“I’ve killed lots of girls for their skins,” he spat. “What’s one more?”
“Your job was to lure the pack teens to Greenleaf.” Hadley made it a statement, not a question. “Why?”
“Why not?” The man twisted in Bishop’s hold. “You’re not pack. What does it matter to you?”
“Hadley is the future potentate of this city,” Bishop purred next to the man’s ear. “She’s not as forgiving as Linus, and he’s not exactly known for looking the other way while his people are preyed upon.”
Midas snapped his head toward her, and the hard set of her delicate features almost convinced him Bishop was right.
“No one preys on the kids in my city.” Streetlight glinted off the wicked blade in her small hand. “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll show you mercy.” She stuck her empty hand into the darkness and drew her second sword. “Or I’ll gut you now and figure it out for myself.”
“Kill me.” The man lifted his chin. “I won’t betray my coven.”
A kick from Bishop took out his knees, and he hit the pavement in a kneeling position.
Knuckles gone white where she gripped her blades, she clenched her hands tighter. “Where are the other gwyllgi teens?”
“As good as dead,” the man spat, “if they aren’t already.”
“Last chance,” she offered, a fine tremor in her voice Midas doubted anyone else would have noticed.
“You will die for this,” he hissed. “My kind will wear your skin as—”
Hadley walked up to him, rested a blade on either side of his throat, and cut without further hesitation.
The scissorlike motion, fueled with inhuman strength, lopped off his head and left Bishop holding it by the hair.
“Goddess,” she breathed and swallowed convulsively. “That bastard.”
A final act of cruelty had stamped a vicious smile on the man, and death had frozen it there.
Except it wasn’t his face but Krista’s that gazed at them with eyes gone dull and lifeless.
The petite body collapsed in a heap, a best friends necklace slung free across the asphalt, and fresh blood wet the parched road while Hadley stared and stared at half of a jagged heart-shaped charm.
“We have to move fast,” Bishop said softly, a reminder of their gruesome bargain. “We need the heart.”
Midas traded skins in a flash of red magic and approached them.
“Give me some room.” She wet her lips. “This is going to get messy.”
“You don’t have to do it alone.” Midas didn’t budge. “We’re in this together.”
Hadley, who was the bravest, strongest, most spirited woman he had ever met, couldn’t face him.
“You’re not a monster.” He sank his fingers into the curls at her nape. “Tonight, you slayed one.”
That earned him a slight tilt of her head, but she ignored him in favor of Bishop.
“Claim the heart like we practiced,” Bishop urged her. “I can get it to the box before it stops beating.”
“It’s not like we practiced,” she whispered, voice breaking. “I’ve killed in the heat of battle, to defend myself, to protect others, but this…” Her throat worked as she struggled to swallow. “Never like this.”
“I know, kid.” He cursed under his breath. “I know.”
“Let me borrow one of your swords.” Midas held out his hand. “Let me do this for you.”
The offer made his gut rebel, but Krista was his, and he owed it to her to make her death count.
“You heard Linus.” Hadley sheathed one but kept the other. “Natisha set the terms with me in mind.”
Midas fought the growl, but he failed to throttle it. “This is not what he meant.”
“We can’t chance it.” She sliced Krista open using a precise Y incision then set to work opening her ribs to reach the delicate organs underneath. Hands steady as a surgeon, she freed the heart, and it pulsed in her hand as she passed it off to Bishop. “There.” She stared blankly at the corpse and vanished her final blade. “Go.”
The shadows licked over Bishop as he walked through them, and his footsteps faded with him.
“I need to call the cleaners.” Hadley’s rock-steady hand shook until she dropped her phone. “Frakking hell.”
“I’ll do it.” Midas took her phone and sent the message. “There.”
Switching phones, he texted Ares with an order to round up more enforcers to finish sweeping the clubs and surrounding area for the remaining teens.
How many times had he hit the clubs in search of kids being kids? Or ducked in and out of every bar with a reputation for serving minors? Or checked cabins for squatters and found teens using them for sex? He couldn’t count them. They were a monthly occurrence, the result of hormones and bad decision making.
Tonight should have gone the same way, with the row of youthful offenders lined up in front of his mom to await their punishment. Now he had to live with wondering if he had brought more enforcers if Krista would have been found in time, if the other kids would have been home already, if he could have spared Hadley the nightmares this guaranteed her.
“Thanks.” Her wobbly smile didn’t fool him. “One down, six to go.”
Before he could think what to say, she lurched to one side and threw up everything in her stomach.
The incessant chatter of her teeth, the loose way she swayed on her palms, shot alarm through him.
“You’re going into shock.” He caught her and rubbed her back. “We need to get you to Abbott.”
The girl had already been dead when Hadley killed her and cut out her heart, the coven saw to that, but Midas couldn’t blame Hadley for struggling to process what she had done when Krista’s likeness stared at them from where Bishop had set her head on the pavement.
“Abbott will fuss at me.” She sucked in air, great heaving gasps. “I don’t want to be fussed at tonight.”
“I’ll take you home then.” He got his arm around her before her knees buckled. “How about that?”
“I don’t want to bring this home,” she said, her voice empty. “Goddess, I don’t know what I want.”
“I have an idea.” He scooped her up then sat in the empty street. “Let me place a call first.”
“Okay.” She buried her face in his shirt. “Okay.”
Chin on top of her head, he held her while he made arrangements for still more enforcers to meet them and claim the body. It wasn’t Krista, not really, but the witchborn fae wearing her skin was all he had to give her parents.
Gwyllgi required no waterproof tents, insulated sleeping bags, or crackling fires to enjoy a night beneath the stars, but they often mated other species less at home in the forest. For that reason, the pack had an unusual number of permanent campsites on their property for mates and children less suited to exposure to the elements. As of last fall, there were even three isolated one-room cabins designed to fade into the surrounding trees.
A good third of the pack had fought his mom on building the cabins, small as they might be. The permanent campsites were already an eyesore, they argued. The den was meant to be a wilderness oasis, a place to shake a long week of working downtown out of your fur. Not walk manicured trails or choke on pungent mosquito repellent.