Fuck! He'd be glad when he was done with this.
And Jesus, this was heading right where he never wanted to go again after his last undercover assignment. "You know he's going to lawyer up."
Mallory's eyes met his, dark, like shiny obsidian.
"He'll talk before we turn him over to the police. Get the Jeep as close to the front door as you can then walk away, Matthew." Run away.
His lips pulled back in a snarl every bit as fierce as one of Dane's. "No."
"You won't get into the back room while we do this."
"Even if I volunteer to question him for you? I know how to make a man talk."
His gut roiled admitting it. He'd done hard things overseas. He'd done hard things in the States.
Mallory shook her head. She wouldn't let Matthew sacrifice more of his humanity.
She wished he'd just go, get as far away from them as he could, but he'd made it clear that wouldn't happen.
"Let's get him to the Brass Ring."
"The Jeep's in the grocery store parking lot. I'm not leaving you alone with him, even if you've got Dane."
She retrieved the Jeep rather than fight, warmth curling through her at his protectiveness.
The Russian struggled as they took him out of the office. He cursed and spat and kicked at Dane, sustaining a bite without crying out.
They secured him in the back of the Jeep. Wrestled him into the Brass Ring, customers turning and watching.
When the door to the ring room opened, three pairs of eyes glanced off their prisoner and settled on Matthew.
Sabin slid from the desk. "So you're going to include your pet in the upcoming fun."
"Stop calling Matthew that," she said, putting a growl in her voice.
It elicited a smile from Sabin, the brush of his body against hers. "Trying to make me jealous?"
Dane lunged and snapped.
Sabin danced away, laughing. "Overprotective? Or does he always fight your battles for you, Mal?"
Hayden and Mikhail took the Russian, forcing him to the center of the circle.
Mallory turned to face Matthew. "This is where your participation ends."
His hands gripped her upper arms, pulling her close. His scent was laced with concern and reluctance. "Don't do anything stupid. There are witnesses who saw him come in here alive."
Her palms pressed against his chest in a silent request for him to leave. It will be okay, she wanted to say, but that would be a lie.
"Go, Matthew. We need answers."
He resisted for long seconds, finally yielding.
Mallory joined the others in the circle.
Sabin forced Iosif's killer to his knees. He gripped the Russian's hair, jerking his head backward so his face looked into hers.
* * * * *
"Where are Iosif Gruzinsky's daughters and their mother?" Mallory asked.
"Stupid cunt," the Russian said, breaking his silence and spitting at her.
Hayden kicked him in the stomach.
Mallory's churned.
"Where are Iosif Gruzinsky's daughters and their mother?"
The Russian spat again.
Mikhail said something in their common language, his kick striking genitals, Sabin's grip keeping the Russian from pitching forward.
Bile rose in her throat. "Who do you work for?" she asked, hoping a change of question would get a different result.
The Russian smiled. "You will learn this. The ones you love will pay for the trouble you have caused the same as you will pay. But I will not tell you. I am a dead man if I talk. I am a dead man if I don't talk."
Sabin laughed. "You think dead men can't talk?"
His knife slashed the Russian's throat, so fast Mallory's shout of NO! remained trapped in her mind.
Blood sprayed across the floor. It rivered down the front of Oleg's shirt. It emptied from his body in beats, freeing his soul and casting it directly into Hell.
The air around them became laden with the smell of a voided body.
Sabin's eyes met hers in challenge and she wanted to shift and lunge, to tear his throat out.
His lips curved upward in a sharp smile, his blond beauty not hiding that he was a ruthless killer any more than his actions had, any more than the brand he bore above his heart did. "What now, Mallory?"
He'd left her no choice. But then, maybe choice had been an illusion all along.
Just as she'd gained the knowledge of how to free Dane from fur—when their sire no longer prevented it—she knew how to open the door between his world and hers. She could enter it with her mortal body and dispose of the Russian's at the same time.
"Get out of the circle," she growled through clamped jaws as she tried to keep her mind equally closed.
Hayden stepped over the brass inlay.
Mikhail left more slowly, his expression holding the open longing to return home.
Dane brushed against her on his way out, his gaze burnished gold instead of midnight black, all of his focus on Sabin.
Sabin stepped over the corpse. He sauntered past her with arrogant confidence, biding his time, a bomb set out in plain sight. One day he'd challenge her in truth to become alpha.
Only his death would end the threat he posed. If the possibility didn't exist that he'd be replaced by something worse, she could almost bring herself to contemplate killing him in cold blood. Almost.
Ancient words flowed from her mouth. A child's whimpering filled her head along with the memory of that first plunge into Hell.
She did not allow the sound of her whimpers to escape—even when the taste of rotten eggs coated her tongue and clogged her nostrils. Even when she saw the female dwarf, and terror and hate moved through her in riotous waves. Even when the shrieking of those claimed by Hell rose and fell, and it was music, a song that brought the desire to shed human form and lift her muzzle in a baying call to hunt.
She clung to her humanity. She fought to retain as much of it as she could by calling up images of Sorcha and Austin, of her mother and Matthew—the latter making her go hot and cold because in the world she thought of as home, on the other side of the ring room door, he was only steps away from Sabin and her brothers.
"The Lord is waiting for you," the dwarf said. And of course, he wouldn't let her come to his realm and leave quickly with answers from Iosif's killer.
She could close her eyes and find her way to her sire's dark castle, so tight was the leash created by blood and magic and brand.
Mallory went, ignoring the dwarf who trailed behind.
She climbed the thousand black stairs and traveled down the long hallway. Entered the throne room decorated with souls trapped into twisted sea salt statues, their eyes alive, leaking tears as beneath the white crystals their raw, skinned bodies burned.
Her sire smiled. He greeted her as he had when she was eight. "Welcome home, Mallory."
She approached the throne and the Hound at its base. The eyes of Mikhail's twin gleamed with a desire to attack and savage, with a hatred of anything human despite being half human.
Above them, the Reaper Lord stood, black cloak transformed to shiny black wings spread indolently over obsidian. "Shall we hunt together?"
Her lips pulled back in a silent snarl. The stink of patchouli rose from her skin and filled her nostrils even as Rahmiel's words drifted into her mind.
Your hate for him blinds you to possibilities. You know so little about your sire's realm, about his motivations.
The Reaper Lord descended the stairs. "Come," he said, a twitch of his hand indicating she was to walk at his side, not behind him.
To keep those she loved safe, she forced her hate downward, imagining it buried in deep, rich soil. And for the first time since her sire had torn her reality apart, she smelled pine trees and rain instead of patchouli.
She equated it with the summer fields scent belonging to her mother and Sorcha and Austin, though she doubted the Reaper Lord was capable of love. "Why manipulate me into becoming alpha?"
He stopped, partially turning so their eyes met. "To make you stronger."
"Because I'm your only daughter?"
His eyes narrowed. Then he smiled and touched a hunch-backed statue whose bobbing, rolling green eyes made her think of fishing floats. The statue dissolved, becoming a white mouse like the one the dwarf had held that day in the grocery store—magic, because all souls possessed it—and some of it was the Reaper Lord's to harvest.
The mouse scurried.
He crushed it beneath his boot.
Warning that he could do the same to her? Or a demonstration of his power?
She suppressed a shudder, remembering what she'd experienced in the morgue, the pulse of a soul against her palm, the sensation that she could absorb some of it, convert it, use it.
"Yes. You are the only daughter I possess."
He lifted his foot, ignored the cockroach that remained.
He resumed walking.
They entered a hallway and passed through a doorway much like the one between realms so they were suddenly outside, walking beneath the gallows trees, their bare limbs adorned with hanging corpses.
Black wings became a cape of blood-red leaves.
Mikhail's mother waited for them at copse end. Her skin was bleached of color, her lips turned gray.
She held the reins of two black horses. Their flowing manes and tails brushed the ground. Sharp horns protruded from their foreheads, the unicorns of myth except for their color and the desire to kill that shone in glowing red eyes.
His smile full of dark secrets and deadly amusement, her sire took one pair of reins from Mikhail's mother. His hand brushed hers and pink flowed into her skin. Her lips darkened, turning shiny red, like Snow White inviting a lover's kiss.
The Reaper Lord mounted the horse. "The other is for you, daughter."
Mallory swung into the saddle, the beast prancing, snorting beneath her.
They entered one of the nightmare forests.
Her sire's pack was immediately there, weaving and circling. And the only comfort Mallory found in their presence was at seeing no half-brothers among them.
The alpha bitch snarled and snapped, vibrating with the desire to kill.
If not for the Reaper Lord's control, she would have leapt and pulled Mallory from the horse.
Hate burned in the bitch's eyes, raw and savage and merciless.
Because I'll always be part human?
Because I can hunt in places she can't?
Mallory didn't know. She wondered if she'd gain that knowledge.
They moved deeper into the forest, coming to a clearing scattered with clubs and stakes and lances.
Iosif's killer was in its center, tugging at multiple rope-like vines attached to his ankles and wrists. The ends were held by clown-like figures dancing back and forth as if they were demented puppeteers, their laughter the skin-crawling sound of hyenas.
He fought like a crazed bull, battling to reach a weapon, being given enough slack to have hope, only to have it ripped from him inches away from grasping a lance or stake or club.
He bellowed and raged, attempted a charge at one of the ghoulish clowns only to be dropped to his back as some of the lines gave while others tightened.
He flailed. Cursed and was allowed to his feet.
His attention was seized by a long spear with blood-blackened tip that was a lunge away. His awareness didn't extend beyond his tormentors.
A healed, pink line marked the place where Sabin's blade had ended his life. She had no way of knowing how he experienced time or how his mind processed this reality any more than she could predict whether it would be nightfall or only moments after his death when she returned to the ring room.
"Your presence pleases me so much that I'll offer you a boon. Answers from him? Or the barrier keeping Dane a Hound removed?"
"Answers." It was far too late for any other choice.
Her sire's smile was the flash of a knife created for paring souls. "Ask your questions then."
The horses flowed forward, harbingers of nightmare.
The clowns' entertainment changed. Garish beings hurried to predetermined positions and stilled like pillars. The lines they held tightened and stretched the Russian's limbs until movement was impossible, the effect like some macabre string game where he became a dragonfly.
He became aware of her then. Hatred blazed in his eyes. He spat and struggled, the desire to rape and defile and kill easily read in this place where souls were bared.
She saw his Earthly name—Oleg Kozlov—and it was further evidence that because of the Reaper Lord's touch in the ring room, or his will, or her own evolution, she was changing.
"Where are Iosif's girls and their mother being kept?" she asked, because their fate preyed on her mind, because Rahmiel's involvement made her believe that finding them would lead to the man the Reaper Lord wanted to hunt.
"Stupid cunt."
"Release him," her sire said, and the ropes dropped, falling to the ground like weak vines.
Oleg snatched up the blood-stained spear, charging toward her rather than running.
The Hounds were on him in an instant. Biting. Tearing. Shredding flesh and cracking bones as he grunted and struck out at them, offering additional challenge with his refusal to scream and shriek.
Massive jaws clamped on his neck. The alpha bitch's gaze was fully on Mallory as she vented her hatred, ripping Oleg's throat open while her mate growled and dug into Oleg's chest, tearing out his heart.
A gulp and it was devoured.
Oleg's body healed even as the clowns gathered the ends of their ropes and pulled, standing him upright.
"Again," her sire said, magical command that returned translucent soul to physical shell.
Oleg's eyes opened, the hate deeper, the determination to rape and defile and kill stronger.
"Who do you work for?"
Oleg spat, saying nothing.
Her sire signaled and the ropes dropped.
Iosif's killer grabbed a club. He feinted forward, only to whirl and swing, knocking one of the clowns to the ground. A second strike and its head crushed, exploding like a Halloween pumpkin.
Oleg ripped a dagger from the clown's belt and charged toward her rather than running.
The horse beneath Mallory rose on hind feet, the move perfectly synchronized with the one her sire rode. Front hooves struck with deadly accuracy.
Oleg dropped. And if not for the words that left her sire's mouth, he would have been nothing but warm meat on the ground.
Instead he screamed and screamed and screamed as the horses trampled him beneath their feet, breaking bone and reducing him to a pulpy bag of human skin while the Hounds swarmed on the fallen clown, rending it into patches of blood-soaked ground and rags.
"Again," her sire said, and time was reset.
Oleg ran.
Her sire's raised hand kept the Hounds from taking Iosif's killer down before he reached the line of trees.
"What do you think of Sabin?" the Reaper Lord asked, his tone conversational.
There was no safe answer and so she gave none.
He laughed, and it held the same soul-paring sharpness of his smile.
Oleg disappeared into black, treacherous woods.
The Hounds orbited, sleek and sensuous, transmitting their restlessness in ripples of muscles and dark-fire glances.
The Reaper Lord passed her a silver horn.
She was loath to touch her lips to it but she'd never escape this world if she didn't.
Mallory carried it to her mouth, surrendering breath, surrendering another piece of her soul.
The Hounds bayed and part of her thrilled to the sounds of a hunt. The pack she'd once run with set off in a smooth, loping wave of black menace, the horses behind them.
There was no correlation between time and distance here. There was only quarry and hunt, scent and the silent padding of paws, screams and savaging and death.
They rode through the forest, ducking branches, scrambling over rocks made bloody by Oleg's passage.
In the near distance there was a splash and she knew he'd stumbled into one of the pits.
Moments later the Hounds encircled it, their snapping keeping him in bracken water to become a feast for flesh-eating creatures.
Her skin slicked as she remembered the pinprick bites of pain, the sensation of maggots entering torn flesh, burrowing so quickly that the seconds she'd been in a similar pit had led to hours of torment as she and Dane used knives to dig the parasites from her body.
"If not for you at my side, this would have been a waste of time," her sire said, his voice not carrying to the pit. "I'll leave him to you, daughter. When you are done, use the word I have used."
He turned and rode off, the Hounds going with him.
The horse beneath her snorted, muscles bunching. Mallory dismounted rather than waste her energy and concentration in an attempt to master it.
Oleg surged toward the bank.
Its slippery steepness gave her time to sweep up a branch and strike his hands, the contact allowing glimpses into his dark soul, of the things he'd done to women, the things he'd intended to do to her.
"Tell me what I want to know and I'll let you out. Where are Viktoriya and her girls?"
He attempted to leave the pit again.
She struck.
"Tell me what I want to know and I'll let you out. Who do you work for?"
"Cunt. Stupid bitch."
She lost track of how many times she asked the two questions. How many times she blocked his attempts to escape. How many glimpses into his dark soul she gained.
He lost an eye to the maggots. An ear.
"Where are Viktoriya and her girls?"
"In a warehouse."
Not the entire truth, not given the faint carrion stench.
She allowed a hand eaten down to bone to remain on the bank, skeletal fingers digging into the muck.
"They're all alive?"
"Not the mother."
He levered himself upward, grabbed, but she was already thrusting the branch.
It struck and sent him back to plunge beneath the surface of the water.
He returned without a nose.
"Give me an address."
He gave it to her and she allowed his fingers to spear into the mud.
"Is there security?"
"Yes."
He attempted an attack.
She parried.
This time he emerged from the bracken water without lips or tongue.
"Again," she said, releasing her claim to him, feeling that release as she'd felt the frantic struggle of an unknown soul against her palm in the morgue.
Oleg's body submerged, disappeared.
A moment later wild laughter wove its way through the forest, the hyena sound of garish clowns who'd had their plaything returned.
They still had the power to make her skin crawl. But it was the ease with which she'd done what needed to be done, the lack of regret over it that made her sprint to the door between realms.
The words to escape her sire's realm rushed from her.
The scent of Hell still clung to her when she was again in the center of the ring room circle.
"What time is it?" she asked.
Hayden glanced up from the laptop. "A little after midnight. Did you learn anything?"
"Viktoriya is dead but I know where the girls are being kept. There's security."
Sabin pushed away from the desk. "So your pet will be coming with us."
"Don't call him that."
He laughed, circled, brushed against her when she didn't step away to avoid it.
"Make me stop," he murmured playfully and she knew this would escalate, that this challenge would soon give way to increasingly emboldened ones, that it was a mistake to think of him as human, to think like a human when they were Hounds.
She pulled her knife. He danced away, sensuous smile on his lips and eyes shining with amusement, not understanding the feint until she jerked the gun from the holster, aimed and fired.
Red blossomed at his shoulder where the bullet had grazed him before burrowing into the wall.
His shout and the echo of gunfire rang in her ears. Dimmed and was replaced by Hayden yelling, "Have you gone fucking nuts!"
"I assume you're talking to Sabin."
She met Hayden's gaze, Matthew's image in her thoughts, the need to be strong, to be alpha in fact, not just in name, essential if she was going to keep him in her life, if she was going to keep him safe from other Hounds.
For the first time ever, Hayden was the one to look away.
He masked it by opening a desk drawer and pulling out a first-aid kit, but that didn't change the reality of his acknowledgment.
She shoved the gun into the holster. He tossed the kit toward Sabin.
It landed short and skidded the remaining distance.
None of them volunteered help beyond that.
"We'll need Matthew to deal with the security," she said, giving Hayden the address so he could get a visual of it.
"The guy we're looking for won't be there," he said. "He'll be a buyer."
She agreed, realized the others didn't know about the lead she'd pursued with Matthew. "We're looking for a black man."
"He's also a witch," Hayden said. "We summoned Raven Stone. She repeatedly drew the sigil designating one inside a box."
"The Satanists would have found him if he belonged to a coven or was trained by someone locally."
The medusa would have too.
"Yeah. The news broke a couple of hours ago that the police found Amanda Edson's body. We used the doll. She paced the same dimensions repeatedly, as if she'd been kept in a small bedroom with a private bathroom."
Mallory rubbed the place above her heart.
Too late. Too late. Too late.
"I'll get Matthew."
Sabin sauntered over, bare chested and bandaged.
She bared her teeth when he got close, warning him against brushing against her.
He laughed, heat in his eyes and his smile. "It's not over 'til it's over, Mal."
She left the ring room.
Fierce, complicated need surged into her with the sight of Matthew playing pool.
He glanced up immediately, dropped the cue rather than finish the shot he'd been about to make. He came to her, enfolding her in strong arms.
His heat and passion and scent were enough to eradicate the smell of her sire's realm, the immediacy of it. His concern wrapped her in comfort and she allowed herself to draw from it for long, treasured minutes before saying, "The girls are being kept in a warehouse. There's security."
"The mother?"
"Dead. Hayden's pulled up a picture of the location."
She drew him into the ring room.
"Where's the Russian?"
"You're better off not knowing."
She sensed him scanning, looking for a hidden exit. She felt his desire to push for an answer. He said, "We hit the warehouse tonight?"
"Yes. As soon as you disable the security."
"I'll do it only if I go in with you."
Denial rippled through her brothers. Sabin smirked.
"Take it or leave it," Matthew said.
With misgivings she said, "You go in."
* * * * *
Vadim leaned back in the chair, smoke curling toward the ceiling from the Cuban cigar.
Life was good in America. He had made it so.
His dreams were close to being made real. He could hear the clapping and the pop of expensive champagne bottles being uncorked, the murmurs as the movies he'd bet on garnered awards. He could smell the expensive perfume and taste Almas caviar imported from Iran. He could feel the hungry gazes of A-list actors and actresses and their agents, of sought-after directors, their thoughts filled with getting him to invest in a favored project.
He sent another puff of smoke upward, thick fingers tapping the script on the desk. This one was better than any of those he had already sent.
He allowed himself a smile. There had been urgency in Linden's voice. Not obvious to another, perhaps, but to a man who had spent most of his life living among and preying upon the desperate, it was the sound of money and power.
He would let Borya finish filming the girl, in case she was not returned. Then he would have her drugged and he would return Linden's call, naming a location for the delivery.
Satisfaction swelled at imagining the man who'd once refused to take his calls now waiting, pacing, anxious to be contacted. Vadim's smile widened and his gaze strayed to the bed.
For a moment he contemplated having one of the women brought to him. But then dismissed the idea.
He did not wish to share his pleasure, his victory—not that he would speak of his dreams—with a whore.
His thumb brushed upward against the script edge, lifting the sheets of paper, letting them fall with a shuffling sound.
Worry slithered in. It bothered him that Oleg had not responded to his calls, enough so that he had left his cell phone at home and brought only a throw-away with him to the warehouse.
It was time to use another place for receiving shipments. It was time to get rid of the women kept in this one. He would attend to the matter after his new friend was in possession of the girl.
Vadim opened a desk drawer, lifted a pistol, the very one he'd used to kill his first man in America.
Some would say it was foolish to keep such a souvenir, but the body had been dealt with, disappearing in a bath of acid.
There was a round already chambered. He held the gun, remembering the hardship he'd experienced, the struggle. Pride burned through him at what he had accomplished. If trouble came, it would be met by bullets.
He placed the gun back in the drawer. It would not be a practical weapon. For that, he would open the safe and remove the MAC-11.
It was a vintage machine pistol, a trophy taken from a dead rival. With it, he could fire twelve hundred rounds per minute. With it, he could be like the hero in an action movie.
Vadim laughed. In the future he would look for such a script.
He leaned back in his chair, lifting the cigar from the ash tray and sending another puff toward the ceiling. Life was good here in America.
* * * * *
The ski mask trapped heat against Caleb's face. The gloves slowed him, but not much.
Mainlining adrenaline, he spoke into his phone, "Come on."
And they did, Mallory and the others moving through the darkness as if they'd been created from it.
Mallory carried a silenced 9 mm like the one in his hand. They reached him and he opened the door to reveal a hallway between rooms created out of thick, unfinished plywood with peepholes drilled into doors that bolted on the outside.
Prison cells. There were easily twenty rooms on each side of the narrow hallway.
Dane entered, Mikhail at his side. Mallory's call, not his.
Caleb went in behind them, with her. He paused to look through a peephole.
A dark-haired woman lay naked, stark and pale on a bare mattress beneath a bare light bulb.
He held up a finger to indicate one.
Mallory was doing the same on the other side of the narrow hallway. She nodded, held up a finger to match his.
Male laughter erupted along with a rapid spate of Russian. It was followed by the sound of cards shuffling
Caleb smiled, putting five different voices to the right of the hallway with a fifty-fifty chance guns were tucked away in holsters.
That'd be seconds gained. Less if the guns were on the table.
They crept forward, not pausing to look through the other peepholes.
Hayden was behind Mallory and Sabin at the rear.
He'd have preferred to have both men in front.
He couldn't discount the risk that he'd be a casualty of friendly fire.
Dane reached the end of the hallway, holding back.
Mikhail inched his face toward the corner for a view.
Exploded into action.
Pfff. Pfff. Pfff. Pfff. Pfff. Pfff. Pfff.
Pop. Pop.
Seven rounds of silenced fire met by two of unsilenced.
Pfff. The junkie and the dog disappeared around the corner.
Pounding forward, Caleb reached the end of the hallway.
Three Russians had fallen onto the poker table, four had died in their chairs. An eighth lay sprawled behind a camera on a tripod.
Jesus, Jesus, he understood what'd set Mikhail off and he couldn't blame him.
Mallory's brother was already at the bed, ski mask off, shirt off, handing it to Iosif's naked daughter, her body shivering, her arms wrapped around her knees.
Caleb's guts burned. In the Sandbox he'd witnessed soldiers pumping round after round into an enemy's corpse. Expressing the rage and pain and soul-wrenching loss that came with losing a unit member.
He felt like doing the same to the men around the table, to the photographer, to the man who ran this operation.
Dane emerged from behind one of the sedans parked in the warehouse.
"Clear?" Hayden asked.
The dog's gaze shifted to what was probably an office, the door shut, the window looking out into the warehouse covered by blinds.
If there was someone in there, they had no way out. After casing the place, Caleb knew that with certainty.
"We need to move a couple of the sedans," he said. "Create a barrier between us and the office and give the women some protection."
Dane joined Mikhail, the two of them guiding Iosif's daughter toward the prison hallway.
"Let's get it done," Hayden growled.
Caleb liberated keys from one of the dead men.
He used the alarm on the fob.
Lights flashed, a horn on one of the sedans honked.
Hayden made a second car chirp and flash.
They got in, started the engines and put the sedans into position, sliding out on the side of the dead Russians.
Sabin kicked a corpse onto the floor. He grabbed the chair the man had been sitting on. "Might as well know what we've got."
He heaved the chair toward the covered window.
All of them dropped into a crouch, watching from behind the cover of the black sedans.
Glass shattered.
There was movement inside the office.
A barrel shoved blinds aside.
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
Sedan windows blasted inward.
Bullets pinged off metal and concrete.
Mallory's heart slammed into her throat when Matthew went around the front end of the sedan, diving and crawling toward the door, dividing her attention between him and the Hounds.
The gun in Sabin's hand feinted toward Matthew and she aimed hers at him in warning.
He laughed. It was the sound of dark mists swirling above heated tar pits.
Hayden fired into the left side of the window.
Bullets punched into the wall. Shredded the blinds and made them dance.
The threat kept their assailant's finger on the trigger, chewing through the machine gun's ammo belt.
The barrage ended.
Sabin streaked forward.
He joined Matthew at the door.
Both of them kicked.
It gave.
"Hands up! Hands up!" Matthew yelled but there was the nearly instantaneous jump of his gun.
Sabin's bullet struck their target first.
She didn't need to see its placement, didn't need to step into the room and view the corpse to know that the soul wasn't tethered to it, wasn't simply lost in the world.
Next to her, Hayden cursed. His hand wrapped around her upper arm, tugging her close.
"You follow that one to Hell, Mal, into his sire's realm and you won't come back without making Sabin your mate. We'll find answers another way, maybe find Rahmiel and bargain."
Warmth spread through her, though it didn't stop her from saying, "What happened to the enemy of my enemy is my friend is bullshit?"
"Bite me." But there was amusement in his voice as he released her.
She reached the office ahead of him.
Matthew knelt next to a body with side-by-side entry wounds in the chest. She recognized the dead man from the party on Mulholland.
Sabin stepped into an open bedroom doorway. "It's clear."
Mallory joined Matthew, all of them removing their masks. She jammed hers into a pocket.
"Vadim Korotkin," Matthew said, reading from a driver's license.
Mikhail entered. "There are eleven women. The girl is Kseniya. She said her sister was taken away. A day ago, two. There's no way for her to mark time. A man came here and looked at them both. Almost immediately afterward, Zinaida was forced to swallow pills that put her to sleep. A little while later she was removed from the room."
"Can Kseniya describe the man?" Matthew asked.
"A black man," Mikhail said.
His scent said otherwise, filling Mallory with dread.
They had less than a day to find the man their sire wanted. If he wasn't the same one who had Zinaida, then there might not be enough time to find both her and him. If he wasn't the same one, then they had nothing except the hope of finding some clue here, and that hope only because Rahmiel had said his interests were aligned with the Reaper Lord's.
The dread built into pounding agony—until she remembered that Hayden had said they were looking for a witch. A witch would be capable of altering his appearance.
"I'll remain behind to deal with the dead," Mikhail said. "When it's done I'll get Kseniya and the others to safety. Some of the sedans are undamaged. I'll question the women further."
"Dane stays with you."
A safe was open behind the desk—a good thing since none of them possessed the talent to break into it—though maybe Sabin did.
"Take the passports when you leave," she told Mikhail. "Take the money. Divide it, distribute it along with the passports."
He nodded, going back to guard the women.
She ordered Sabin to search the bar and bedroom.
Matthew and Hayden took the desk while she went to the safe.
She emptied it, placing bundled cash and passports grouped together with rubber bands onto the floor at her feet. Behind them was a ledger.
"Got something."
She removed the book, turning and placing it on the desk, pushing a script aside before opening the ledger. It was columned with coded names and dates and amounts.
Matthew touched writing to the far left. "This looks like what was on the back of the women's pictures."
"Identifying them," she guessed. "And the amounts, what they owe him? Or what he sold them for? And the other column, who has them now?"
Hayden closed the ledger. "There's nothing useful in the desk. I've got his phone but it's going to be a burner. Time to get out of here."
Sabin joined them at the doorway.
"Anything?" she asked.
A shake of his head said nothing, or nothing he was willing to reveal in front of Matthew.
They left the office. She stopped next to Mikhail and Dane near the hallway entrance while Haden and Sabin kept going.
"I'll meet you at the Jeep," she told Matthew.
He hesitated but followed Hayden and Sabin out.
She walked over and looked at the men who'd died at the poker table, then at the photographer, as if somehow proximity might give birth to regret, sorrow, some sense that they deserved a justice other than this one.
It didn't.
"What did the man who took Zinaida look like?" she asked Mikhail.
"Kseniya said he was white with blond hair and blue eyes, shorter than I am."
"It would take a lot of magic to not only change features, but to change skin color."
"Yes."
Wouldn't a man that powerful be known to other witches? Wouldn't he be easy for the Satanists to find, or the Medusa?
Maybe he'd handed Zinaida off to the man they were hunting.
No, that didn't feel right.
The scent of sand and sunshine and date trees eradicated that of gun powder and blood and vacated bowels.
Mikhail's hand came up, gun pointed behind her.
Dane crouched, hackles raised and eyes burning red.
She turned.
Rahmiel had his arms spread, inviting Mikhail to shoot, fingers waggling in a go ahead, do it gesture.
"It's okay," she told her brothers, moving to stand between them.
The unlit cigarette at the right corner of Rahmiel's mouth dipped and lifted as he smiled. "What? No more bloodshed?"
Instinct made her grab at opportunity. "Does it matter so much that I'm his only daughter?"
Rahmiel's eyes crinkled at the corners. He plucked the cigarette from his lips, inspecting it before dropping it into the pack in his shirt pocket.
"Does it matter? That depends on you. There won't be another for a thousand years, less the twenty seven you've been alive."
A jolt went through her, a shockwave of possibility at understanding she had value she could trade upon.
His smile was its own kind of deadly.
"Why are you here, Rahmiel? What do you want?"
"The better question is, what do I have to offer, besides answers?"
He closed his hand, opened it. A soul orb sat on his palm. "It belongs with the one I gave you in the morgue."
His gaze slid from her to Mikhail and back. He opened and closed his hand again. A second orb sat next to the first, though it was captured fog, howling desolation that made her ache with a sense of waste and loss.
"Add these two to the other. All three belong together."
And she knew.
Too late, too late, too late.
For Viktoriya and Iosif and Zinaida.
"What do you want, Rahmiel?"
His gaze flicked to the dead men, to the office where Vadim Korotkin lay. He rolled the orbs in his palm. "It would be tempting to claim this is enough. But sadly it's not. A Hound, when I need one. A favor for a favor."
"Done," Mikhail said.
Rahmiel's gaze slid to him then back to her, considering, measuring, wondering if she'd let her brother bear the burden.
Dane's bulk pressed against her. She touched her shoulder to Mikhail's. "Together we'll owe you two favors, one for each orb."
Rahmiel smiled, firing one orb after another toward the warehouse ceiling.
Mikhail caught the first.
She caught the second.
Rahmiel pulled the crumpled pack of Camels from his pocket, tapped it, retrieving a cigarette. "I'll see you in the days after your sire enjoys his Earthly hunt."
He disappeared as quickly as he'd arrived.
"I'll take the orb," Mikhail said.
She handed it off, joining the others at the cars.
Hayden was already in the Jag, Sabin in the passenger seat.
She leaned down, mouth close to Hayden's ear. "Blond hair, blue eyes. Shorter than Mikhail."
A slight nod acknowledged it.
There was nothing more she could do until Hayden had a lead on their prey. There was nothing more she could do for Iosif and his family, and it was better for all of them if Matthew wasn't at the Brass Ring.
That's what she told herself. That's how she justified what she intended.
"Call me when you have something."
Sabin's smile flashed white. "Going to spend time with your human p—"
The gun was out and aimed.
He laughed. She pushed away from the Jag, getting into the Jeep and staying behind Hayden until peeling off in the direction of Echo Park.
"I'll just follow you to the Brass Ring," Matthew said.
"I'm not going there. I'm going home."
He didn't believe her.
It didn't matter.
They reached the apartment building. She parked in front of hers.
Steps from the Jeep he blocked her. His scent held anger, the fading smell of gunpowder and adrenaline, all of it mixed with desire.
I want you to be happy. I want you to have what I have in Phillip and my three beautiful, wonderful children.
Her mother's voice was springtime breeze. She wasn't sure of what she could have with Matthew, not until the hunt was behind them, but for what remained of the night, she could have what she'd wanted for days. Him. This.
She put her hands on his chest, soaked his warmth through her palms. She felt the kick of his heartbeat and thrilled at the deepened desire that threaded his scent like a river cutting its way through mountainous terrain.
Always before she'd experienced sex as a quick physical connection without intimacy, sometimes without more than the exchange of names. It would be different with him.
It wasn't just physical attraction. Physical attraction would be easy where everything about him was complicated, because he was human. Because she wasn't, and was getting less so.
"Come in with me?"
* * * * *
Matthew's lips firmed. But his heart sped beneath her hand. His need was a heady aphrodisiac feeding her own.
She fought against licking her lips, against pressing to him, nose touched to the strong line of his throat, tongue darting out to taste.
"Taking one for the team, Mallory? Keeping me busy so I won't be there when your brothers and the asshole go after whoever has Iosif's other daughter?"
Her throat constricted, desire driven back by her failure to reach Zinaida in time to prevent her death.
Too late. Too late. Too late.
But Matthew didn't know that. He couldn't, not unless she brought him fully into her world. She wasn't ready to attempt it and he might never be ready for it.
Hands dropping away from his chest, she stepped back. "Forget I asked."
Jesus. Jesus. Don't—
Only he was already grabbing her, jerking her to him, trapping her against the Jeep, his mouth claiming hers.
The kiss was teeth and tongue and fury.
He'd never wanted a woman as badly as he did her. She invaded his thoughts, his dreams. The more he was with her, the harder it was to imagine a life without her.
He swallowed her taste down along with the soft sounds of pleasure she made and he reveled in being able to elicit them from her. His hands roamed, shoved beneath her jacket and encountered the gun.
He'd killed before, in the line of duty, overseas and at home, but tonight he'd killed for her regardless of whose bullet struck Korotkin first.
It should bother him. It should have warning bells ringing so hard that his body vibrated with the message he was in too deep, that he needed to get away from her, not get closer, that if he wasn't careful, tonight would only be the first time he killed for Mallory.
Fuck.
Heat scorched through him with the word. Raw, ferocious heat that burned away sanity and resistance. A hand tangled in her hair. His body ground against hers.
The desire riding him wasn't the aftermath of a fire fight and coming out alive, it wasn't related to the job, it was more primal, more all-consuming.
More. He had to have more.
The need for it gave his tongue the will to retreat from sensuous battle, gave his lips the strength to pull from hers though there was hesitation, a heated lingering before complete disengagement.
"Let's take this inside."
Her husky laugh held feminine amusement, not victory.
Holding hands, they got to the front door, got in.
Stop at the couch.
It was a last, weak grasp at sanity.
It failed.
Steps inside her bedroom, their jackets were stripped away between kisses. Their guns went gently to the floor.
She pushed the dark tee he wore upward and he pulled it off, a rush of pure lust arrowing downward at having Mallory's hands on him, roaming, dark eyes following them, making his blood heat another hundred degrees.
The muscles of his abdomen clenched when her fingertips swept over them on the way to snap and zipper. Between the catch of his breath and low moan at being freed, he managed a husky, "You like the direct approach."
The curve of her lips, the molten black of her eyes were the embodiment of feminine sensuality, feminine power. Her hand found him, encircled him, the stroke of her thumb making his hips jerk. "Is that a complaint?"
"Fuck no."
Her laughter filled his head with white heat, challenged him.
He gripped her hair, dragged her lips back to his, plundered her mouth.
Foreplay was overrated.
After denying himself, he wanted her now.
A jerk sent the buttons of her shirt sailing to the floor.
Another had breasts bared, tight nipples stabbing into his chest and sending streaks of pure heat straight to his dick.
He kicked off shoes. Toed off socks. Shoved his jeans down.
Released her hair in favor of stripping away her clothing, a shudder going through him with the first full body press of her skin to his.
He couldn't wait any longer. He already felt like he'd waited a lifetime.
He tumbled her onto the bed and covered her, the feel of her beneath him nearly enough to make him disgrace himself by coming before he got inside her.
He took her mouth. Kiss following kiss, raw need and feral desperation engulfing him when her legs wrapped around his waist.
Enough sanity remained to say, "Condom."
"I'm safe."
Need shuddered through him, intensified by what she offered.
He hadn't been with a woman like that since a college girlfriend.
Don't—
But his discipline deserted him at her slick opening, going completely AWOL with the first shallow thrust.
His hands sought hers, found them, their fingers entwining. He held hers to the mattress as lips fused, as tongues twined and tangled, as pleasure became the only agenda.
Hers first.
Delivered with measured thrusts. Hard thrusts. With the press and rub and grinding of pelvis to clitoris.
Then his, coming with the fast pistoning of hips, with exalting rush, leaving him lightheaded and drained of fight.
"That took the edge off," she said.
He laughed and rolled to his side to get a better look at the scenery he'd ignored in his haste to get inside her.
Dark nipples capped gorgeous breasts. Flat stomach led down to a small black triangle. Long legs that went on forever and felt just right around his waist.
"Christ, you're beautiful."
Model beautiful. Actress beautiful. Centerfold beautiful.
Any other woman would have a hard time making it into his fantasies.
Mallory's body hummed. It felt right with Matthew. Better than it ever had before.
She closed the distance between their lower bodies, rubbed her foot along his calf, brushed a finger over the earring and promised herself she'd do the same with her mouth and tongue, smiled when a stroke there had his breath quickening and his cock lengthening against her stomach.
"I bet you get your fair share of compliments."
His lips kicked up at the corners, the same quick humor that had made her see past the fact he'd been in a titty bar and playing pool with Hayden the first time she saw him.
"I'm all ears if you want to lay some on me," he said.
"And swell your head."
He glanced down, where his cock pressed against her. "That wouldn't be the only thing you're responsible for swelling."
She laughed and leaned in, touched her mouth to his, repeated what she'd said before the tumble to the bed. "Is that a complaint?"
He gave her the same answer as before. "Fuck no."
Urgent need should have been tempered by satisfaction, allowing for simmer and build, the wet slide of lips against lips and quick, teasing forays of tongue.
But the first kiss revived the hunger.
She inhaled him. Pushed him onto his back so she could devour him.
She took the earlobe with the stud into her mouth. Stroked it with her tongue. Sucked it.
Her pelvis ground against his, the press and rub of her clitoris to his cock sending streaks of pleasure down her legs and upward to her breasts.
Her toes curled. A throaty moan escaped when his hands cupped her breasts, thumbs brushing over her nipples, creating a fierce need to have his mouth on them.
"No fair," she panted.
"There's no such thing as fair."
"In that case…" She rose above him, rubbed her nipple against his lips, heat shivering through her to pool between her legs, to slicken and plump and prepare, her wetness lubricating his cock.
"Jesus, you play dirty."
"I've been told there's no such thing as fair."
"True."
His muscles bunched, a build of masculine strength before he rolled them, putting her beneath him, his heat like the rub of fur, his weight a natural demonstration of dominance.
Primal need came roaring back. She moved against him. Enticement, not resistance, and thrilled at the look in his eyes, the change in his scent, the possessive claim of his lips when they returned to hers in long, drugging kisses.
He moved lower, adding teeth and sucking bites.
Her back arched at the press of his mouth to her throat. She moaned, hands roaming, nails scraping, wild craving erupting from deep inside her, deepened by the mark he left on her neck.
He moved to her breasts. Latched onto a nipple, his lips delivering ecstasy at the same time they ratcheted up the need for more of it.
She bucked and writhed, engulfed in flames that only got hotter with the touch of his mouth to her stomach.
He kissed his way to her mound, lifting his head from her feverish skin and wet need to meet her eyes, holding them as he took in her scent, as his tongue darted, capturing her taste.
Pleasure rippled through her, deeper than just the physical.
He ducked his head, intensified that pleasure with carnal kisses that had soft, desperate sounds spilling from her throat with each thrust and swirl of his tongue, that had her hips lifting, driving her clitoris between his lips, that had her careening out of control, crying out as orgasm slammed through her.
Matthew moved up her body, replaced wicked tongue with thick, hard cock. He filled her, catching her on the way down from bliss and driving her toward it again with frenzied thrusts ending in shuddering ecstasy for both of them.
He remained on top of her, his weight like an anchor holding them in the moment. His eyes met hers. The corners of his mouth kicked up, pouring sunshine into her soul.
"Now that took the edge off," he said.
She laughed, heart swelling, wanting him to stay in her life, needing him.
His mouth brushed hers.
"I'm glad you left the dog with Mikhail."
She smiled against his lips. "The dog has a name."
"Your brother's."
What would he say if she told him they were one and the same?
"Yes."
His hand went to the brand, palm sliding up and down, replacing remembered horror and pain with comfort and pleasure. "You've got one too."
"Not by choice."
"Your father kidnapped you when you were eight. He forced the brand on you. As a condition of leaving?"
So he'd put it together, because he knew the others had brands, because the news had revived the story of her kidnapping, though he could have just as easily learned about her disappearance by Googling.
"Yes."
"He's not out of your life, is he?"
"No."
"Tell me about him."
"He's nightmare and torment and damnation."
And I'm his only daughter, the only one he'll have for a thousand years.
Anything less would probably be the blink of an eye to a Reaper Lord.
He wanted her strong. He'd brought her to Hell and made her live and run with pure Hounds. He'd returned Dane to this world and forced Mikhail into it before allowing her to come back to L.A. He'd manipulated her into becoming alpha so she would wield the gun, and while he might have sent Sabin as a potential mate, she thought he might be satisfied knowing Sabin made the pack—her pack—stronger.
Information would make her stronger yet. So would forming alliances and gaining control of the abilities that would manifest because she was her sire's daughter. But, making Matthew a part of her life, being able to have what her mother had with Phillip, that's what fed her will and determination to be stronger.
She touched her mouth to Matthew's, traced the seam of his lips with her tongue. Breathed him in. "Does it weigh on you? The killing?"
"In the warehouse?"
"There and when you were in the service."
"No."
His scent said otherwise.
"Liar."
"I've made my peace with what I had to do."
She nuzzled his shoulder, inhaled. "Truth."
The smallest shiver went through him, but fear didn't invade his scent.
If he can accept this, why not the rest?
He hadn't flinched at the things asked of him. He hadn't turned tail and run.
Maybe, just maybe…
"How did you make your peace with killing?"
He shifted onto his side, a leg over her thighs, his torso angled so he remained above her.
The dog tag he wore grazed her shoulder. She lifted it, transferring the warmth it'd gained from his skin to hers. The back was smooth. The front held the image of a machine gun standing upright, the stock thrust into a small mound of sand. Dropped onto the muzzle was a helmet, while above and to the sides and beneath was the message: Freedom Does Not Come Free.
"How did I make peace with the killing? By believing that sacrifices need to be made for the greater good, for the things this country stands for."
"But there's still guilt." His scent said as much.
His eyes were dark pools of turmoil as they held hers. "Yeah, there's guilt, and living with it is part of the sacrifice, the same way losing your limbs or your sanity is. I've killed innocent people, civilians caught in the crossfire. I've hurt others."
His hand surrounded hers on the dog tag. "There was a farmer. I watched him for days, working his farm, laughing with his wife, teaching his children. And when the order came, I dropped him with a sniper's bullet right in front of them."
"What was he guilty of?"
"Nothing. I found out later the intel was bad." His hand tightened on hers. "Too bad I don't have your sense of smell."
She ached for him. There were no words she could offer that would lessen his pain and absolve his guilt. She stroked his cheek, offering comfort instead.
He leaned in, touched his mouth to hers. "I can think of better things to do than relive the past."
Her hand moved, fingers tangling in his hair. "Give me a hint about what they are."
* * * * *
Linden paced the office. He couldn't work. Couldn't remain still. Couldn't think of anything but his need for the girl.
The stink of rabbit urine burned his nose. His ears ached from their screams.
Dealing with the kittens had been worse. He'd reached his tolerance for it, leaving the remaining animals in the wire cages that lined the hallway outside the guest room.
Though he knew the smell of fur and blood and urine no longer clung to his skin, he returned to the bathroom and washed his hands yet again. Unavoidably his thoughts went to the small corpse he'd disposed of. There was no satisfaction in putting the weight belts to good use.
He'd make sure the sister—he'd think of her as April until he knew her real name—didn't kill herself. He'd stay the night with her, perhaps tranquilize her each time he left to make sure she remained safe.
He wouldn't be able to keep her for long, maybe no more than a few days, but today's sacrifices would hold him, along with the ones he'd make tomorrow.
There'd be no time for gaining her trust, for slowly seducing her into yielding. Force was out of the question. He would never resort to that. But drugs…
Bile rose in his throat at the prospect of resorting to them, like some pervert. But the alternative, of having the need build and build and build—
Julia's bedroom games wouldn't be enough to appease him, not for long. He'd become too accustomed to having an outlet, a way to keep Aubrey safe.
Sweat gathered in his armpits.
Anger flared, as minutes ticked away, getting further and further from when the call from Korotkin should have come.
This was game playing, the Russian thinking he was the one in a position of power.
Or he's been arrested.
Panic flared. His fingerprints would be on the vodka glass.
They prove nothing. There is no evidence I received the girl. There was no evidence I knew Korotkin dealt in human flesh.
Linden's stomach cramped. What if the reason that the Russian hadn't called was because he was trying to find a substitute for a package that could no longer be delivered? What if the girls had made a suicide pact?
His stomach churned. Shivers racked him, hard enough that for an instant he felt the same terror he had at stepping into the house and finding the magic totally drained.
He knelt, hunching over the toilet bowl, bile turning into the swell and purge of vomit.
He flushed, terror swirling away and disappearing along with the contents of his stomach. Anger took its place, that he'd been reduced to this. He was a survivor. He was meant for great things.
After I deal with the remaining animals, I won't spend another day like this one, like some slaughterhouse worker, like some sick, pathetic weakling.
The only face he could put to the reason for his troubles was the one shown to him on every news station—Mallory Cassel.
He left the office. Fantasy gripped him, of taking the sister and using her to draw out the bounty hunter, of killing the one and therefore gaining plenty of time to enjoy the other before she too became a sacrifice.
He had no intention of driving by the house where the girl—Sorcha—lived with her mother, father and brother, but he did.
It was dark.
He did not slow. He did not make a second pass.
He went home, and though he slipped into the house quietly, Aubrey came running, bare feet slapping on hardwood floors, Zeus' toenails clacking as he trotted after her.
Linden smiled, heart swelling. "What are you doing up so far past your bedtime?"
"I couldn't sleep. Not until I checked to see if you felt good enough to come to the dog show."
"I will absolutely, positively be there." He enfolded her in his arms, his love protecting her until she snuggled closer, trustingly pressing her body to his, stirring feelings he didn't want, needs denied for too many days now, first because one girl's actions goaded him into killing her, and then by another's self-serving suicide.
"Go to bed," he said, slamming mental doors so that he didn't follow her there even in his thoughts.
He couldn't go on like this. He needed an outlet, even a temporary one.
Tomorrow he'd find one. He'd get to the house early, empty the cages, except perhaps for a kitten, something to keep the next girl company, something she'd love and wish to protect, something that could be used to ensure she had reason to remain alive and find ways of pleasing him.
His footsteps slowed. Some of the tightness in his chest eased. Maybe he wouldn't need to mar his enjoyment by drugging the next girl.
Julia watched a movie in the entertainment room. He dropped onto the couch next to her and immediately her hands were on his shoulders, massaging, reducing the tension.
"Trying day?"
"You have no idea."
"You look better than you did this morning. I'm glad. Aubrey has tried to put on a brave front, but I know she's been worried you won't see all the things she's taught Zeus."
"Nothing will keep me away."
Julia laughed, arms sliding around him, breasts pressed against his back, her cheek rubbing his. "You're a good father. This town is full of men who only remember they have children when the police show up at the door or when they need to parade them out for a photo op. Speaking of which, I got an advance copy of the program. The camera loves Aubrey."
Julia disengaged long enough to retrieve it from where it'd slipped into the space between cushion and couch end. She flipped it open to a picture of Aubrey sending the Old English Sheepdog over a white picket fence.
Warmth flooded him, nearly able to make him forget everything else about his day. He took the program, flipped through it, mouth going suddenly dry, heart thundering at seeing the blonde girl working her mongrel terror. Grace North and Turbo.
No! Too risky. Too closely associated.
But desperation weakened the arguments he'd used numerous times before, even as he stood in Aubrey's room, looking at the class roster and knowing that if he wanted to, if he were willing to take a chance, to use enough magic, he could acquire this girl.
Desperation provided clarity of thought, survival instinct kicking in. If a black man was seen taking her, he wouldn't be a suspect. He'd be a parent to be questioned about strangers he might have noticed, a man warned to remain on guard to keep his daughter safe.
And he would. He would keep Aubrey safe.
* * * * *
Caleb's hands roamed Mallory's back beneath the silky fall of hair as they lay in her bed. Their breaths were synchronized, their heartbeats synchronized He wanted to keep pretending their lives could be synchronized.
"You can't stick with me today," she said.
He'd been expecting it. "Cutting me out now?"
"For your own good. Stay away from us today, Matthew."
His pulse sped, breaking the synchronization.
Today was the day they'd identify their target. Today was the day they'd make their move and capture the man they intended to hunt.
She rose, straddling him for a second time in the morning light, taking heat away from one place while the press of her sex to his cock intensified it in another.
He snagged her wrist, holding her long enough to sit. He removed the tracker he wore and put it on her.
The tag rested above the swell of her breasts, making it impossible not to claim her lips, then kiss downward, worshipping feminine curves and hardened nipples before returning to her mouth.
Tender kisses grew rougher and rougher to match the fury in his chest, at himself, at her, at fate. "You don't have to go it alone," he said, words wrenched from his soul.
"Today I do."
"Talk to me, Mallory."
And his heart beat harder as if they stood on a precipice—but it wasn't the job he thought about, it was his gut saying things weren't as they appeared, reminding him of all the times some deep primal instinct had urged him to flee.
He stared into her eyes.
What did she see when she stared back into his?
"Look up Hellhounds," she finally said.
He freed the hair tangled in his fingers, covered the scarring on her upper arm. "The brand?"
"My sire's. He pressed the iron to my arm himself before letting me return."
The phrasing sent a shudder through him before he could stop it.
She pushed away.
"I need to leave. Stay in bed if you want."
He let her escape though he craved what he heard in her husky voice, what he saw in her eyes, that she liked thinking of him being there.
She disappeared into the bathroom, emerged a short time later fresh from a shower.
He wanted to forget everything and entice her back to bed.
She headed toward the door. Stopped and came to him.
One kiss became another and another, and they all tasted like desperation, but he couldn't tell if it was hers or his.
"Let me go with you."
"No." She separated herself from him.
At the doorway she turned, eyes traveling over him, and his heart sped at the sensation she was committing the moment to memory, that the next time they were together, something would be irrevocably changed.
"Help yourself to the coffee and whatever you can find to eat," she said, and left.
He gave her enough time to drive away before he got out of bed. He retrieved his cell and launched the app to start tracking her movements.
He ate a breakfast of eggs and toast, had a cup of coffee, then a second cup.
He roamed her apartment. There wasn't any point in searching. His being left there alone said she didn't have anything to hide.
He paused at the puzzle on the table. He scanned the collection of games. He stopped in front of the family portrait.
This was the life she wanted. Family. Kids.
It was what he wanted, what had brought him back to the States and what was pushing him to give up the adrenaline-charged life that came with being undercover.
He pictured his parents and Grace. They'd be heading to the dog show in a little while and he wouldn't be there with them.
Next time.
Always next time.
This'll be wrapped up soon.
Ache speared through his chest at imagining Mallory in cuffs, behind bars.
She hasn't gone too far yet.
Liar.
His chest constricted, his heart banged his ribs as if jailed.
She hadn't killed last night, but she'd be charged with murder all the same.
The prosecutor wouldn't need to put a deal on the table for the first person who talked, not with him as a witness. Not that any of them would take the offer.
He rubbed his chest, trying to massage the ache away.
The men who'd died last night deserved death. He wasn't sure he'd have done anything differently if he'd been the one to peek around the corner instead of Mikhail.
He could leave the assault and rescue out of his report. Mikhail's was the only face the girl or the women had seen and he doubted they'd go to the authorities and betray the man who'd helped them escape hell.
Not that there would be bodies to find.
A shudder swept through Caleb.
He allowed himself to remember Mikhail crouched in the alley next to the dead Russian, to remember the chant-like cadence of the junkie's words and the flash of red in Dane's eyes, and later, the unnatural ash left behind.
That's what he'd find if he went to the warehouse. Ash. He knew it by the sudden waking of his hindbrain that always urged the same thing: Run!
He tried to shake it off. Couldn't.
If they were capable of making a body completely disappear, why leave one where it dropped? Why leave one with a bullet that could be linked to other murders? Why bother taking someone into the desert or woods and hunting them down?
Initiation rite? Bonding ritual?
The signal went dead.
She'd entered the Brass Ring.
You can't stick with me today didn't mean he couldn't swing by with an offering of food.
They were closing in on their target. That was the real reason he was here and Mallory was gone. Hayden had to be close to cracking the ledger's code.
Talk to me, Mallory.
Look up Hellhounds.
The brand?
My sire's. He pressed the iron to my arm himself before letting me return.
Caleb shut down the tracker app. Opened the browser.
A chill swept over him. He lowered the phone, rubbed it against his thigh.
Did he really want to do this?
He took a deep breath, gaze moving, taking in the games and puzzles, the portrait.
Yeah. Yeah, I do.
He searched on Hellhound.
Read.
Mind snagging.
Denial surging even as the pieces of myth were burned into memory.
Black fur.
Glowing red eyes.
Sometimes glowing amber eyes.
Fire-based abilities.
Duties connected to the afterlife, the supernatural. The hunting of lost souls.
A shiver took him, remembering the encounter with the cobra. The impression captured in the shiny edging of a terrarium—hastily suppressed—of the woman's braids transformed into a hundred golden snakes, the triangular beads at their ends the heads of a hundred vipers.
The strange conversation that had followed the woman's sudden appearance.
You need nothing of hers.
You'll take nothing of hers.
Our dead are protected, as you have discovered.
His thoughts spun to the wooden box surrounded by the things Mallory had gathered, like valued possessions around a coffin. Watch and zebra and horse, velvet-dressed doll and Raggedy Ann. The conversation as they'd returned to the Jeep after talking to Amy Edson.
Are you going to tell me you're the psychic?
Would you believe me if I said yes?
Fuck, I don't know what I believe anymore.
Well, you don't have to believe I'm a psychic. I'm not that.
A subtle distinction. I'm not that.
He read on, heart thundering in his ears at finding myth designated them The Bearers of Death, claimed they were created by ancient demons.
We've got killing in our blood. He's nightmare and torment and damnation.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Caleb shut the browser, scrambled for the rational. A fist clamped fast and hard and tight on his heart because the only one that made any sense was that she was playing him.
Fuck.
Had he been wrong about her? He rubbed his chest, glanced through the open bedroom door then down at the hand above his heart, suddenly seeing himself reaching out the night he met her, feeling the jump of her pulse and smooth, warm skin against his palm as he brushed his thumb beneath angry bruises and twin puncture marks.
Last night, this morning, he'd been too caught up in her to think about the dog bite being completely healed or that now she bore scars like slash-marked tallies on the arm with the brand.
Focus. Focus on the important.
He launched the app.
The signal was still dead.
Without eyes on the Brass Ring, he couldn't be sure Mallory hadn't ditched the tracker, that they weren't already going after their prey. If he could figure out who their target was, he could make the call to Zack and have the guy brought in for questioning. But he couldn't work both angles at once.
He pulled the driver's license he'd taken off Korotkin's body from a pocket. Looking at the address, he went with his gut, betting there'd be other leads there.
* * * * *
Linden tapped the steering wheel. He didn't like leaving the carcasses for later.
It troubled him that in the last few days he'd had to leave one corpse after another for later, when always before, death and disposal had been meticulously planned and executed. He did so now because he wanted to scout Grace North's neighborhood earlier rather than later.
He checked his watch. He'd gotten used to seeing black skin beneath it, a black face when his reflection was caught in windows and mirrors and the shiny silver of big rigs on the freeway.
That would change, not completely, but after this acquisition, he'd alter the tone to brown so even a half-blind bigot couldn't mistake one black man for another. The car would have to go too, just to be on the safe side.
He smoothed a hand over the console between driver and passenger seat. A cursory inspection of the contents and it'd look like any other—vehicle registration, proof of insurance along with assorted pens and accumulated junk. It'd pass a routine traffic stop, the odds of one increased by the color of his skin. Without concerted effort, the compartment containing the tranquilizer pistol wouldn't be discovered.
Not that he actually believed he'd get lucky today. What were the odds?
And yet, time after time, just when he needed a replacement, one had dropped into his lap.
The cop's stepdaughter, who should have known better than to get in a stranger's car, delivered to him via her friend. Practically gift wrapped in exchange for drug money. They'd erred in believing there was safety in numbers.
And after that one, the girl who'd actually managed to make him uneasy with her talk of demon lords and hellhounds, she'd practically forced her way into his car when he'd slowed for a better look.
And that latest—before the Russian's Trojan horse—like the very first, the one the news media relished calling Jane Doe, she'd been standing on a corner, his for the taking.
He turned onto the street where Grace lived, passed the ranch-style brick house that she called home.
A white Suburban sat in the driveway, dog jumps visible through rear windows. It made him smile, thinking of the mountains of stuff purchased for Zeus, the steady outflow of cash to cover trips to the groomers and acting classes, those coming after classes for puppy socialization and obedience.
At the end of the block he turned to the right. Circling. Widening that circle. Guided by instinct, by luck, by fate.
And there she was, on a skateboard, leash in hand, the terrier pulling her along.
Perfect. So very perfect.
His nerves jangled. They always did.
He rolled down the windows on both sides, slowed to a crawl and removed the pistol from the hide. He didn't need to check the dart. It was chambered and ready, the tranquilizer fresh, mixed before he left the house because deep down he'd believed after the trauma of the last couple of days, luck would favor him today, that when he returned to deal with the carcasses, he'd be exchanging them for a new guest.
Grace neared a corner.
Grace.
Already the name resonated for him.
He sped up.
Caught up.
Fired.
The dart struck her mid-back, shock and dosage and the force of it toppled her—thankfully onto soft lawn instead of hard curb and street.
He was out of the car and lifting her in an instant.
The terrier darted in, yapping and dancing away. Yapping and dancing away, very nearly plunging him into panic.
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!
The dog was drawing too much attention. More than he'd counted on. And he couldn't afford to be bitten and leave DNA traces.
He shoved Grace into the back seat and sped away. Heart pounding and breath heaving in and out. Nerves vibrating and stomach churning when the dog began chasing.
A block.
A second.
He sped through an intersection.
Heard the squeal of brakes and watched as a car swerved, barely missing the dog.
Another block.
The terrier slowed.
Stopped.
Turned and raced toward home.
* * * * *
Caleb studied Korotkin's house. The Russian had skimped on the security at the Brides' office and the warehouse, but not his home. There were conspicuous cameras, not top of the line, or the latest-and-greatest, but a high enough quality to make getting in a challenge.
Not that he couldn't do it, but it'd take time when he couldn't afford the delay. And going in without taking that time would be risky.
Had they wiped out all of the Russian's crew? Seven in the warehouse, not counting the photographer, plus the one in the alley, plus the one that had disappeared from the secure room.
Jesus, thinking about the last two took him right back where he didn't want to go, where he didn't want to be—caught between believing what he'd always believed or what he'd seen and learned since walking into the Brass Ring that first time.
Shut it down.
Too late for that.
He checked the cell.
She was either still at the Brass Ring or she'd ditched the tracker and he was shit out of luck.
He'd sit on the Russian's house for a little while. He'd made the drive upward into expensive-view territory. Might as well.
Caleb settled in to wait. Tried to keep from circling back to the weird but the weird had been with him from the start. And Mallory—
That'd been a lost battle from go. If he wasn't careful, he'd be pinging bullets off the asphalt saying, She loves me. She loves me not.
He rubbed his chest. Caught himself doing it.
What a fucking mess.
Around and around his thoughts went, until getting on the freeway and dealing with idiots, the insane and the angry, started looking good in comparison.
His hand went to the ignition key, stalled there when he caught sight of a small white car approaching in the rearview mirror. Give it another few.
A gut call, but it paid off when the car got close enough to see the driver.
He recognized the brunette immediately, from one of the files in the Brides' office.
He waited until she'd pulled into Korotkin's driveway and the garage door was rolling up before getting out of the car.
The instant she was inside the garage, the engine off, he sprinted toward it, sliding under before the door could close.
She was still in the car.
He stopped next to her window.
Guilt cut through him at being the cause of her trembling, at adding to the hopelessness and dread in her eyes.
He crouched rather than tower, noticed the maid's costume and tight clench of her hands in her lap. Slavery had a lot of forms, abroad and here at home, though the majority of Americans never wondered if the wait staff or hotel employees or the people producing the goods they bought lived free.
"Don't be afraid. I'm not going to hurt you."
She edged away. Looked away then back, eyes lowered, shoulders curved forward.
"I can help you, if you'll let me. Korotkin is holding your passport? You came here thinking you would marry an American man?"
"Who are you?"
"Matthew. But it doesn't matter. Last night there was a raid on a warehouse Vadim Korotkin owned. Passports kept in the safe were recovered and the women he was holding freed."
The brunette swayed, gaze lifting to meet his. "All of them? How many women? Was Ellena Gavikov among them?"
"There were eleven women and a girl. I don't know any names. I didn't see all of the women or handle the passports, but I can get you somewhere safe and we'll figure out the rest from there."
She hugged herself, rocked, as if she could barely believe freedom was possible and close.
"What's your name?"
"Bela. I am Bela."
"Bela, before we go, I need to search this house. Is there anyone inside?"
"No."
"Do you expect anyone to show up?"
"His men do not come here unless invited. His lawyer Vassily comes, but it is the same, he is invited. His mother will come tomorrow night for dinner."
Hatred flared in her eyes along with renewed fear.
"She works at the Brides From Russia office?"
"Yes." Bela spat the word, hugged herself more tightly.
"Will you let me into the house so I can search? Will you let me take you somewhere safe afterward?"
"He will come back here?"
"Korotkin is dead."
He saw the jolt go through Bela.
Her eyes remained steady on his. "He is dead? You are sure?"
"Positive."
Trembling, she unlocked the car and got out. She led him to the door into the house and disarmed the system.
They stepped inside. Caleb said, "He had an office here?"
"Yes. I will show you."
The door was locked.
"It is the only room in the house he locks," Bela said.
"I can get in. Gather your things. Change clothes if you've got others so you won't be so noticeable."
"I will hurry."
The picks got him into Korotkin's office. There was a wall safe. There was a bank of screens tied to the security feeds—not just the cameras visible externally, but covering every room in the house.
Caleb searched the desk, found nothing of interest except for Korotkin's personal cell. He'd get Bela somewhere safe then he'd contact Zack. He'd have to risk a handoff. He couldn't sit on the phone.
Bela walked in, her meager possessions filling a grocery bag. She shuddered, paled at seeing the screens and he could only guess what she'd been forced to do, at the torment she'd experienced in this prison.
He checked the security feeds. The recorded material started from the time Korotkin left the house the night before.
Caleb erased all the footage then turned off the cameras, made a cursory pass through the house before escorting her to his car.
He found a decent motel, parked, caught the slide of resignation in Bela's eyes, the acceptance that she'd pay for his help on her back.
"The people who raided the warehouse, they aren't the police. The one who took the other women somewhere safe and returned their passports will come for you. He'll tell you if he knows anything about Ellena. It may take an hour for him to come here, or a day even."
He hesitated then touched the arm clutching the grocery sack. "Trust me just a little while longer. Don't run. Give me the chance to help you."
She remained silent, rigid, but he preferred that to false assurances.
He left the car, wondered as he rented a room if she'd bolt.
She was there when he returned.
He opened the passenger door, caught Bela's flinch, but said only, "The woman who works in the Brides' office with Korotkin's mother, does she know about the human trafficking?"
"She is his mistress now but before that, she enjoyed making the porn movies. She knew some of the women in them had no choice."
He opened the motel door, allowing Bela to precede him. Inside he found a writing pad and pen. He scribbled his cell number then pulled his wallet, emptying it of forty-seven dollars in cash and placing it on the pad along with the key card.
"No one knows to look for you here. There shouldn't be any trouble, but call me if there is."
The slightest nod gave him hope that she'd wait for Mikhail, that she'd be able to take the first steps away from this nightmare.
He left.
A block from the motel his heart stopped.
Grace's face lit an electronic billboard.
Amber alert!
Missing child!
Stranger abduction!
He jerked the car to the right, out of traffic. Foot slamming the brake. Adrenaline flooded his system so he shook with it in a way he hadn't when he'd come under fire on that first tour of duty.
His cell was in his hand, his parents' number a digit away from going through before he realized what he was about to do and wrestled down instinct, fought the dictates of his heart, walled himself off from emotion—or tried to.
He couldn't call them, couldn't go to them, couldn't be there for them, not in person, not while he was still under.
Next time…
His throat tightened.
He cleared the phone number from the cell.
The burn phone was in the glove box.
He couldn't look away from Grace's face.
Caleb turned the radio on, found a news channel. His gut roiled and burned and twisted at hearing the reporter say, "A neighbor reports seeing Grace North ride past the house on her skateboard just seconds before a dark blue car being driven by an African American man. The skateboard was found against the curb a few houses away after Grace's dog returned home and her parents began searching. Anyone who might have information should call—"
The number was drowned out, overlaid by remembered conversation, the woman they'd encountered among the snakes talking about another girl, one who looked like Grace, dying while trying to escape after a black man used a tranquilizer dart in an effort to abduct her.
Everything inside Caleb screamed that this was the man Mallory and the others hunted. This was the predator who'd stayed under the radar for a couple of years, but now he was escalating.
Because he couldn't control himself? Because the news reports had him afraid time was running out or gave him a thrill? Because killing the girls provided more gratification than just molesting them?
Caleb choked on a wave of guilt, wondered if because of the news reports, if because of him, his association with Mallory, Grace had been targeted, taken.
For long moments it felt as if his chest had been ripped open so rough hands could plunge in, gripping his heart and delivering excruciating pain.
His throat locked, trapping the swell of anguish there, sending a burn through his jaw. Mallory had ensured her sister was safe, while his—
No.
No. He wasn't responsible for this. Grace being taken because of him only worked if he'd been made.
Deep in his gut he didn't believe the man they'd been hunting knew what he was, who he really was. Deep in his gut, he didn't believe Mallory did either.
He wrestled the worst of the guilt into a cold mental box, but that left his heart banging, a furious pounding of denial and fear and raging conflict.
Vadim Korotkin's phone might hold the clue to the man who'd taken Grace.
He'd intended to hand it off to Zack, to get ahead of cold-blooded murder but now—
The police, the FBI, the task force—if they'd even formed one to look for this monster—none of them knew as much as Mallory did. None of them would act without probable cause, assuming they could pinpoint a likely suspect. But Mallory could, she would, only it wouldn't end there.
He closed his eyes and her voice whispered through his mind.
We've got killing in our blood.
He wouldn't be able to prevent murder if they found Grace's abductor.
I can live with that.
But could he live with betraying Mallory afterward?
He forced the question aside, opening his eyes and drawing a deep harsh breath, because Grace's face remained on the billboard.
I'll be there for you this time and from now on.
I'm coming for you.
Just stay alive. Grace, just be alive when I get to you.
Scenarios played out as he drove to where he'd left the bike. Enough of his training, his sanity survived to swap the car for the Harley before heading to the Brass Ring. Enough of his personal loyalty, to Zack, remained for him to use the burner phone when he reached it.
"Your parents are holding up," Zack said. "We've got men on this."
"Do they have anything?"
"Nothing solid. Not yet. He's smart enough to have avoided traffic cams. But eventually he'll show up on one. Someone will have gotten a partial plate. We'll find him. We'll find her."
Eventually.
Eventually was horror for Grace, for his parents, for him. Eventually was Grace dead, the same way the other girls were. And more pain came, at realizing there'd be no rescue of Iosif's other daughter.
"Those famous spidey senses of yours picking up on anything?" Zack asked. "On someone keeping an eye on the situation?"
He stiffened. "What makes you ask?"
"After Mallory Cassel's face started showing up on screen, I got a call from Deputy Director Bly. A lot of dancing around without either of us imparting information. It gave me an itch."
"Maybe we're about to move into need-to-know territory."
Inexplicably, ice slid down Caleb's spine.
Somebody walking on my grave.
"Maybe. If you get a lead on Grace, you call me, Caleb. You don't go in alone. That's an order. Understood?"
"Understood."
He pocketed the burner phone, not expecting a welcome when he entered the Brass Ring, but some of the pressure eased at finding Mallory sitting with Mikhail at a table, their attention on a TV screen.
Sabin shot pool solo. He looked up, threat and the willingness to kill in eyes that might be sky blue but held a darkness deeper than Mallory's black.
The screens flashed, the TVs in the bar tuned to different stations but covering the same story—Grace's story. Amanda Edson's story, Caitlyn Lawrence's story, a Jane Doe's story, and Christ how many other girls were out there, like Maven Stone and Belinda Brooks and Zinaida Gruzinsky, whose disappearances hadn't been linked to these?
How long until the news media dug deeply enough to come up with the fact that Grace was adopted? That there was a brother who'd served his country? Until one of the few pictures of the four of them as a family, taken when the FBI wasn't a part of his future, surfaced and ended up on the web or plastered across the TV?
It didn't matter. He'd sacrifice himself for Grace. Not that he meant to take unnecessary risks.
On every screen, news reporters rehashed, voices unloading recap and rhetoric and speculation. Details of Grace's abduction along with what was known about the other girls. His eyes met Mallory's. "Come outside?"
Mallory rose, heart double-timing at reading the tension in Matthew's body, triple-timing at reaching him and scenting the desperation, the fear.
Outside he said, "How close are you to finding him?"
"Close." And she hoped it was true. Hayden thought Korotkin had purchased the code from someone in the old KGB, or what replaced it. He was counting on a contact getting back to him—soon. They all were. In less than five hours, the Reaper Lord expected to hunt.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
Matthew shoved hands into his Harley jacket rather than reach for her.
Her heart spasmed at the rejection.
So he'd looked up Hellhounds.
It wouldn't explain the fear, not unless he believed. It didn't explain the desperation in his scent.
"What gives?" she asked.
"I went to Vadim Korotkin's house. He had one of the women from the files there. She let me in, let me search. I found his personal phone."
Mallory held out her hand for it. "Was there a safe?"
"Yes."
They'd figured as much given the one in the office. She'd agreed that it wasn't worth the risk of breaking in when Sabin told her about the cameras he'd seen doing a drive-by of Korotkin's house. Now she was doubly glad for not having to involve Matthew any further.
"Where's the woman?"
"I've got her stashed in a motel. There's a chance she'll bolt, but someone she cares about may have been in that warehouse. I told her someone would come for her, that she'd get her passport back."
"Mikhail will go."
He gave her Bela's name and location, pulled the cell from a pocket, fingers locking it to his palm. "I stay with you. I know Grace North, Mallory. Her brother was in the Army."
"No."
He crowded close, the scent of fear and desperation subsumed for an instant by want, need. The heat between them undeniable, inescapable, and hope was a hawk diving, sinking talons into her heart, that the fear in his scent had nothing to do with what she'd told him and everything to do with Grace North.
"You can't be with us today, Matthew. Can't."
"Then promise you'll call me if you find her. Promise me that much."
"I promise," she said, because it was the right thing to do. Because she was defenseless against the liquid pleading in his voice, the sheen of it in his eyes. Against the knowledge that more than anything else, the girl would need the familiar, she'd need someone she knew and trusted.
His mouth slammed down on hers, sealing the oath with a kiss that scorched through her, feeding the hope that they could make this work and for long moments, obliterating everything else.
He pulled away, handing her the phone. "Be careful, Mallory."
"You too."
* * * * *
Sabin and Mikhail had returned to the ring room.
Mallory entered it, giving the cell to Hayden. "It's Vadim Korotkin's."
"Via Matthew," Hayden said.
"Yes." Her gaze shifted to the desk, to the ledger.
Still undeciphered.
Mikhail lay in the center of the ring. She joined him. Crouched. "Matthew rescued another of the women. Her name is Bela. He's got her stashed at a motel."
Mikhail's eyes opened. "I'll go."
She gave him the location.
He stood.
Hayden opened a desk drawer, tossed a phone to him. "Keep this on."
He nodded and left.
Mallory returned to the desk.
Hayden was working his magic on Korotkin's cell.
Numbers fed in, spawning window after window of personal information on the people they belonged to.
DMV records.
Criminal records.
News mentions.
Anything.
Everything.
Data quickly covered other data and Mallory's heart sped, her mind raced, trying to make connections.
There were too many possibilities.
Hayden's email program pinged.
He shut down the app he was using on the phone, freezing the collage of images and text.
"My source," he said, opening the email.
Unpacking the file.
Printing out code, translated first into Cyrillic letters and numbers, then transcribed to English.
"We'll have to do this by hand."
It took time to decode the entries in the ledger. The slow crawl of it.
Mallory heard it ticking down.
Too late. Too late. Too late.
Finally Hayden said, "Here's the mother."
Viktoriya Evanoff. Moscow. Anja Suvorin. Merchandise destroyed.
And beneath her name, the girls.
Kseniya Evanoff. Moscow. Anja Suvorin. Oscar.
Zinaida Evanoff. Moscow. Anja Suvorin.
Anja Suvorin would be the procurer Iosif had mentioned.
Iosif's daughters had been interchangeable to Korotkin. It hadn't mattered which of them remained locked in the warehouse prison.
Oscar.
"I saw Korotkin on Mulholland when I was hunting a high-end skip. It was a movie industry party."
"On it," Hayden said.
The collage began breaking apart, reforming, reducing because Hayden was looking for legitimate, for mainstream, for the men who had the power to deliver what Korotkin wanted.
Exactly what she didn't know, but she ruled out actor, director, unless he wanted those things for someone he loved. Producer maybe—not hands-on, but another name for a moneyman, the power behind the film.
The images on the screen winnowed down to around fifty, maybe sixty of them. Mallory scanned, tried to connect one of them from the party.
"Anything?" Hayden asked.
She shook her head. "I don't remember seeing any of these faces near Korotkin."
A couple of them looked familiar. She touched the screen. Trey Griffin. Producer. "I think he was there."
Hayden tapped the keyboard. Trey Griffin had a blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter who attended a parochial school. She was seven.
"Close," Mallory said, sickened by the prospect that Griffin was acting out his fantasies with other girls, waiting for his own daughter to get a little bit older.
Hayden found the uniform for the girl's school. The plaid was dark blue and red and green. "Not the same. But maybe it doesn't have be. Recognize anyone else?"
She found four others. Three they could confirm were out of town.
Without getting close, without the witch scent there was no way to clear the fourth.
This was going to take too long.
Hayden continued tugging and digging and massaging information, one man at a time, none of them a sure bet. Her chest got tighter and tighter, her breathing shallower and shallower, until it ceased when the image of Aubrey Spiller appeared on the screen.
The likeness to Sorcha was inescapable.
Her gaze flicked to the picture of Linden Spiller. Blond. Blue-eyed. Like the man Kseniya had described.
Dane growled, low and savage.
She touched the back of his neck. "We've got to be sure."
"Parents were divorced," Hayden said. "Mother a high-powered executive. Father a teacher."
A move and click and the file housing the research on uniforms opened.
"There's the match," Mallory murmured, seeing the name of the school Spiller's father had taught at, along with the image of a uniform that matched the one the Jane Doe clothed herself in when summoned. "Did Spiller go there?"
Hayden dug, shook his head. "Didn't attend. But here's another connection. Aubrey Spiller's dog goes to acting classes. There's a show today."
"The same show Grace North was going to be at?"
More than one news reporter had mentioned the show while showing a picture of the terrier that had alerted Grace's family to her disappearance.
"Yes." Hayden turned, eyes meeting hers, saying, Make the call, Mallory. Don't fuck around.
"Track his phone."
"Done." He swiveled, tapped. "He's at the show."
He probably takes his kids for ice cream and reads them bedtime stories. Lives this whole other life where everybody thinks he's a wonderful dad. And then he comes looking for one of us.
She said, "He'll have another car. He'll have a place he takes the girls. He'll want to get back to Grace as soon as he can and he'll ditch the phone."
"I agree. The house and the car are going to be buried deep." Too deep.
And the Reaper Lord expected to hunt tonight.
Mallory wiped damp palms on her jeans. "Then we get him to come to us. We use Korotkin's name as leverage. Spiller won't refuse a meet if he believes Korotkin is demanding it."
Hayden rocked back in his chair. "Could work, not the warehouse. Korotkin wouldn't have let him see that set-up, or if he did, he'd have brought Spiller in blindfolded. If we tell Spiller to go there he's going to imagine plastic on the floor and a bullet in the head. What about Korotkin's house?"
"I'll call Mikhail. If he's got the woman, he can ask if the house is clear and going to stay that way."
Sabin smirked. "Not going to call your chew toy and ask him?"
Mallory's eyes met Sabin's. She touched the gun at the center of her back.
"Mal," Hayden growled in warning. "We need this asshole."
"Do we?"
Sabin broke the stare by laughing.
"Not pet, not chew toy, what should I call him?"
"Don't call him anything at all."
Don't think about him. Don't go near him.
Sabin's eyes gleamed at hearing what she hadn't said.
"Shoot him later," Hayden said, an edge in his voice. "He's got to be the one to approach Spiller. When we get close to the dog show, I'll send Spiller a text from Korotkin's phone requesting a meeting and giving him the address in case he doesn't know it."
There was no hiding the resemblance to her brothers, no ignoring that her name and face had been in the news. If Spiller was the man they were hunting and one of her brothers showed up, he'd never believe the connection to Korotkin, he'd never believe he wasn't about to walk into a trap.
Sabin's smile was sharp weapon. "Why we don't mix well with humans."
Mallory left the ring room. It was that or put a bullet in him.
* * * * *
Caleb's heart double-tapped when the tracker pinged with Mallory's emergence from the bar.
He kept his eyes on her, lifted the phone, thumb brushing against the screen. Come on, call me. Offer me some hope. Tell me you've got something.
The phone remained silent though Mallory had hers against her face.
Who are you talking to? Your brother?
He'd followed Mikhail to one of the sedans liberated from the warehouse, left it at that since odds were high the junkie was going for Bela.
The junkie's name is Mikhail.
Mallory's voice, sharper in his mind than it had been the night they'd sat outside the pedophile's house. Sly question sliding in behind it, his own.
Wouldn't you shoot up if you were a hellhound? A bearer of death created by an ancient demon who burned his brand into your arm?
She'd gone missing for eight years. They'd all disappeared in childhood, or at least the ones with a childhood that could be documented had.
Mallory reentered the bar and the tracker's signal died.
Caleb dropped the phone, scrubbed his hands over his face, trying not to think about what might be happening to Grace, what might have already happened, about his parents.
He wanted to be with them. They needed him now, and here he was sitting, waiting, hoping the killers he'd been sent to bring to justice would find the man they were hunting—and he couldn't get Mallory off his mind, couldn't get the things he'd read, the things he'd witnessed off his mind.
It was a relief when the three of them and Dane emerged from the bar and climbed into the Jeep.
This is it.
Had to be.
He let them get far enough ahead that the chance of them noticing the tail, even though he had swapped the bike for the car, was slim. Slim, but not nonexistent.
He slowed when they did, sweat making his shirt cling. His guts twisted when they entered a parking garage, forcing him to keep going or take the chance and follow.
He passed, circled, found a place on a side street and waited, heart thundering like round after round of heavy artillery fire.
Mallory emerged, driving one of the sedans from the warehouse.
A minute later the Jeep came out, Hayden driving, Sabin next to him.
The tracker made it an easy choice.
He followed the Jeep, going hot and cold when he realized they were close to where Grace and his parents would have been, should have been right now, instead of trapped in a nightmare.
Hayden parked and went into Starbucks. Sabin sauntered away like he didn't have a care in the world while the app showed Mallory closing in on Korotkin's place, probably checking to see if he'd missed something.
Caleb's guts cramped. Adrenaline dumped out of his system, leaving him nauseous. They didn't have anything, not yet. They were still looking for clues.
* * * * *
Linden's chest swelled as Aubrey and her classmates, along with their dogs, took a fourth bow on the makeshift stage. Like the other parents, and Julia at his side, he had his phone up, recording images he would cherish for years to come.
The cell buzzed with a text he ignored. Nothing was as important as these moments watching Aubrey.
His daughter far outshone her classmates. But even if she hadn't, it wouldn't diminish his love and pride.
A fifth bow and the instructor stepped forward, thanking everyone and officially ending the program. Squeals of laughter were accompanied by excited barks as the show participants jumped from the stage and raced to their families.
"You were wonderful!" he said, hugging Aubrey tightly, Julia joining him.
Aubrey bounced on her toes. "Zeus was too!"
He laughed, disengaging long enough to scratch behind the sheepdog's ears. "He certainly was."
"I can hardly wait for the next class to start!"
Around them, he heard other children expressing the same sentiment, other parents telling their child they'd been the best. He smiled, it was their prerogative, though far too quickly the mood of the crowd shifted.
In this town, the show always went on. But ears sharply attuned to it, fed by the high that lingered from his daring, brilliant acquisition and the heady anticipation of returning to the house and starting a new relationship, caught the hushed mentions of Grace North.
There was worry in some of the voices, titillation in others, at being even peripherally involved in something now at the forefront of the news. But along with the talk, the speculation, came glances at Aubrey, who looked so much like her missing classmate. And that he couldn't tolerate. He wouldn't have her happiness, her moment of glory tainted in any way.
"What do you say we celebrate with ice cream at Andretti's?"
It earned him another hug. Aubrey's face shone, her eyes alight with love as she looked up at him. "Can we eat outside so Zeus can have some?"
"Absolutely."
He took her hand, placing his other at the center of Julia's back.
They were steps away from the exit when a blond blocked their way, eyes like blue ice, his presence creating inexplicable fear.
"A moment of your time," the man said. "For Vadim."
Linden's skin chilled. His hand tightened involuntarily on Aubrey's before releasing it. "You go with your mother in her car. I'll meet you at Andretti's."
Julia hesitated, attuned to him, picking up on his fear of this man the same way she could spot him needing rescue at a party.
"I'll catch up to you," he said.
She and Aubrey stepped around the blond.
"A lovely family," he said, and there was no mistaking the threat in his voice. "Vadim wishes you to join him. You are to go to his house now. You know the way?"
Linden retrieved his phone, saw that the text he'd missed was from the Russian. He would make his excuses to Korotkin, arranging to meet when it was convenient.
The call went to voicemail. Before he could leave a message, the blond said, "Vadim is not a man to slight. He wishes to meet with you now. It would be smarter to tell your wife you will be delayed rather than risk his sending men to Andretti's or to your home to persuade you to join him."
Linden's heart sped. If Korotkin thought he could make threats against Julia and Aubrey he was mistaken.
Perhaps it was time to learn how to channel the magic in a different way, to use it to kill rather than only capturing it by killing. It would mean making a concerted effort to find a black-magic practitioner.
His skin crawled at the prospect. He was not so naive as to believe he was the only one in Los Angeles touched by magic. He'd just preferred not to make himself known to them.
Secrets in this glittering, shallow town were often the currency that got results. He'd believed he had far too much to lose to risk exposing any of his. But going forward he would begin making discreet inquiries.
Until then, he would deal with the Russian. Nothing had changed.
Korotkin's lackey was not Korotkin. Quite possibly the Russian wanted to apologize in person for not being able to deliver as promised last night. Maybe Korotkin meant to offer an alternative selection, even compensate by making it a gift.
Linden wet his lips. If he killed a girl who would most definitely be damaged goods, it would add months to his enjoyment of Grace.
How much risk could there be when he was free to let others know his destination?
"Tell Vadim I am on my way."
* * * * *
Mallory's phone buzzed with a text message.
He's all yours.
"He's coming," she said, not moving from the window.
She fisted her hand rather than feel the cold phantom weight of the gun she'd be offered for a third time.
Mikhail joined her, touching his shoulder to hers. "We'll have to take him quickly, Mal, before he can cast a spell."
No hesitating. No crisis of conscience. No second guessing.
She slipped an arm around his waist. "I'll do what I have to do."
"It gets easier."
That's what I'm afraid of.
The minutes crawled, until Linden Spiller pulled into the driveway, then they sped.
He looked ordinary, or Hollywood ordinary, anyway.
Average build, attractive looks, a confidence that came with money and power and perceived entitlement.
She positioned herself to the right of the door, so she'd remain out of sight until it had closed.
Dane stretched out to the left of it, appearing more pet than predator.
Mikhail opened the door even as the bell rang, grabbing Spiller and jerking him into the house.
Mallory slammed the door shut. Rammed into Spiller from behind.
Dane sprang, the three of them taking their prey to the floor as they'd once done together in Hell, the air thick with the smell of sulfur.
Spiller fought like the merely human.
Writhed and bucked.
Panted and gasped.
The scent of his fear intensified, becoming lush bouquet so howl welled inside her, hot and dry like the Santa Anna winds, a call to violence that threatened to climb out of her throat.
They got his wrists bound behind his back, rolled him so he lay on his arms, his hands pressed to his spine.
"Do you have any idea who I am?" he panted.
"We know," she said, pulling her knife.
A snick and it opened, shiny and sharp and deadly.
They had to be right. She thought they were but there were no guarantees.
If they were wrong, it would come down to a choice between conscience and survival. Spiller had seen their faces.
She slid the blade beneath the chain he wore, lifted until a medallion slid free of the shirt.
Mikhail's hand encircled her wrist. "He gets to keep it."
"Maven Stone thought he was a witch, but he's not one, is he?"
Beneath them Spiller jolted at hearing a name not in the news, the name of a girl whose parents had sought a different brand of justice, one that wouldn't allow for escape by hiring expensive lawyers or fleeing the country. His heart thundered at recognizing he was in the presence of others who knew about magic, whose lives touched the supernatural.
Mikhail used the hand on her wrist to slide the blade beneath the medallion, to flip it over so he could read the sigils and symbols on both sides. "He's only human, Mal. A human preying on other humans. He's diseased, not just because he likes molesting little girls. In the end he sacrifices them to keep himself alive."
She remembered the Reaper Lord's sly smile. The stomp and crush of the mouse, leaving a cockroach to scuttle away. The touch, moments later, of his hand to Mikhail's mother, the transfer of magic that transformed her from gray and wraithlike to a red-lipped Snow White awaiting her lover's kiss. Souls were just another type of sustenance in Hell.
He'd duplicated what the man he wanted to hunt did, and she understood that even with bone or ash or hair, the girls Spiller had sacrificed couldn't have been summoned and made aware enough to provide answers. He hadn't been able to capture and consume all their soul-magic, but he'd taken enough, what was left was like what remained after meeting the heel of her sire's boot.
Mikhail released her wrist. She let the witch charm fall to Spiller's chest.
They had him now. Before they left, she'd have answers, not just for Matthew, but for those who cared about the other girls.
"Let's start at the beginning. Was the Jane Doe the first person you sacrificed?"
"You don't know what kind of power you're dealing with. The witch who created the medallion for me will come after you."
The carrion scent assaulting her said otherwise.
"Lie," she said and touched the blade to his neck.
The reflexive jerk of his head opened skin. The rich metallic scent of his blood stirred predatory nature and made her want to exchange cold steel for sharp canines.
She let her eyes become amber.
He began trembling.
Her mouth watered. "Was the Jane Doe your first sacrifice?"
"Yes."
"What was her name?"
"Elizabeth Sayers. That's what she called herself."
And with no additional threat, he answered her questions as to where he'd dumped the bodies of Caitlyn Lawrence, Bailey Morsey, Maven Stone and Zinaida Gruzinsky.
The scent of jalapenos eradicated the smell of fear at mention of Iosif's daughter. Remembering the captured fog and howling desolation of the soul in Rahmiel's orb, Mallory asked, "What did Zinaida do to you?"
The jalapeno scent deepened. "I saved her from years of abuse and she killed herself. She wasted the lives of the others. She reduced me to slaughtering animals."
Or Rahmiel had.
Mallory's hand dipped, the urge to slash across Spiller's throat so strong that she only barely stopped herself from doing it.
"Where's Grace North?"
Cunning entered his eyes. He smiled. "Kill me and she slowly starves to death."
She leaned in, touched her hand to his chest and could feel his soul fluttering frantically against her palm, as desperate and terrified as those in the morgue had been.
"You don't think you'll tell me what I want to know in Hell?"
His bowels let loose.
She rocked backward, a futile human move to escape the stink, though the Hound part of her had a far different reaction.
Dane bristled and growled. His muscles rippled, clamoring for that moment when prey was brought down and savaged.
"Not so much fun when you're the victim, is it?" she said, blanking her mind to what it must have been like for the girls Spiller had molested and killed.
Mikhail rolled his shoulders. Bones subtly popped with his desire to shed skin for fur. His magic rose along with his desire to run beneath the moon. It brushed against her like a sleek Hound.
"Tell him he'll get his chance at freedom, if he can outrun us. Let's get out of here, Mal."
"Where's Grace North?"
Where there's life, there's hope, Linden thought.
It had been his mother's mantra as the disease advanced, as she sought out more and more unorthodox treatments for him, finally dragging him to a hovel in Haiti, a place where the mud stank of goats.
He believed them. They'd let him go. They'd hunt him.
But they'd allow him to keep the medallion. While he possessed it, he stood a chance of surviving.
He could outthink them, outwit them, outrun them. At their core they were beasts, though he kept his eyes off the dog.
My family is looking for me. They're praying for me. The demon lord will send his hounds for you.
The girl's voice rang in his head—smug taunt now instead of the fearful threat it had been then.
When he'd seen the tattoo at her wrist, a goat's head made part of a pentacle, he should have released her, should have learned more about her family as insurance. If he escaped—
When he escaped, he'd act on the intention to find a way to use magic to kill, or he'd buy the magic that would allow him to defend himself and his family. He wouldn't be caught again.
Where there's life, there's hope.
He gave them the address, hesitated over giving them the code to the room, then decided withholding it might delay his own freedom.
He thought it reasonable to ask, "When will I be set free?"
"At sunset," the man answered, standing. "Let's leave, Mal. The others should be close by now."
They hauled him into the garage and put him in a sedan's trunk as if he were garbage to be disposed of, as if he were already a carcass or a corpse. But they were underestimating him.
He would survive. Not just survive, but come out of this stronger, smarter, more powerful.
* * * * *
A ping had Caleb's pulse spiking. Mallory was on the move and heading his way, toward Hayden and Sabin four blocks ahead of him.
Attention flicking from car to cell, he waited until the last possible moment to make a quick turn and pull over to the curb. He couldn't risk getting caught tailing them, couldn't be sure Mikhail didn't have a description of the car after retrieving Bela from the motel room and questioning her.
The tracker stopped moving, just for a heartbeat, two, three, then kept coming his way. He watched the red dot marking Mallory's approach, eyes finally shifting from cell to rearview mirror.
They'd switched cars. She was driving the Jeep now instead of the sedan and it looked like she was alone.
He jerked away from the curb on a surge of adrenaline. Fuck! He couldn't let the others get out of sight.
His cell chimed with Mallory's tone. A fist plowed through his chest, cracking it open and sucking the breath out of him. "Tell me something."
"I know where Grace is."
She gave him an address, a code to get into Grace's prison.
"It's up to you how you handle it," she said.
The call dropped without her making any promises that his sister was alive.
Moment of choice and he made his. He grabbed the burner phone and called Zack. "I have a lead on Grace. I'm going in."
"Not alone. I'm going with you. This needs to be on record, official, the scene uncompromised and your ass covered, with no reporters showing up to catch you on film."
"Then you better get moving."
Let her be alive.
Please let her be alive.
It circled through his head as he sped toward the address.
They'd get through this. Counseling. Love. Whatever it took. They'd get through this, just let her be alive.
He reached the address a minute before Zack.
The house was brown adobe with barred windows, not a terrible neighborhood, but not a great one either.
Zack popped his trunk, pulled out a thirty-five-pound door ram, handing it off as they both pounded to the front door.
All of Caleb's fear, all his rage went into the first strike.
The second.
The door crashed open, and they surged into the house, guns drawn.
"Jesus," Caleb said, heart banging against his ribs and throbbing in his throat, his chest like a balloon expanding to the point of popping.
Stacks of cages lined the wall, all of them empty.
The place reeked of urine-soaked newspaper.
They checked for possible threats.
Room by room by room.
Adrenaline surging faster and faster.
Pulse pounding harder and harder.
Anxiety mounting with every second spent doing anything but reaching Grace.
A final, "Clear," and he stood in front of the key pad. He stabbed the numbers, breath locked down tight in his throat, heart pounding fast enough to explode if—
The lock disengaged.
He shoved into the room.
His sister huddled defensively on the bed, a tight donut of misery.
"Grace," he choked out, a near sob.
She jerked upright. Scrambled off the bed, eyes shining.
They met, her body colliding with his, an arm going around him, a deep sob escaping her slight frame.
Her tears wet his shirt.
His wet her hair.
He hugged her. Rocked.
Thank you, Mallory.
"You're okay now," he said. "It's going to be okay now."
He repeated it over and over. Minute after minute, like a needle stuck on an old vinyl record track, needing to hear it, needing to believe it, needing it to be true.
He hung on to her, wanting the relief and joy to last, wanting to hold the what comes next at bay—Grace's thinking about what had been done to her, reliving it.
Pinpricks of pain lanced his chest.
Something squirmed between them.
Grace struggled and his arms tightened, making her wriggle harder.
"You're squishing him," she said against his chest, and he heard the sound of a squeaky mew.
He released her.
She clutched an orange tabby kitten.
Something left for her by the man who'd kidnapped her, who ultimately intended to kill her after he'd—
Caleb's mind shied away, returned to it.
"We need to call Mom and Dad. We'll have them meet us at the hospital."
Grace jerked. Paled. Clutched the kitten against her chest with both hands.
Incendiary rage poured into him. He hoped the hellhounds had the man who'd taken Grace. He didn't care if they killed him.
"Did you recognize the guy who took you? Did he tell you his name?"
"I never saw him. When I woke up I was in here and Marmalade was licking my face."
Grace moved into him.
His arms went around her.
She shivered, whispered, "I don't feel any different. I don't think anything happened to me while I was asleep."
She looked up at him, eyes wet, pleading for it to be true. She'd already seen too much of what people were capable of, in the time before her junkie mother overdosed and Elaine gained custody.
Caleb's throat felt raw. His chest burned.
Let me have gotten here in time.
"You still need to be checked out at the hospital. And we need to call Mom and Dad."
He turned toward Zack and noticed the markings on the ceiling and floor and walls. Christ.
Zack was shooting video with his cell, probably streaming it back to the office.
Caleb's hindbrain roused, racing his heart, pouring the urge to flee into his system. It was worse than what he'd experienced in the Satanists' temple, not as bad as the surge of adrenaline and wild pounding in his ears at stepping into the room at the bar and seeing the brass ring set in the floor.
Analyze it later. It can wait until after Grace is safe with Mom and Dad.
"How do you want to handle this?" he asked.
"We'll take it from here," a male voice answered from the doorway.
Caleb whirled, gun hand already up.
The man had both of his lifted, a badge in the left. "Agent Rivers."
He moved from the doorway. "My partner, Agent Cason."
Short hair, dark glasses, dark suit, dark tie on a pristine white shirt, they looked like they'd stepped out of casting for Men in Black.
"Operation Hellhound is ours now," Rivers said. "You'll surrender the relevant files and be debriefed."
Meaning the investigation would disappear, probably leaving no record it had ever existed. Caleb's gut said he was looking at the men who'd set it in motion, feeding it to Zack and monitoring the situation.
They had to have been waiting for the moment to reclaim it. He was betting Zack's video had been the trigger.
Zack moved toward Rivers. "On whose authority?"
"Deputy Director Bly. Feel free to contact him."
The call was short.
Zack gave Caleb a nod.
Both of them holstered their guns.
Cason held his hand out. "I'll make sure the girl gets to the hospital and your parents are notified while you and Agent Reid go in for debriefing. We'll get word out that she's been recovered."
"No." No fucking way was he handing Grace off. "If the operation is over then I'm out from undercover. I'm staying with my sister."
I'm done with not being there for her.
Rivers shook his head. "There's only one way you could have found this place. You're a dead man if your face shows up and you're identified as an agent. They'll kill you in a heartbeat if they think you've betrayed them."
Grace trembled against him, sending ache spasming through his chest. He tightened the arm he had around her. "I'll take that risk. My sister needs me."
"We can't let you do that," Rivers said.
"I don't want you to be killed," Grace whispered, and he could feel her trying to make herself let go of him.
"We compromise," he told Rivers. "I stick until we hand Grace off to my parents."
Rivers and Cason shared a look.
"We make the arrangements," Rivers said.
"Done."
Cason stepped out of the room to take care of it.
Rivers said, "Do you have an ID on this guy?"
"No." Though chances were good they'd have one within the hour. There'd be prints, DNA, other clues.
Cason came back. "All set. Agent North, Agent Reid, Grace."
Caleb kissed the top of Grace's head. "Mom and Dad are going to be so happy to get you back. Don't expect them to let you out of their sight anytime soon."
Just inside the shattered doorway he took off the Harley jacket, used it to cover her hair. "Keep your head down."
Cason tossed Caleb his jacket to use as a shield. He flung it over his head.
"Agent Snow will take you in for debriefing, Agent Reid."
"Our rides?" Zack asked.
"They'll be cleared from the scene."
"See you on the other side," Zack said, eyes connecting with Caleb's.
He left. Cason said, "We're the near sedan. I'll get the door. You get in ASAP. Neighbors are already standing in front of their houses, cell phones aimed at the action."
They followed him out. Slid into the back.
Grace pressed so tightly against Caleb that he thought her age was probably the only thing that kept her from climbing onto his lap.
The kitten's purr was a loud rumble in the car. He stroked orange fur and asked, "How's Turbo going to handle the competition?"
"He'll be fine. He's good with Merissa's hamster and Rowan's Siamese cat. He only wants to play with Milli, the five-pound Chihuahua in our acting class."
The tightness in his chest eased. She sounded so normal, so everyday. He swallowed against the sudden burn in his throat, allowed himself to believe that he'd reached her in time.
He didn't look away from her until the sedan slowed and entered a parking garage. It climbed to the fourth level. The entrance was blocked by yellow police tape.
A dark-suited agent removed the tape long enough to allow the car to pass. Cason parked, not joining them when they got out to wait.
Caleb took Grace's hand. "They'll be here soon."
"You'll come home now, for good?"
"As soon as I can. I'll be there for you from now on."
Her hand squeezed his. "You're always there, even when you're not."
They heard the car before they saw it.
A sedan identical to the others pulled onto the fourth level and was allowed past the yellow police tape.
It approached, slowed.
The back doors were opening before it came to a complete stop.
His parents emerged. Tears streamed down his mother's face. His father's eyes were reddened.
Grace was already rushing toward them.
She crashed into them.
He was only a heartbeat behind, going in easy where she'd gone hard, arms around each of his parents.
His chest burned. His throat burned. His eyes burned.
If not for Mallory…
His hand dipped into his pocket. Hours of staring at the app made it easy to shut it down.
I won't betray you.
Behind his family, the driver motioned a wrap-this-up signal.
"You should get going," he said. The news was probably already breaking—or rumor of it anyway, fueled by Tweets and posts and tips. "I'll catch up with you when I can."
His mother wouldn't separate without hugging him tightly. Neither would his father or Grace.
He waited until they were in the sedan and through the barrier before turning. Cason was out of the car, hand out. "Cell phone."
They'd find the app if they dug, but he wasn't going to give them reason to. He surrendered it. "I get it back after the debrief?"
"Yeah."
He took the front passenger seat, half expecting to be ordered into the back.
Cason twisted, making no move to start the engine. "Who's in charge now that Bastian Kerr is dead?"
The desire to protect Mallory came on strong, strong enough that Caleb's first instinct was to send them sniffing after Sabin. But if they were close enough to the situation to have shown up so quickly, then they probably knew.
Lying would destroy his credibility, and he might need it. He said, "She is."
Cason's smile was small and fleeting. "She was always our best chance. We just had to wait long enough. It's going to be hard for you to keep that promise to your sister unless the four of you disappear, and stay disappeared—or you stay under, working for us. We need people who can manage unusual talent."
Unusual talent.
The word reverberated, resonated, revealed.
The gossamer-thin denial he'd managed since Mallory left her apartment fell.
Cason knew the brands weren't just symbolic. He fucking knew Mallory and the others were—weren't completely human.
Caleb's gut burned hot thinking about Grace's prison, the place other girls hadn't made it out of alive. And that burn crawled upward into his chest at wondering if Rivers and Cason would secure and use the man who'd created that room—if they got to him before Mallory and the others did—rather than turn him over to face the death penalty.
Caleb leaned back, forced himself to visibly relax. "I'm listening."
And when this was done, he'd find Mallory.
Cason laughed and cranked the engine. "More talking is above my pay grade. Recruitment is Snow's department."
* * * * *
The moon dominated the horizon, orange and full and beautiful, spilling light into darkness, a Hunter's Moon.
Mallory wondered how far Spiller had gotten. There was no turning back, no turning away from this hunt.
She'd put off entering the Angeles National Forest and finding the others until she couldn't any longer. But at least she had the satisfaction of knowing Grace North had been found alive. At least she had the satisfaction of knowing there would be partial closure, for the families of the other girls, though unless Spiller's body was discovered, they'd never know he'd paid for his crimes.
She clasped the dog tag, wishing she'd heard from Matthew, wishing he'd shown up at the apartment, wishing she knew whether he'd looked up Hellhound, whether he could accept this, accept her. Chill invading, because the Reaper Lord needed to accept her choice too.
"It's time," Hayden said.
The soul jars and orbs were already placed an equal distance apart on an imaginary circle. Tonight there were no candles, no water from their sire's realm, none of the trappings of magic. Tonight power was measured by pain and blood and terror and the joyous baying of Hounds.
The men stripped out of their clothing, Sabin trying to catch her eye. She ignored him, fought a shiver as Hayden spoke over the knife and that alone was enough to fill her nostrils with the scent of pine trees and rain, to make her aware of the trapped souls swirling, frantic to escape their glass prisons.
The scent of pine trees and rain changed into that of patchouli. These souls didn't belong to the Reaper Lord.
She slashed a deep cut in her forearm, lowered her hand so blood streamed across her palm to fall onto the ground, her life pumped out with each beat of her heart.
Words flowed from her mouth, ancient, archaic commands gained in the challenge circle when her sire's leash thickened and changed and she became alpha.
She walked the circle thirteen times. It took that many to reach the end of the spell.
With the last word her blood offering turned to fire so hot it shattered orbs and jars, opening a doorway between worlds.
The Reaper Lord arrived astride the black horse with fiery eyes and deadly horn. He came accompanied by a hoard of garish clowns riding lesser creatures, the scent of Hell filling the night along with the hyena sounds of their laughter.
Motioning to her brothers and Sabin, he said, "Change them," and one by one she turned them inside out, pulling Hound forward until it overtook human form.
When it was done he indicated the second horse and she swung into the saddle to ride at his side as she'd done in Hell.
"Listen, daughter," he said, his power surging, moving over and through her, and though he didn't speak, his words took shape inside her head, manifested will and she understood their purpose.
She looked backward, the horse prancing beneath her.
Behind nightmare clowns, souls were granted form, becoming part of the hunt astride red-eyed goats.
Viktoriya and Iosif and Zinaida.
Caitlyn Lawrence and Bailey Morsey.
Maven Stone.
Amanda Edson.
The Jane Doe who'd told Spiller her name was Elizabeth Sayers.
This hunt would free them.
If it ended with death, Spiller's soul for theirs.
As the Reaper Lord had done in Hell, he passed her the silver horn.
She carried it to her lips.
Surrendered breath. Felt as though she surrendered soul with the sound of terror unleashed into this world.
The Hounds charged off, noses to the ground, baying at catching Linden Spiller's scent.
The horses and the mounted creatures behind them surged forward.
He stood no chance without a head start.
He stood no chance at all.
But then his victims hadn't either.
Branches scraped against her legs and arms, forcing her to duck and twist in the saddle.
Mile after mile they rode. The years in Hell overlaying the present, conditioning and a Hound's nature creating unwanted thrill, whispering temptation, to give in, to accept, to embrace what she was: a killer.
The moon rose, becoming smaller.
The night deepened.
Even in the saddle, the strengthening scent of their quarry reached her.
The Hounds began baying again, their voices the deep trumpeting of impending victory.
They scrambled, kicking rock and dirt and leaves behind them. They caught Spiller, surrounded him before he plunged into a ravine.
His fine clothing was torn, streaked with dirt and saturated with sweat. His eyes were wild, his breathing gasps intermixed with whimpers.
The Reaper Lord turned to her, the black satin bag marked with golden symbols in his hand. When she didn't reach for it, his head tilted in the direction of the spirit riders. "They are mine until you free them, Mallory."
She took the bag.
The horse knelt, and she slid from the saddle.
Her feet touched the ground and satin bag became black ash, falling away to leave nothing between her skin and the cold steel of the gun.
No shot fired from it would miss its target.
No shot fired from it would pass through the heart it struck.
No shot fired from it would be survived.
Conscience tried to make a final stand, a lifelong resistance to becoming a killer, a true Hound. But the sight of Amanda and Caitlyn and Maven and Elizabeth, all so much like Sorcha in appearance, drove it back.
The dog tag lay against her skin, a warm reminder of Matthew.
How did you make your peace with killing?
By believing that sacrifices need to be made for the greater good.
A sacrifice of self, and she was uniquely qualified to make the world she wanted to live in a better place.
She had never wanted to become judge and jury and executioner, but as Spiller's features began to change into that of her mother's in an effort to escape this fate, she touched a finger to the trigger.
Pulled.
The gun's recoil traveled up her arm and into her chest, cold and sharp like black obsidian, but it was met and rebuffed by love, by fear, by the belief that both would keep her from becoming an indiscriminate killer.
Linden Spiller's body dropped to the ground, his soul flying to her father's hand, mouth gaping in a silent scream.
The Reaper Lord closed his fist around it.
Garish, hyena-voiced clowns disappeared.
For an instant, the dead lived as more than body-housed wraiths.
Mallory's eyes met Iosif's, seeing thanks there, and then peace before form disappeared and spirit was freed for what came next.
The horse the Reaper Lord rode sidestepped, getting close enough that her sire's black-clothed thigh pressed to the brand, just as he'd once pressed the hot iron to her skin.
"A satisfying hunt, daughter."
She fought down the remembered scent of burning flesh, the remembered pain, the smell of patchouli. She inhaled instead to gauge the breadth and depth of pine trees and rain, the tag Matthew gave her a reminder that she wanted what her mother had with Phillip.
She looked up at the Reaper Lord, into eyes that were unknowable abyss. "A boon?"
His smile was sharp, always and forever like the flash of a knife created for paring souls. "Claim the human as your mate if you want him, Mallory. It serves my purposes."
Refusal was her immediate response. Denial of his plan for her.
It was countered by a Hound's need for companionship, a human's need for love.
Having Matthew in her life made her stronger, not weaker.
The Reaper Lord reached down and cupped her cheek. "If he betrays you, I'll take his soul. I have no desire for my daughter to hunt in human prisons."
Her heart bounded, a fast, violent pulsing that throbbed up her neck and into his hand. She nodded, accepting his truth.
If Matthew was going to be a part of her world, he needed to accept her for what she was, a Hellhound, a Reaper Lord's daughter, a killer. He needed to understand what he risked.
Her sire's hand fell away. "Remain behind, Sabin."
Mallory shoved the gun into her waistband. "We're done here."
She turned away, thought of the debt to Rahmiel and wondered what hunt he would soon set them on now that this one was done.
Dane came to her side and she reached for the magic between them, pushing the Hound toward his center and pulling the human from it, changing him—and then, one-by-one the others.
She began walking. Dane moved in, shoulder brushing against hers. "I'm not sure you should trust Matthew. I don't think he's what he seems. I think he may be a cop."
Her heart lurched and tumbled. She slid into a lope, wondering if she was running toward the man she wanted or toward another death.
* * * * *
Caleb leaned against the Harley. The night sounds were back to normal and had been for over an hour, but the gun shot still echoed in his ears along with the baying of hounds. Both were accompanied by the sense that they had traveled over an unnatural distance.
He'd be lying to himself if he said he wasn't afraid. A part of him still wanted to deny this reality.
The holstered gun didn't offer a hell of a lot of comfort. There were enough of them to take him out before he could get a shot off.
He shuddered, remembering Dane's kill in the alley.
He had no warning of their approach.
One instant the moon lit a line of trees, and in the next, they emerged, slipping silently from blackened wilderness like a pack of predators.
His skin pebbled despite the warm night, despite seeing Dane Moira and not the dog. He fought against reaching for the gun.
"He's mine," Mallory said.
To kill?
To keep?
"You guys leave."
Dane's eyes flared red and Caleb stopped pretending that he'd only imagined seeing it before.
Mallory reached out, touched Dane's arm. "This is my choice. Take the Jeep."
She peeled away from her brothers, came toward him and a firebomb exploded in his chest. He wanted her. There was no rational explanation, but he did, and it didn't have anything to do with the job.
Reaching him, she said, "The dog tag?"
"Yeah."
She didn't resist when he pulled her against him, hands travelling down her back, stopping at encountering what he'd bet was the Colt M1911 that should be in police custody, hell, that shouldn't even exist.
"LAPD? FBI? Homeland Security? What flavor of cop are you?"
"The second."
"And the girl who was taken? More than the sister of a guy you knew in the Army?"
"My sister."
"She's okay?"
"A little spooked, but that's all."
"I'm glad. Is that why you're here alone? Giving us a free pass?"
"No." He nuzzled her neck, breathed in her scent, mysterious forests and wild waterfalls. "I'm here because I want you. I want an us."
"That's a dangerous choice."
He nipped her neck, soothed the bite with the stroke of his tongue. Fire coursed through his bloodstream with the tremble of her body. "I've been in dangerous situations before."
"Not like this one. We're all killers. If you betray me, you'll end up dead, your soul in the possession of a demon lord, a Reaper Lord, the being who sired me."
He kissed upward, lips feathering across her ear. His hand moved from waist to arm, his palm covering the brand "I'll protect you, not betray you. A special unit swooped in and took over the investigation. They were the ones who fed it to my unit in the first place. They didn't go to all this trouble because they want to arrest you. They want to use you. You're going to need someone on the inside."
"And you'll be that guy on the inside?"
"I'll be your man, inside and out." His mouth left her ear, his eyes meeting hers. "You killed the man who took Grace?"
"Yes."
"Why leave the body?"
"Because we hunt in prison too. Because the Reaper Lord doesn't consider it a sacrifice if one of his sons ends up there. I'm his only daughter. I don't know what that means, only that my being with you—being with a human—suits his purposes."
His fingertips brushed the gun. "You should get rid of this thing."
"It's not that easy, Matthew."
"Caleb," he said, kissing her lightly, briefly, wanting everything in the open before they left the clearing. "Matthew is my middle name. Caleb Matthew North."
Her hand slid up to cover his heart. She murmured his name and he liked the sound of it on her lips.
"My father has a boat. We'll wipe the prints from the gun and dump it in the ocean."
"It'll only come back to me. But you already know that."
Her eyes held hints of red, warning him against lying.
"Think I know. Strongly suspect. That's closer to the truth. For this to work, you've got to let me in, all the way in, Mallory."
Warmth spread through Mallory, tangled with desire. Caleb's scent told her everything she needed to know. It was rich loam and home.
"No more secrets," she said, her lips joining with his in a wet slide, tongues delving, delivering ultimatum and promise and pleasure beneath a Hunter's Moon.
# # #
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