lose a suspect on your home turf? That really pissed you off, didn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, it did. But now I found you.”
“Congratulations. You’re the best that’s ever been.”
Stella grinned. “Thank you.” She raised a piece of paper and waved it at me.
Fine. I made my tone flat and disinterested. “What’s that?”
“This is a murder. I think it’s connected to yours.”
I opened the ward. “Come in.”
“Is it safe? Will the germs get me?”
“Poverty isn’t contagious. You’ll be fine.”
Stella entered and followed me to the kitchen.
“Beer, coffee, tea?”
“From this kitchen? No thanks.” She passed me the paper.
I read it. A name and an address. “Alycia Walton. Why do you think she’s connected?”
“She is, well, she was, a historian specializing in early Christianity.”
If you had some Christian relics and they had real power, the next step to selling would be to establish their history and provenance. Stella knew about the relics.
“How?”
Stella grinned. “I would imagine she went to college, maybe for many years.”
“How did you know about the connection to the Christian relics?”
“Alleged Christian relics. The Christian relics Pastor Haywood may have authenticated, those Christian relics?”
I would strangle her in a minute. I sat down at the table and smiled at her. “My patience is an infinite lake. Feel free to drown yourself.” There were times when ancient proverbs came in handy.
“You are no fun. I’m here to help. Like a colleague or a partner.”
“You screwed up and got sent to Atlanta, because that’s where the Order dumps troublemakers with potential, those who don’t follow orders. This is the end of the line if Nick can’t”—I paused, looking for the right word—“rehabilitate you. Except both times I came to the Order, you were there, in the middle of the day, at your desk, instead of being out working a case and making a difference. Nick is keeping you on a short leash. It’s killing you, and here is a high-profile murder that none of the other knights are working. You saw it and you jumped on it. So, you didn’t come to help me. You came to help yourself.”
Stella looked at me for a long moment. “That, and I don’t trust you. Also, I’m bored.”
“How did you find out about the relics?”
“Nick sent me to the Methodists to check on the boy. While I was there, one of them handed me a list of relic hunters to pass on to my ‘colleague.’ He also mentioned that there were two historians in north Georgia who specialized in consulting on relics and Alycia Walton was one of them.”
And Stella had put the rest of it together. Smart. She would be all over this murder, except Nick had surrendered this case to me, and she probably didn’t have authorization to investigate things on her own. She needed me.
“Can I have that list?”
She passed me another folded piece of paper. I opened it and scanned the six names. None of them looked familiar.
“How is Douglas?”
“Who’s Douglas?”
“The little boy.”
Stella grimaced. “They said they are doing all they can.”
Whenever I heard that, things turned out for the worse.
“Do you want to see this crime scene or not?” Stella asked. “I’d love to waste more time, but if we don’t hurry, the cops will cart the body off.”
“You mean this is a recent murder? When exactly did this happen?”
“It was reported about an hour ago.”
“Were you going to tell me this at some point?”
“I just did, but if you want, we can keep trading barbs in your charming kitchen.”
“Wait for me outside, please.” I got out of my chair and went to get my horse.
Thirty minutes later, Stella and I stood in front of Henry L. Bowden Hall in the heart of Emory University. The three-story building loomed in the dark, dimly illuminated by a row of fey lantern streetlamps, and the ghostly blue light gave it a foreboding air. When we arrived, two policemen, armed with shotguns and swords, guarded the entrance. We had shown them our badges, and one of them went inside to let the lead detective know that we were there.
We’d been standing around for twenty minutes, waiting for the PAD to finish processing the scene. Supp
osedly, we’d be allowed in once Biohazard said it was safe.
The building was older, pre-Shift, with the first floor sheathed in pale stucco and the two upper ones inlaid with polished stone tiles, marble or granite; I couldn’t tell in the dark. All three floors sported rows of rectangular windows, three feet wide and six feet tall, shielded by thin metal grates. Half inch steel bars, only two cross bars, cheap-looking steel without any trace of silver. Protection on a budget. To make things worse, the grates opened like shutters, so the top and bottom edges of the grate weren’t anchored. The entire mess was secured by four bolts on each side, driven into the wall.
Do you want magic monsters in your office? Because this is how you get monsters in your office.
I was pretty sure Alycia Walton hadn’t wanted monsters.
“The grates aren’t properly anchored,” Stella said quietly.
“It’s a college.”
“So?”
“They have a limited budget.”
Stella rolled her eyes. “The Academy is a college and it has proper grates.”
She wasn’t wrong. “Let’s take a walk around the building.”
We turned left and followed a paved path around the corner, rounding the building. The Woodruff Library sprawled to the left of us, cushioned in trees and steeped in deep, night shadows. You could hide a dozen wolves in those shadows, and using my magic to send out a pulse and check if they were there was out of the question. I didn’t know what Stella’s special tricks were. The less she knew about me, the better.
Moonlight cascaded from the dark sky, illuminating the side of Bowden Hall. A hole gaped in the top row of windows, second from the left, emanating a faint cerulean glow. The steel grate that used to shield it stuck out of the hedge bordering the path. The corner of it jutted up, with the bolts still attached to the hinge. You get what you pay for.
Deep gashes marred both sides of the window.
“Those are claw marks,” Stella said. She held her hand up, sizing them up. “Big boy.”
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