by Gaja J. Kos
Aric bridged some of the remaining distance between us. I really should have gotten a medal for not leaning in all the way.
A current of frustrated magic zipped the air.
“I’m tracking down the previous owner,” Finn said. “I just finished talking to someone who knew the werewolf. Said he sold the place in February and took off somewhere. He thinks he might have moved to Munich but isn’t sure.”
My bare feet had stuck to the ground, so I shifted a little—coincidentally ending up a hair’s width away from Aric.
“Are you roping Lotte in on this?” I asked Finn.
“Yeah. I don’t like throwing cases her way, but she’s our best shot.”
I nodded. I knew full well what he meant.
While Lotte was always more than happy to assist us in any way possible—and kept reminding us of it—I still always felt a bit bad for adding to her workload. She was, after all, Superintendent Freundenberger. A position that came with a fuckload of responsibility.
But she was a werewolf first. And for the right pack, there was nothing we wouldn’t do.
“There are no documents of the sale,” Finn yanked me back into the conversation, “and no mention of the new owners anywhere.”
“The witch could have worked some magic on the officials to make the records disappear,” I pointed out, my gut sinking.
Finn finger-gunned me. “My thoughts exactly.”
“Don’t you think she would’ve done the same to the previous owner?” Aric asked.
I glanced up at him right as Finn said, “Yeah. But he’s still the best lead we’ve got unless Jorn calls me with some fucking great news.”
On that said but not completely hopeless note, we parted ways. Finn headed for the stairwell while Aric and I went deeper into the maze of interview rooms. The first one was occupied—Finn’s witness, most likely—so I picked out the one farthest away and unlocked the observation room. This wasn’t an interrogation any longer, and I didn’t want Aric to feel that way, nor did I want him to think someone could be watching from the other side of the glass.
He cast a look around the room, then slumped in the chair I’d pulled up from the far wall. I took the one beside him, the distance between us skewing toward intimate while at the same time offering some breathing space.
Aric rotated the silver ring on his ring finger. Then the one on the middle.
I’d seen him fidget before, but never quite so much.
And I hated that I had to bite my tongue. That I couldn’t tell him to take his time, offer whatever damn support I could, because just watching him was smothering my damn heart. But no matter how good my intentions might be, any kind of comment could disrupt the process he was building himself up through.
Eventually, Aric sighed—the kind of sigh that shifted the whole atmosphere.
“The witch working with my brother…” His leg bounced up and down. “I don’t know her specifically, but I recognized her brand of magic from back when I still lived in the States.”
That my jaw didn’t literally drop was a massive achievement.
It was almost tangible, the first crack Aric had made into the hard shell protecting his past.
“My maker,” he went on, his face all hard planes and haunted tension, “he had a witch on his side. Geraldine. I don’t know how they met or when, that was before my time, but she was always around, so I got…familiar with the magic.”
The censure in his voice hinted there were volumes still buried inside him, but he was giving me information, and that was all that mattered right now.
Aric scraped his thumb along the tips of his fingers. “Geraldine’s bloodline wasn’t extensive, and her magic definitely wasn’t the kind just anyone receptive to power could tap into.”
That much became clear when the hundredth witch I’d dragged to Rheinsberg to examine Dominik’s curse echoed all the previous witches’ statements.
They couldn’t influence the magic. Couldn’t connect with it on that deep, foundational level.
To remove the curse would mean to kill my brother.
“As far as I was aware,” Aric said, “not even all of Geraldine’s ancestors had this power. It was like…” He squinted, lips pursed. “Like a specific brand that flowed through few. It wouldn’t surprise me if this witch is Geraldine’s direct descendant. Gods know she always wanted to carry on the line. But even if all this is true, I still don’t know why she’d be here.”
“What do you mean?” I frowned.
If Milton and our witch were already acquainted, it didn’t seem like such a leap for them to be scheming together now.
Aric shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his leg bobbing again. “Geraldine worked solely for our maker, not us. Never us. Maybe Milton tracked down one of his own somehow or, if your witch is, indeed, in my maker’s employ, Milton found a way to convince her to assist him, have her travel over to Europe…”
A beaten-down laugh rolled from his lips. The hairs on my arms rose.
“Makes sense now, why the asshole was able to track me so well. Break into my apartment without leaving any traces behind.” He fisted his hands. “He had a fucking Geraldine copy on his arm.”
I studied Aric for a second longer, my mind racing. I’d need a fucking whiteboard to write all of this shit down, but one question stood out above them all.
“Aric, how does your brother come into play in any of this? Why go after you?”
“Milton has always been vicious.” Aric clasped his hands together—or more like held them to keep himself from fidgeting. His leg had gone from bouncing to listing to the side. “Those deaths in the fifties that you mentioned… They were all Milton’s victims. More than even the papers covered.”
The thought sent a chill down my spine. Just how many more were there?
But that was yet another topic for later.
Instead, I asked, “How come the public didn’t turn on vampires? I mean, the articles reported girls drained of their blood, but there’s no mention of your race anywhere. And vampires were out to the humans at that point.”
They might have been the only supernaturals who didn’t hide their existence from the human population, and the world had been far from the magic-ridden place it was now, but vampires were… Well, they were definitely visible.
Aric dragged his fingers through his hair, then sat lower in the chair and stretched his legs out in an effort to exude—or convince himself of—casualness I knew they didn’t feel.
“Yeah, we were out, but it varied across the States. Some were more informed, some…less. I guess there were individuals who, I don’t know, refused to even believe vampires existed, though they had the cold hard fact of bloodless bodies dropping on their doorstep.” He shrugged, fumbling with his nails. “Then there were makers, like mine, who worked on keeping our actions in the dark.”
“What about those articles then?” I slipped one leg beneath me. “It looked pretty out in the open to me…”
Vamps who wanted to fly below the radar would have never left bloodless victims behind.
Aric tapped the tip of his shoe against the desk leg. “That was my doing.”
I jerked. “What?”
Threads of acrid memories wove through his scent. Aric pulled himself up, crossed his legs at the ankles, knees spread wide, and hunched forward. For a moment, he just stared at a spot on the floor, but his scent laid out the inner struggle beneath his silence.
I breathed, waiting—
A barely audible grunt pushed from his lips. “My maker tasked me with covering Milton’s tracks. Milton was too careless. He thought he was untouchable. So, it fell onto me to make sure we wouldn’t get any heat.
“Look, Gina, when I turned, I wasn’t exactly a model citizen. I never killed anyone, but I’ve…done some shit. Seduced people for their blood, and…” His nostrils flared. “Eventually, though, I changed my tune.”
Dark lashes fanned across his cheeks as he wrung his hands together, yet beneath all that weight
, I sensed something…different. An echo of a light.
“I was at Elvis’s concert in Memphis when…shit, I don’t even know what happened. But hearing the music, seeing how it impacted people, how it…touched something inside me…” He shook his head and looked at me. “I realized I didn’t want to do this anymore. I wanted to walk the straight and narrow. Build a life for myself.”
There was so much I wanted to ask, so much I yearned to glean about Aric’s early years, but now, as much as it pained me, wasn’t the time.
Aric wetted his lips. “I knew I’d never be able to do that while I ran with Milton and my maker. I had to break away. Leaving those bodies…it was a means to get Milton in trouble. His reputation as a wild card worked in my favor.”
Mentally, I acknowledged that it was a good diversionary tactic. But it was also clear from the heavy charge in Aric’s scent that the path to his end goal had been far from smooth.
If—I thought to what had brought us here—he’d even reached his end goal at all.
“After a few more deaths left for the authorities to find, my maker confronted me.” Aric’s brows rose, and he briefly looked at his entwined hands, then smoothed them down his black jeans. “He asked me if I was rebelling, trying to be like Milton. I told him no. I told him that it was Milton, giving me shit and hiding what he was doing from me because he was fed up with having a nanny constantly watch over him. And it was true—in part, at least. Milton had said those exact words once before. My maker didn’t need any more convincing. So, when the whole fiasco put my brother in the hot seat, I bolted.”
“That’s why he’s pissed at you?” I cocked my head. “Sounds to me like he brought it upon himself.”
Even if Aric had intentionally left those bodies, they were Milton’s kills. And from Aric’s narrative, it seemed to me as if Milton had been giving him attitude for a good long while. What Aric did…
Well, wasn’t that exactly what Milton wanted?
Aric’s lips curved in a sorrowful smile. “It wasn’t that easy. When I hit the road, Milton went after me. He was well aware I’d lied, but that wasn’t why he came. The bastard didn’t want me to go. Said we were a team.”
I snorted before I could stop myself, but, thankfully, all Aric did was shoot me a look that conveyed loud and clear just how much he agreed.
“When I refused to return with him, we got into a fight.” He rotated one of his rings with the pad of his thumb, letting out a mirthless whisper of a laugh. “I got away, but I knew Milton wasn’t about to drop it. If he didn’t care that I’d set him up earlier, after our fight, after I told him our brotherly bond was fucking trash, that it meant nothing…”
“He wasn’t quite so understanding any longer?” I offered.
Aric nodded. “I had to get him off my back or he’d just follow me across the States. So I tipped off a local hunter and, last I heard, right before I boarded the bus to take me the fuck away, the hunter had captured Milton.”
Unease coiled through my stomach.
This spun a whole different perspective on Milton’s motive. Because if Aric did what I thought he did…
“Gina”—he looked at me with all the shadows of the past straining the tight lines around his eyes—“the reason my brother is coming after me is because I set him up to die.”
Chapter 16
“Fuck,” I whispered, and the suffocating charge in the air grew.
I tried to breathe through it, stop my own energy spike from affecting the atmosphere in the too-small observation room, but my racing thoughts crashed and rolled relentlessly, stirring up cramps of anxiety in the pit of my stomach and making my protective side roar.
If there ever was a burning, volatile fuel for a vendetta that would never die, it was payback for the kind of thing Aric had done.
Florian Zierke rose to the forefront of my mind. The vampire had been willing to murder people to set Aric up, and all he’d lost was his reputation and livelihood.
Milton…
It was his life Aric had ended.
Well, almost ended, it seemed.
“And you had no idea Milton was alive?” I asked, perhaps a little uselessly.
Aric sliced his head to the side. “Not until the second message.”
His words swirled through the air, and I frowned.
“What made you so sure it was him?” My chair creaked beneath my butt as I leaned forward. “What about your maker?”
Or someone else from his past he’d crossed paths with in a less than pleasant way.
I might not have had all the details at my disposal, but I could read between the lines well enough. When you’re operating out of the low vibe of your spectrum, there were usually a whole array of people you wronged without even realizing the full impact of your actions.
Any one of them could be behind the bloody messages.
“It’s kind of a leap from thinking someone’s dead to believing they’re the one exacting revenge,” I added, though not unkindly.
I might have had my own issues managing my overthinking, but as an agent, looking at all angles and possibilities was crucial. And even knowing that, there were times where I’d been blinded by my own mind and would have given anything to have someone on the outside prod my brain and open it up to new perspectives.
Before I could share my reasons for questioning his belief in Milton’s guilt, Aric sighed and dragged a hand through his hair, mussing the dark brown strands. “It was…more of a feeling, really. But if you want to go the rational route… My maker would have come after me sooner if he wanted to. He would have caught wind of me if he were looking, and he wouldn’t hesitate. Roscoe was always the kind of vamp who, once he decided on something, he got shit done. Finding me…” A wan, mirthless smile pulled on his lips. “He would have done so a long time ago.”
Yeah, being in a popular band and anonymity did not go hand in hand. The Whiskey Jet Preachers may have operated mainly in Central Europe, but they were far from unknown across continents.
”Besides”—another labored sigh rattled from Aric’s lungs—“of all the shit I cooked up, turning Milton over to the hunter takes the top. It’s him, Gina, I know it.”
I flattened my lips and gave him a nod of acknowledgment. Gut instinct was rarely misleading and, more often than not, right, even if the explanation seemed far-fetched to the mind.
Truth be told, more than doubting Aric, it was me really, truly fucking hoping there was another explanation. Because if Aric was right and it was Milton gunning after him…
“He isn’t going to stop,” I said softly.
“No.” Aric smoothed his palms down his thighs. “He’s toying with me now, but he’ll escalate eventually.”
Making Aric suffer as much as possible before moving in for the kill.
A growl vibrated in my chest. I couldn’t let that happen. Wouldn’t.
“Aric—”
The whole room shook with the splitting cry of an alarm.
Cursing, I jumped out of my seat and bolted across the room.
Aric joined me a second later, his face hard and gaze searching. “What is it?”
“The arcane alarms.” I yanked the handle. “Dominik.”
We sprinted toward the cells. The second I wrung open the hallway door, a thick cloud of magic punched me in the face. Grimacing, I rushed forward with Aric fast on my heels, then skidded to a stop before the group of witches pushing their magic toward Dominik and Emilia’s cell.
Snarls and growls ricocheted off the wall, and although I couldn’t see inside, I knew it had to be the curse.
Aric placed a hand on my shoulder, stanching some of the anxiety I was leaking all over the place. I leaned into his touch, my back now pressed against his chest, and monitored the witches.
Part of me wanted to give them space—probably should have, given my emotional state—but if the situation took a turn for the worse, Aric and I were the only reinforcements they had.
“We need more power,” Ma
ra yelled. “Stop focusing on the wolves and divert everything you have to the wards. We’re losing them.”
Glass cracked.
Aric’s grip on my shoulder tightened, and I could feel him shifting into a defensive stance precisely as my own body prepped for an attack.
“Wards!” Mara bellowed again. “Amp up the wards!”
A bust of power exploded from the group. Somewhere behind me, more agents poured into the hallway but kept their distance. The more of us adding to the charge in the air, the more difficult the witches’ job of containing Dominik and Emilia would be.
I could have taken the chance if I wanted to, switched roles with the reinforcements, but now that they were here, I found it easier to suppress the overflow of my emotions.
In part because that hard-coded protectiveness refused to let anyone else near Dominik and Emilia if they broke free.
In part because I abhorred the thought of my colleagues getting hurt.
Behind me, Aric didn’t give off a single vibe even as I felt his readiness to react at any given moment as well as if it were my own.
We had this.
The snarling and thrashing from within the cell built up, the witches sweating under the strain of shoving so much power into the protective barrier. A couple swayed on their feet. I rushed up and caught one before she could fall—the newbie.
She sagged in my arms but continued to project her magic toward the cell I now finally saw clearly. The two massive brown wolves paced the room and sporadically threw themselves at the glass. More cracks marred the surface, the ones that had already been there expanding.
Still holding the witch upright, I scanned the web of fractures that encompassed almost the entire width and length of the glass.
A few more hits and the damage would be critical.
Magic of a different kind surged, and I glanced to my right to see Roth shoulder down the corridor. He bypassed Aric, took one look at our sorry assembly, and threw his illusion magic hard into the cell.
Emilia and Dominik bared their teeth, but whatever it was Roth was projecting, it had halted their attacks.
Holding my breath, I watched Roth’s face transform into a mask of pure concentration. His stance, though, remained assertive. I was sure all of it was purely psychological—and something Roth had counted on—but the sight of him seemed to have given the witches a boost.
