“No.”
“No?” I gritted my teeth. “This is my room. You don’t get to make that call.”
“I’m the only person in this game who won’t lie to you, Ellis. I’m not sneaking around behind your back. I’m not lying to you or trying to trick you.” His earnest expression never wavered. “I’m sitting right here in front of you, laying all my cards on the table. I’m being honest.” His jaw flexed. “I want to use you—as Lori—for bait. Together I think we can end this.”
Laughter sliced up the back of my throat. “Hypocrite much?”
“I never said Vause had a bad idea.” He looked pained to give her that much credit. “Manipulation isn’t the right way to go about asking for your help. She shouldn’t have kept Lori in her back pocket like an ace in the hole in the event the conclave managed to corral Charybdis and needed an operative to bring him down. The day she pulled your file and chose you for this was the day she should have confronted you with her plan. That’s what I believe, and my being here ought to be proof of that.” His shoulders tensed. “I’ve told you what I need from you. Will you help me?”
The question lingered between us, and I sat there rubbing at a grease stain on my knee from the bacon I had eaten at the breakfast we had shared this morning, the one where I thought tonight would be ending with a belly full of food and not rage. I embraced the anger. It broiled away my aching uncertainty into a flawless clarity that allowed me to appreciate what he was saying, the logic of it, and then wield that same instrument to deduce what he wasn’t.
“You weren’t surprised.” The truth slammed into me. “In Falco, you weren’t surprised I could shift.” Most folks were stunned where he had been sympathetic. It wasn’t a talent I often showcased for good reason, yet he took it all in stride. A worse possibility dawned. “Were you at the Wink Sinks? Is that how you knew?”
“I interviewed one of the marshals.” Tension in the air thickened, and he admitted, “He told me what you did.”
So he had come to find me knowing I could shift even if he hadn’t grasped the parameters of my abilities.
“That explains the white-glove service.” Feeding me, driving me around and hauling my luggage up to my room. “You wanted to keep an eye on me until you figured out what Vause saw in me.” I felt sick. Nauseous. I wanted to crawl in bed, pull the covers over my head and stay there for a month. “Then you saw Lori, and the cogs started turning.”
“The killer is targeting young fae girls,” he pressed. “Tell me it’s a coincidence you can shift into a child’s form. Not an illusion, an actual child. Tell me Vause doesn’t know exactly how to play on your guilt over Lori to coerce you into doing what I’m asking you to do of your own free will.”
I got to my feet and smoothed the wrinkles from my pants.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
“You won’t leave my room, so I’ll go.” I walked to the door and snagged my purse too fast for him to dump the contents off his lap and come after me. “Make sure you lock up when you’re done.”
Once out in the hall, I made the short trip to Harlow’s room. The “Do Not Disturb” sign still hung from the lever. So much for hiding out with her. There went my buffer. I pulled out my phone and dialed her number but got punted straight to voicemail.
The late hour and the warg occupying my room left me with few options. Figuring Harlow must still be on the scene in Falco, I rode the elevator down to the lobby and called a cab. Cellphones and water didn’t mix, so it made sense she wouldn’t keep hers on her. I’d head out there, give myself time to cool off, and she could give me a ride back to the hotel. I would treat her at one of those twenty-four-hour restaurants that did brisk business preying on interstate traffic with their glossy signs and promises of bottomless mugs of coffee. Right now that kind of anonymity hit the spot.
Chapter 9
Brushy Creek Lake resembled all the other lake turned crime scenes I had visited since Charybdis began his murder spree. He definitely had a preference for the remote and the tick-infested.
“You sure you don’t want me to hang around?” The cabbie leaned out his window, scratching his cheek as he took in the desolate location. A full moon hung overhead, muted by the thick beams of his headlights. “I got a daughter your age. I wouldn’t leave her out here’s all I’m sayin’.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.” I pointed to the far end of the weedy parking lot where a black van straddled crumbling white lines. “That’s my ride home. I’m meeting a friend here.”
“Friend? Hope you don’t mean a guy. Only one thing they want if they ask you to meet them at a van in the woods.” He huffed. “It ain’t right. No friend of yours ought to drag you out here in the middle of the damn night.”
Smothering a grin at the human working himself into a protective frenzy over me, I took pity on his conscience and removed my ID from the purse slung over my shoulder. I flipped open the wallet and presented my badge, which was enchanted to appear to him as what he expected to see, whether that meant local law enforcement or a government agency. Still wary, he pulled a flashlight out of his console and swept it down the side of the van, illuminating the seal of the local marshal’s office, which was also glamoured to meet his expectations.
“I guess you can take care of yourself, huh?” He squinted at the badge one last time. “You keep my number, all right? I’m on the clock until six this morning. If you run into any trouble, you give me a call.”
“I will,” I promised, stepping back to give him room to execute a three-point turn.
His hand twisted in a slight wave, and he was gone.
Night sounds creeped over me as I stood, allowing my eyes to adjust to the gloom. That the noise and light from the cab hadn’t brought Harlow running wasn’t a great sign. I crossed to the van and found it empty, as expected. I checked the handle. The door was unlocked. I used the step and braced a knee on the front seat to get a look around. A pair of lime-green skate shoes sat on the front passenger seat, but her cellphone was nowhere in sight. I peered into the night through the windshield.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone.”
My head popped up and smacked the ceiling of the van. Rubbing the sore spot, I climbed out and slammed the door hard enough the vehicle rocked. Graeson stood cloaked in shadow.
“What’s wrong?” I grimaced. “Afraid Charybdis might nab me before you get the chance to toss me at him?”
Graeson stepped from the trees into the parking lot, and moonlight kissed his bare skin. He was naked. Fully nude. Not a scrap of clothes on him. I’m not proud of how long I struggled to drag my focus from his navel to his gaze. A few inches lower, and I would never be able to make eye contact with the man again.
“My plan involves a team operating in a controlled environment where you’re kept perfectly safe, not rushing into the unknown without backup.” Another step closer. “I would never allow you to be harmed. Not even to capture him.”
Except he already had, whether he knew it or not, by pretending to be interested when all the while he was sizing me up for other reasons.
“You seem to have lost your clothes,” I pointed out, voice higher than usual.
“I heard you tell the cabbie where to take you. I shifted and followed. It was fastest.” He frowned at his body, as if not seeing the problem. “It’s too dangerous for you to be out here alone.”
“I’m not alone.” My traitorous gaze dipped to his collarbone before I caught it sliding south and jerked it up to his jawline. “Harlow is out here somewhere. Her belongings are still in this van.”
He tipped his face into the wind. “All the scents here are hours old.”
“Then where is she?” I turned back to the van. “Her shoes are in there. She can’t have gone far without them.”
“You’re assuming she was on two legs. She is a mermaid…sometimes.” He hesitated as if her dual nature confused him too. “She might still be in the water.”
Foreboding sli
thered down my spine. “Her team wouldn’t have left if she was MIA.”
“Are you sure?” His tone made it clear he figured the marshals for deserters.
The urge to defend the conclave parted my lips, but I had seen how the marshals in Wink treated Harlow, and that was before she got one of their own killed. Gossip spread fast among fae. Soon it would be hard for her to find work, and walking onto a job would mean watching her back. She had faced this new team and new location alone, and I got a bad feeling about that.
I picked a direction and launched my one-woman search party. “I’m going to look for her.”
“I’ve scented Harlow and the McKenna girl,” he called. “I’ll be able to track down where the attack happened.”
I kept walking.
“The lake is in the other direction,” he yelled helpfully.
I let my head fall back until the sky filled my vision. When no divine help was forthcoming, I straightened my shoulders and faced the naked man. My eyes wanted to map his body in search of more tattooed skin when I should have wanted to parade him through the brush in the hopes his free-range trouser-snake got snagged by briars or brushed against poison ivy.
“Let’s get this over with,” I huffed.
He chuckled under his breath. “There’s the spirit.”
He set off in the opposite direction, leaving me with a prime view of his muscled shoulders and a different kind of full moon shining below his waist. I didn’t look. For long. Nice butt or not, he and I wanted different things from each other. Not that I wanted him. I mean, I barely knew him, but he was easy on the eyes, and I hadn’t seen a naked man in…
“Watch your step.”
My head jerked up, but I stumbled over the knotted clump of vines anyway and fell against Graeson’s chest when he turned to catch me. Our forearms locked together while he fought to keep me from face-planting, and I recoiled to avoid touching more of his sweaty, muscled skin than necessary. I ended up smashed between him and a tree with him gripping my wrists at shoulder height, both of us breathing hard and fast.
“You can release me now.” Being pinned against the trunk by a naked warg seemed like a dangerous place to be. “Any day now.”
The warg gazed down at me with expectation that made my cheeks burn, but he let me go, and we resumed our hike into the marsh. It took a while for us to reach the darkly glittering body of water where the kelpie had hunted the McKenna girl, and Graeson ended up steadying my elbow when my feet bogged in mud more than once, though we managed to avoid another tree incident. I didn’t thank him. I shrugged him off and trudged on, looking for an indication of where Harlow had gone into the water, but the sand hadn’t been disturbed by a sometimes-mermaid. All I had to tell me we were on the right track was Graeson’s nose, and that seemed more interested in sniffing me than the ground.
“Why don’t we split up?” I suggested. “You can search by scent, over there near the water, and I’ll head deeper into the woods.”
Farther away from you was implied.
“No.” He didn’t entertain the thought longer than it took to shoot down my idea. “We stick together. There’s something off about this place.” He stopped to rub a leaf through his fingers then sniffed them. “We know Charybdis was here, so was the McKenna girl, so were the chaperones who answered her cries for help and the search crew the conclave dispatched, and so was Harlow.” He stepped forward and repeated the process. “Yet I haven’t picked up a single scent that isn’t coming from you or me since we left the area surrounding the van.”
“Could it be an erasure spell?” Fae scents often frightened local wildlife. Several fae species were custodians of the earth, and they advocated such measures in order to do no harm to the animals. Erasure spells created sensation voids, which spooked animals too, but not as much as the predator smells did. Over time, after a good rain, the antiseptic magic washed away to be replaced with more natural aromas. “Can you tell if it’s charm based?”
“They’re too good for that. The absence is telling, though. I don’t like this. Someone wiped the entire lakefront. That shouldn’t have happened until all support personnel had cleared the area.” Pointing to the deer trail I had been following, he ordered, “Stay close. I’m going to try tracking by the water.”
Magic and water didn’t mix. If we had walked into an enchantment, wading into the water might break it. I was fine letting him play the guinea pig. I preferred being head blind to waterlogged.
Graeson kept to the sandbars as we circled the perimeter of the lake while I traversed the solid ground, walking beside him but six or seven feet away from even the barest hint of moisture. Every so often, I caught his head tilting back, tracking our progress by the moon.
“Is it true what they say about wargs?” I peered through the canopy of pine needles overhead. “Can you only change during full moons?”
“That’s personal.” He seemed to consider it a moment. “But I owe you one, so I’ll answer.” We walked in silence for a few minutes. “The more dominant the wolf, the easier the moon’s song is to ignore. New wolves get moonsick and fly into rages. Older wolves have better control. Some wolves—” he cut his eyes toward me, “—don’t need the moon to change at all.”
Trees flashed between us as I kept pace with him, and each flicker revealed a subtle shift in his expression. “What does it feel like when you change?”
A hitch in his stride was the only indication I had struck a nerve. “How does it feel when you change?”
The bite of his words stung, but only a little. I had expected him to lash out, maybe even wanted his irritation to clash with mine. It felt more authentic than his oh-so-helpful facade. “It feels like being turned inside out.” I waited for the lump in my throat to subside. “It’s worse for me because Lori is much smaller than I am now. It’s a lot of Camille to cram into such a tight space.”
Had I glimpsed pity in his gaze, I might have spun around and marched back to the car, Harlow be damned. His eyes held only moonlight, and to my surprise, he answered a second question.
“Every bone breaks. Skin tears. Ligaments are shredded.” He leapt from one sandbar to the next. “You want to know the worst part? It’s the fur. Most folks think it’s the bones, but hell, kids break bones.” Though not on the scale he endured. “Having thousands of thick strands of fur pierce through your skin like needles through cloth? Now that hurts.”
A shudder rippled through my shoulders. “Okay, you win.”
“It’s not a contest.” He shot me a halfhearted smile. “Physical pain can be overcome with enough practice. There are worse ways to ache.”
I let my silence stand for agreement. “Are you picking up on anything yet?”
“There are multiple scent layers. Humans mostly. A few dogs.” He rubbed his nose as though to rid himself of a tickle. “Those smells are old. Nothing fae yet.”
We must have circled almost back to where we started when I shoved through a dense layer of brush, and my next footstep sank into powdery sand, the kind trucked in to create manmade beaches. “It looks like we’re headed into a picnic area.”
Graeson didn’t respond. The warg was nowhere in sight.
I shoved aside a tangle of thorny smilax vine and found him squatting over an indentation in the sand. “Graeson?”
“It was here,” he growled, fingers piercing the grains to produce a luminescent scale he held aloft, one too large to have come from a mermaid of Harlow’s stature. He stood in a fluid motion and vanished in a blur of flexing muscle.
The calm waters mocked me. A jump down to the sandbar would save me time chasing him, but I couldn’t do it. Instead I turned on my heel and bolted for the picnic area. Splashing noises interrupted the still night. I followed the ruckus, keeping a few yards between me and the edge of the lake.
I stepped on a pinecone camouflaged by decaying leaves and rolled my ankle. My back hit a nearby tree, but this time there was no one to catch me. I grunted on impact and leaned against the
trunk, shifting the weight off that foot. I lifted my leg to inspect it, and the ground roiled under my heel. More pinecones emerged from the detritus, shaking off their spiny backs while marching toward me, circling me.
“What the—?”
Tiny eyes gleamed in the faint light. For the love of pancakes. Those weren’t pinecones. They were igel, and the twerps had learned from our run-in in Wink. This time they hadn’t come alone. Two dark shapes glided forward. Only the glittering rims of their outlines gave them away. Umbras. Shadow servants. Light bent around the figures, blurring their features into masklike smoothness.
A throaty howl raised gooseflesh down my arms.
Graeson.
“Can we talk about this?” I asked the nearest umbra. He rustled a response that probably meant no, because he swung a long arm at my head. I ducked then popped up kissing-close to its maw. “Graeson?” I shrilled. “Feel free to jump in at any time.”
One of the shapes peeled away from the other and drifted into the shadows. Great. I had set him on the warg’s trail.
I struck out, but my fist shot through the smoky creature. Perfect. It was going to be one of those nights. The billowing mass inched forward. I backed up a step, stumbled on an igel that was quick to burrow under my heel, and lost balance. The blackness enveloped one of my flailing arms in a chilling embrace and hauled me closer.
Snarls rippled over the water. Limbs snapped and leaves rustled as the second shadow located its prey. A yelp sounded, and the creature billowed toward me with a silver and white wolf writhing in its stomach.
“Graeson,” I breathed, and his golden eyes lifted to mine.
“Tonight just keeps getting better,” a sultry voice announced. “Who have we got here?”
Dead in the Water (Gemini: A Black Dog Series Book 1) Page 10
