Siobhan didn’t bother looking around the room. She evidently didn’t need another glance at the apartment to know what I was alluding to. “A messy home full of affection is better than a grand house filled with people who don’t care about you.” Her smile hadn’t faded, but it had lost some of its joy. There was sadness in her words she seemed all too accustomed to.
“You love him?” I hadn’t thought of Shane in romantic terms during the time I’d known him. He was handsome enough if you were into the whole scruffy bad-boy thing, but he was also my underling. It’s hard to think of someone as sexy when you had control over their life.
“Love’s a funny thing.”
Oh yeah, it was a laugh riot. “If by funny you mean something only an idiot would participate in…then yes.”
“I hear you’re quite the idiot.”
I laughed, probably for the first time in a month. Being called an idiot had never felt so good. “Yeah, you could say that.”
The front door swung open with a crash, cutting our laughter short. Siobhan and I pivoted, her hand going for a baton on the coffee table, while I chambered a round in my gun and aimed it at the new arrival.
Shane stepped through the entrance, completely soaked by blood and holding a machete. There was a feral glint in his eyes, and I wasn’t sure he noticed I had a gun aimed at his head.
“Shane?” Siobhan put the baton back on the table. “What’s wrong?”
He acknowledged us then for the first time. “Secret?” He shifted his attention from his diminutive lady love over to me. “You’re here?”
“You drew the short straw this week, remember?”
He might have looked confused, but it was hard to tell with the blood coating his skin and clothing. “Is your gun loaded?”
“Yes.” When did I ever carry an unloaded weapon?
“Good,” he said. “I need your help. We have to go kill something.”
Kill something. Music to my ears.
Chapter Two
Since Shane didn’t bother cleaning the blood off himself before we left the apartment, I had to assume whatever we were hunting was a baddie of the biggest variety.
I wasn’t keen on Siobhan tagging along, but Shane didn’t tell her to stay home, so maybe she could hold her own. Far be it for me to assume a girl, especially a small one, couldn’t kick butt in a fight.
We skirted the block Shane’s shitty apartment complex was on, and Siobhan and I followed the bloodstained hunter down an alley and through a minefield of moldy cardboard boxes. Between the puddles and the stench I was relieved I’d opted for boots that evening instead of open-toed heels.
“Where are we going?” I jumped sideways when one of the boxes groaned. A scraggly homeless man swore at me and fixed the wall of his Frigidaire palace.
“It went this way.” He pointed at a nearby building, an apartment identical to Shane’s own, but this one appeared vacant. Leave it to our quarry to pick an abandoned building for its lair.
The shittier the digs, the happier the monster.
Shane wasn’t waiting for us. He ducked under a peeled-back section of chain-link fence and vanished around the back corner of the building.
“He’s gotten faster,” I observed.
“He had to.” Siobhan moved ahead of me, following Shane’s route.
I’d vanished for three weeks over the summer, time lost in a fae realm, and though three months had passed since then, I was still learning how much I’d missed during that time. I didn’t know what had happened to Shane and Siobhan, and I was only getting snippets of what had occurred in the lives of my other friends, but I wasn’t too fond of being in the dark about things.
It made me feel like a shitty friend and a bad ally. Whatever Shane had experienced to make him a stealthier fighter, I hadn’t been around to witness it. And what if things had gone the other way? What if instead of adapting, he’d failed?
We might not be besties, but he’d been around for a lot of crappy stuff that had gone on in my life, and he’d toughed it all out. I’d go as far as to say we were friends. Friends with a weird working relationship.
Anything less than friendship and I probably wouldn’t have followed him into the dark unknown. But he was part of my life, and was willing to keep me in his house at his own peril. Plus he’d promised we’d get to kill something.
I checked the safety of my gun and made sure it was off before crouching low to the ground and ducking under the fence.
Shane was halfway up a rusted fire escape, and my gaze traveled past him over the brick wall of the building. A shattered window ten floors up was his most likely destination. Siobhan clambered after him, and I brought up the rear. Shane paused outside the broken window and waited for us to join him, holding a finger to his lips to signal for us to be quiet.
I wanted to point out that three grown adults standing on the fire escape of a condemned building was just an accident waiting to happen, but my complaints would have to remain silent.
From inside came a sound I was all too familiar with: a young girl crying. The pitch of her voice was all I had to go on since she wasn’t saying anything, but from that alone I knew she had to be very young. Possibly a child.
What did it say about my life that listening to a child crying in fear was the norm? A messed-up one, is what.
Since I’d been living in relative hiding, I also didn’t know what warrant Shane had been working on that would have resulted in this situation. I was allowed into the council headquarters under strict supervision, and only when absolutely necessary.
One of the threats on my life was from Alexandre Peyton, a rogue vampire who’d been locked up by the council for over two years, chained in silver and starved to the point of emaciation. He hadn’t been a fan of me to begin with—our history of trying to kill each other went waaaay back—but now he would stop at nothing to see me dead.
And the last place he’d been seen was in the council headquarters. So he knew his way around the lower passages, and he knew the Tribunal chambers. If he was somehow still hiding there, or knew a way to get back in, I wasn’t protected in the place that should have been the safest for me. Which was the only reason I wasn’t being locked in there permanently.
Sig, the two-thousand-year-old Tribunal leader and my boss of sorts, had a few ideas about where I should be, but ultimately had yielded to the babysitter notion.
Babysitters and a perpetual shadow.
Somewhere in the alley, Holden Chancery would be watching. Sig could have selected from a hundred different vampires to watch over me, but we didn’t know who we could trust these days. Peyton was beguiling and had enlisted aid from other vampires in the past, so it wasn’t out of the question he might have help on the inside.
Holden was trustworthy.
He was the only vampire aside from Sig himself who I knew without a doubt wanted to keep me alive. Sig found me…amusing. He was interested in me as a sort of pet project, but I knew he cared about me in a weird, twisted way. My death would upset him. It would inconvenience him. And Sig didn’t like to be inconvenienced.
Holden was different. He’d once been my key into the vampire council, and now I was his superior. But that wasn’t what made him loyal. Holden loved me. He’d told me as much, in front of my boyfriend no less.
It might not have been ideal, but it meant he could be trusted because no matter what happened, he wouldn’t let the woman he loved die. Holden would sacrifice himself to protect me, so Sig had chosen him as my guard.
I scanned the alley, looking for any out-of-place shadow, but he was too good to be easily spotted. I couldn’t see him, but I felt his presence, and it comforted me.