The trip over was short, but it felt longer without Bonnie’s soft ears to rub between my fingers.
Maybe I didn’t need a friend. Maybe I needed a nice, uncomplicated dog. A real one. Not a fae one.
We stepped out into the parking lot, empty since the park closed at dusk. I found my way back to where I first spotted Bonnie standing near the creek and barely resisted the urge to ask Ford to sniff around to see if he could identify the trail and follow it.
“I’ll save us time and tell you I can’t track worth a damn,” Ford said from behind me.
“Really, Ford?” I noticed a narrow footpath, possibly a deer trail, and decided to explore it. “Did I say anything?”
“I could feel you thinking it at me.”
One thing necromancers had in common, whether Low or High Society, was excellent night vision. The waning crescent moon gave me enough light to pick my way through the woods without stumbling. I don’t know what I hoped to find. I wasn’t sure the killer had gone this way, but I had to do something. I was tired of sitting around, waiting for another tip that came too late.
“Scat.”
“As in poop?” I checked my soles, hoping I hadn’t stepped in any. “Or as in scat you cat?”
“The first one.” He pointed off the beaten path. “Definitely warg.”
“No guarantee it’s our guy, though.” I debated how badly I wanted to poke around in stale droppings and decided I would rather continue on, see where the trail ended. I took out my phone and pulled up the GPS app, adding a pin on the map to identify the scat. “Let’s keep going.”
Ford didn’t mention smelling anything else, and I didn’t notice much worth commenting on. We walked until we hit another parking lot. Apartment buildings hugged the corner of the street, and a subdivision ate up space too.
“He can’t be this obvious.” I searched for any indication of where he might have gone, but the trail was cold, and it was wishful thinking to expect otherwise. “What are the odds the killer lives here? He could have leased an apartment, rented a house.” A thought was slowly forming. “Have we crosschecked the victims’ addresses against this location?”
“Shonda lived near Piedmont Park.” Ford scratched his head. “Far as I know, the cleaners have only ID’d two of the eight victims found here. I doubt the addresses have been run considering the limited data pool.”
“I’ll get Bishop on it.” I sent him a text. “He’ll have those results to us soon.”
“Did you crash with him last night?” Ford studied my chin, which I hoped hadn’t sprouted any black hairs to warrant that kind of attention. “You left with him, so I wondered.”
“I have no idea where Bishop lives, so no. I didn’t crash with him. He’s a coworker, a glorified babysitter more than anything.” I took one last look around and started back the way we’d come. “Please don’t tell me that Midas marking me requires you to stick your nose into my nonexistent personal life.”
“Just the opposite.” He hesitated a moment. “Any man with half a brain would leave you the hell alone.”
“What does that make you?”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “Half as smart as I thought I was.”
Thirteen
In his childhood room, deep within the den, Midas sprawled across a twin bed and laughed until his ribs hurt while his niece, Evangeline “Trouble” Kinase, climbed his sister like a tree during their video chat.
“Unca Midas lets me braid his hair,” she whined. “Momma, pleassse.”
Blue was Lethe’s favorite color, and she hadn’t stopped dyeing her hair various shades since she was old enough to defy a direct order from their mother. However, bright hues attracted clever little fingers. That might explain why the shoulder-length bob his sister preferred was gone. A pompadour with an undercut had taken its place. There wasn’t much left to braid, except on top.
“Yeah, Momma.” Midas wiped tears off his cheeks. “Pleassse.”
“I will end you,” Lethe snarled. “Do you see my hair? Do you see it?”
“It’s robin’s-egg blue. Hard to miss.”
“She climbed in bed with me last week and cut all the hair off one side of my head before I woke up and caught her.” Lethe lifted her daughter by the scruff, like she was a puppy, and set her on the floor. “No, Eva. Go play with Daddy. I bet he would love you to style his hair.”
Her mate, Hood, kept his sandy-blond hair in dreadlocks that brushed his spine.
He would not, in fact, love his daughter to style his hair. However, Midas kept his mouth shut.
Watching Eva skip off, he hated to be missing out on so much. “How is the little tyrant otherwise?”
“She’s fifteen months old. Developmentally, she’s a six-year-old.”
While Lethe was pregnant, a dominance fight would have cost her the child had her best friend, Grier Woolworth, not stepped in and performed healing magic on them both. Grier was a special type of necromancer. Her Society called her goddess-touched, and her father had been the heritor of an ancient vampire. The resulting combination was a powerful woman with uncharted powers she was doing her best to navigate without guidance from her estranged family.
When Grier saved Eva, she accelerated her growth. Eva had developed faster in the womb, been born premature, and had grown like a weed since she drew her first breath. Right now, she showed no signs of slowing down. One of the reasons Linus spent so much time in Savannah was to help Grier monitor Eva.
His current working theory was that she would plateau at puberty and mature normally from there, the way some fae did.
Midas hoped he was right. Gwyllgi enjoyed long lives, but he didn’t want Eva’s to speed past on fast-forward.
“How are you?” Lethe held the screen up to her face. “You look pale.”
“I’m sitting in my room, in the dark, with a tablet lighting my face. Of course I look pale.”
“Whatever.” She muttered storyteller under her breath. “How are things then?”
Liar was one of Eva’s favorite words to shout at strangers. Her mom and dad were busy trying to reprogram her, but no luck yet.
“A serial killer followed our newest packmate home from the women’s shelter where I found her.”
“What?”
“The POA is on it,” he reassured her.
“No, he isn’t. He’s making goo-goo eyes at his fiancée. I can see them from here. It’s disgusting, and it blocks my view of the chocolate raspberry mousse cake he baked last night.”
“You’re at home. How are you seeing them? Did they come for a visit? Am I interrupting?”
“I bought a telescope,” she said primly. “I’m a mother now. I can’t be over there all the time, and you know how Grier is. She’s always being kidnapped or attempted-murdered.”
Midas bit his tongue to keep from asking if Linus and Grier knew they were tonight’s entertainment. Lethe’s maternal instincts had been in overdrive since Eva was born, and her best friend would just have to deal with how she coped with the fact they were neighbors instead of roommates these days.