by Lisa Ladew
Gemma squared her shoulders and glanced in Jameson’s direction. It was his book, after all. “Palladium and her sisters died. Another switch took over the Keeper’s Book.”
Wide eyes all around. Cora was the first to speak, and she looked nervous. “How did they die?”
Gemma turned back a page in her notebook. “This is Palladium’s last entry:
We can wait no more, the time has come. Our faithful mates have returned to the Well ahead of us, and my sisters and I, we long to follow. We leave this world to the care of the covens, to the bidding of their young hearts and able bodies, with faith that they will continue the fight and end victorious. There is nothing left for us here.
Only Antimony would have us delay. She scolds us cruelly for our desire, for our weariness, our unwillingness to wait. She says we will break his heart, but we wonder that she even cares.
No, it is time, dear sisters. Know that we leave you with all the love in our warrior hearts to see you forward on your journey.”
Gemma looked up for reactions. Cora had her hand to her chest and a relieved look on her face. “I thought it was going to be vampires.”
Jameson rested a hand on Cora’s back. “What happens next?”
Gemma showed him, turning carefully to the page in the Keeper’s Book she had just begun to translate. “The next entry is from a switch named Anna. You want me to read that?”
Everyone nodded. Gemma smiled, nervous and excited all at once. “Okay, well, she starts out by just introducing herself and all the sisters who are alive then. She’s Bond Coven, by the way. But here’s an interesting part:
Antimony has left us, we know not wherefor. Another switch was called to take her place, leaving us both grateful and grieved. Mayhaps she returned to the Well as her sisters did.”
Cora spoke up, her voice full of sorrow. “So nobody knows what happened to her?”
Gemma shook her head. “Not that I’ve found so far. I think the next thing is some kind of spell, but I saw that part about Antimony and had to stop to tell somebody.”
Jameson appeared deep in thought, but two seats over Goldie was smiling and wringing her hands like she wanted to grab the book away from Gemma. “What kind of spell?”
Gemma glanced down at the book again. “I… I don’t know yet.” The language of the Keeper’s Book was no easy feat to translate, but she was getting better at figuring out the meanings quickly. “It looks like…” Everwear? Everweave? “Everweft?”
Jameson’s eyes brightened? “‘Everweft’? I’ve heard that word before. Carick said it.”
Gemma translated for the next twenty minutes, working out the instructions and writing them with painstaking accuracy for Goldie to practice. They weren’t even really instructions. Not the way Gemma thought of them, anyway, like a recipe in a cookbook. This was more like guidelines. Nevertheless, she ripped the finished page from her notebook and handed it over to Goldie. The gentle blonde switch squealed with excitement and dragged Flint through the kitchen and out to the courtyard, a concerned look on the big bear’s face.
Gemma kept going with her translation, writing in her notebook as Jameson and Cora fell into their own private conversation. She felt comfortable here, surrounded by her new family. Riot wasn’t around, but his stuff was downstairs and he was staying, at least for a while.
After another quarter-hour she thought she had more to share, but as she was about to catch Jameson’s attention Goldie and Flint came bounding back into the room. Flint was grinning at his woman in unabashed admiration, and Goldie’s face was flush with triumph. “I did it!”
Cora’s eyes shot up. “Did what?”
Goldie turned to Flint. “Show them.”
Flint looked around him, backing up until he was a good distance from walls and furniture, then without a word he went through the same process as Riot had in Gemma’s walk-in closet. Only this wasn’t sexy, this was intimidating. Dude is huge! Gemma froze on the couch and fought simply to breathe.
Gonna have to get used to this shit, girl. Maybe she should think of it as immersion therapy, surrounding her with every animal she’d ever been convinced would kill her until she didn’t even blink. Gemma knew she’d get there soon, but… she looked at Flint’s massive bulk… in the meantime, holy Jesus, just please don’t eat me.
The bear turned his huge head in her direction and Gemma heard Flint’s voice loud and clear. I’ve got twenty pounds of ribs in the smoker. You’re safe for tonight.
Gemma laughed, sounding hysterical even to her own ears, and tried to relax by reciting this new discovery to herself. They can all hear me when they’re shifted. Good to know. “Okay, so what’s the trick?”
Goldie grinned. “Here it comes.”
Flint shifted back then, fur turning to t-shirt and jeans, his whole self going straight back to the way he’d been. Jameson whooped and grinned. “Yes! No more having to stash spare clothes everywhere in the forest in case we get caught naked after a shift.”
Gemma’s eyes stayed wide. Her mind flashed back to the night before and how close she’d come to her fantasy. “I’ll do Riot.”
The room went hushed, and Gemma realized she’d spoken out loud. Cora laughed and winked, in typical fashion. “No doubt.”
Gemma blushed and rushed to explain herself. “No, just, I mean… I’ll do that spell for him.”
Silent nods surrounded her again and Gemma flushed, buried her face in the Keeper’s Book without looking up as Goldie showed Cora how she’d worked the spell. Cora and J left for a while, and when they returned Jameson could also shift from human to white wolf and back without dropping a stitch. Gemma watched, managing to keep her cool this time, reassuring herself that just like Riot, these shifters would never turn their power against her.
She turned her attention back to the Keeper’s Book. After a few minutes she heard J’s voice - in her ears, thankfully, because that telepathy shit was still too bizarre and uncontrollable for her tastes - and glanced up to see him fully human, his piercing blue eyes looking down kindly on her. “Thanks for finding that, Gemma. It’s a big help.”
She nodded, too distracted by the passage she was translating to reply. Jameson sat down nearby, his eyes fixed on the book in her lap. “You find anything else good?”
Gemma didn’t have it all, but she mused about what she had transcribed so far. “Anna’s writing about how they hunt the nests. Says the shifters sniff them out, but there are a few ways they narrow the hunting grounds.”
Jameson leaned forward in his seat. “Like what?”
Her eyes narrowed, completely focused on tracking the words from the Keeper’s Book with her left index finger at the same time as she spoke the translation and her right hand scratched it on the paper. “‘When hunting in cities, the ancient switches said, they looked to the slums, where the bloodsuckers keep to the shadows and choose their victims as fish from a barrel.’”
Gemma locked eyes with Jameson for a second. “That sounds like they stick to the parts of town where it’s already high-risk living. But then she talks about how it’s different in the forest. ‘In these woods no man is unknown, so the beasts must charm their victims into wandering far from safety.’”
Gemma’s mind flashed back to her first encounter with a vampire, in the hospital parking lot, and how it might have ended if she’d been a regular human woman. She shivered with apprehension. He could have taken her, and nobody would have even known.
And just like that, Gemma’s mind made the connection. “They’re the kidnapper!”
Jameson sat up straight and stared at Gemma. “They’re what?”
She waved at him to follow her. “Come on.”
Gemma jogged all the way up to her room, to the wall-to-wall dry-erase and cork boards where she’d been working on her Tri-State Kidnapper article in between bursts of translating the Keeper’s Book. A map was stuck to the cork, an extreme blow-up of the northern border of Georgia, where it met Tennessee and North Carolina. She w
atched Jameson’s eyes scan the push-pins marking where women had gone missing, the dates and their names listed on the dry-erase board next to the map. His bright eyes flicked to hers. “You’re writing about them?”
“About the missing women?” She nodded. “For weeks now.”
Jameson returned her nod. “You're right on. There was a picture online, not too long ago, of a perp who’d abducted a woman. He was a vampire. We have a shifter on the police force who’s been tracking abductions in our area, but what you’ve got here, this is much bigger.”
Gemma’s whole body shook with the adrenaline rush. This is huge. “What we just heard from Anna fits, too.”
She pointed to the clusters of push pins one at a time. “One of the things that’s always been so confusing about the TSK is that the victims are from very different pools. One day he’d take a homeless woman from downtown Atlanta, and the next day a soccer mom from Chattanooga would just up and disappear from a jogging trail, but always the exact same way, so the cops were sure it’s the same person.” She shivered a little. This part always gives me the creeps.
But she kept on, anyway, filling Jameson in on the details that had been kept out of the press thus far. Gemma had learned them from one particular Atlanta detective who knew her skills for finding shit out in ways he couldn’t, and trusted her to let him know anything that could lead to an arrest. “No signs of a struggle, but their phones, their purses, groceries, whatever they were carrying, even the coins in their pockets… everything but their clothes, were left neatly stacked at the abduction site.”
Jameson looked as confused as the cops had been. The FBI had taken over, Gemma knew, since the crimes crossed state lines, but she still kept in touch with her source. She moved back to the map, gesturing at the wide swath of victims. “Whoever it was, the theory was he moved around so much, maybe he was a truck driver. Except he’d have to have a secondary vehicle for getting around the remote spots like the jogging trails.”
The silver in Jameson’s blond hair caught the morning sunlight through the window as he nodded. “But it makes sense if it’s a bunch of different nests in different places, but all the same kind of perp. What’s with the stacking, though?”
The tiny clusters of push-pins looked even more foreboding than they had before. Gemma swallowed and shrugged and cut her eyes to Jameson. “They’ve infested this whole area. They’re just getting started.”
The Keeper’s face was hard as stone. “It isn’t just Victory Party and the elections. This ties in somehow.”
Gemma felt a sinking in her gut. Jameson and Bryce had explained all about the Victory Party and what they seemed to be up to. Honestly, the whole time they’d been talking Gemma had just been thanking her lucky stars she wasn’t a political reporter. She’d have been locked-up for attempted murder months ago if she’d been exposed to a whole campaign of vampires.
Jameson turned on his heel and stalked out of the room. He didn’t say a word but Gemma could tell by the set of his jaw, that wolf was getting ready for war.
Chapter 20 - Shifters’ Paradise
Riot slumped into Resperanza’s basement barracks the morning after a second night of sleeping in the tree outside Gemma’s window, somehow resting better knowing she wanted him there. It wasn’t either of the places his warring body and mind wanted him to be - either in her bed or out of The Cause entirely - but Riot had to admit it wasn’t half-bad.
His pack heavy on his back, Riot made for his room and closed the door behind him. After a moment’s thought, he locked it, too. Yesterday morning had been too close a call. Gemma had almost seen the bags of cannabis and hemp he was hiding in a cooler.
He’d tried to keep it light when she surprised him, show her he wasn’t uninterested - even though he should be, dammit - but then she’d smiled at Bryce and Riot had wondered if he was really special to Gemma at all, or if she’d pump any shifter for the information she needed.
Riot snarled at the thought and crossed to the closet to do a final check of his ingredients. He’d bought all the oil he’d need yesterday and borrowed Shiloh’s car to transport it, but he wasn’t sure what to do now, how to prepare it without drawing attention to himself.
Now the only stoves he had access to were the ones at Shiloh and Ryder’s place - which was a hard ‘no’, because no way was Riot putting his friends at risk like that - or here at Resperanza. And that wouldn’t work even if he did it in the dead of night, because the oil had to heat for hours. Maybe I could buy a slow-cooker and do it in my room? But that wouldn’t work either, because of the smell.
But when he opened the closet, Riot’s stomach dropped. All his oil, it was gone! Shit! Fucking hell! Someone must have found it and taken it, which could only mean… Riot swallowed, hard, and reached for the cooler, preparing himself to find it empty. Or maybe just a note, telling me to get my sorry ass out of here yesterday.
Neatly lined up inside were a dozen bottles of oil with the deep green color that said they’d already been infused with the herb that he’d tossed in the cooler less than twenty-four hours ago.
Riot dropped his pack with a thud and backed up to sit on the bed, his mind still reeling. It’s done. Handled. Shit. But who-? Riot didn’t even finish the thought before he cracked a smile.
Thanks, Resperanza.
For a split second, he felt the house around him, like an abuela leaning over a treasured child. The feeling retreated, but the knowing didn’t. The house was magical, too, and it liked him, was helping him.
Whoa. This magic shit was hard to get used to.
Riot shouldered his pack, heading out to the rec room. Shaken, but trying not to be.
He glanced around the room and saw a handful of the shifters who worked for The Cause. No Ryder, Shiloh, or Bryce, but Dario and Aven were sitting at the bar. Flint took up one of the couches. Jameson stood in the center of the room, giving Riot the nod as he strode past Flint to sit on an unoccupied sofa.
The Keeper set his jaw and looked around the room. “I’ve got some news, but first: Riot, what’ve you got for us?”
Riot dug in his pack and pulled out a heavy, burlap-wrapped object. He explained as he unwrapped it. “Ryder took a plaster cast of the prints he found in the forest the other day so that everyone would know what to look for.”
He pulled the plaster out of the burlap and set it on the coffee table in front of him with the tread facing up. Somehow it looked even bigger here than it had in the dirt of the forest floor.
Jameson got closer, his forehead furrowing as his piercing eyes sharpened on the cast. “That’s what was in the forest?”
Riot nodded, pushing his flop of hair to one side. “You seen it before?”
The older male stepped back, his eyes going unfocused for a moment before he replied. “I’ll get Cora to take a look.” His gaze turned on Aven. “You think this could be the guy from Goldie’s accident? Darby’s stalker?”
The eagle shifter with the sharp profile shook his head and clacked his teeth. “Too big. Our guy at the accident wasn’t even six feet, I’m betting. Whoever made those prints is huge. Probably close to seven feet.” He gave Jameson a meaningful glance that Riot didn’t understand.
Jameson zeroed in on Riot again. “Describe the scent.”
Riot shrugged. How do I put that scent into words? But he’d try. “Definitely a cat. Old. Not weak and dusty, but… ancient. Strong. Honest to Cat, I’ve never scented anything like it.”
Again Aven shook his head. “Not the same guy.”
The Keeper moved on. “We have some new information from the Keeper’s Book, thanks to Gemma.” Jameson glanced Riot’s way, but Riot made sure not to react. After all, there was nothing between them, right? Nothing that couldn’t be between her and any other shifter she chooses, Riot thought, with a quiet snarl. And where the fuck is Bryce, anyway?
Jameson shot Riot a sharp, curious look. Riot realized he was growling, a low rumble in his chest, and stopped. J continued. “She found some
clues about where the vampires like to make their nests, and showed me the abduction sites the Tri-State Kidnappers have hit over the last year. We both came to the same conclusion: each cluster of abductions is probably centered around a nest. All we have to do is find them.”
He addressed the room at large, looking at every shifter in turn. “One of the clusters is about ten miles southeast of Turner’s Mill. Almost a dozen women have gone missing near there in the last few years, including Brittany Whitaker’s mother. Most of them from hiking trails in the area, which means the nest is probably somewhere in the forest where nobody ever goes.” He looked straight at Riot. “You know the off-trail sites. Anywhere you can think of around there that a nest of vampires could hide?”
Riot swallowed, buying himself a minute. He wasn’t used to being asked for advice. “There’s a system of caves past Watha Falls. Or up near Casar’s Quarry, the old abandoned gold mine. That’s another good spot. It’s been condemned for years because of the cave-ins.”
Jameson nodded. “We’ll start with those.”
The meeting disbanded and Riot was up like a shot, rushing to his room to grab a couple of bottles of oil and shove them in his pack. Faith said they were almost out; now Baker won’t have to miss a dose. Riot grinned. He was almost tempted to kiss the wall, just so Resperanza would be sure to know how grateful he was.
He tightened the drawstring on his pack and slung it on his back, heading straight for the garage and his bike. Flint was there, putting a handful of reusable grocery bags in his SUV and climbing in after them. “Where you off to, looking like the cat who stole the cream?”
Riot rolled his eyes but didn’t break his stride. Jesus, is this bear ever going to let it go? “Little town upstate, called Nunya Bizniz.”
