My thoughts drift to Quinn again. She’ll be okay.
She has to be.
“How many hours until sunset?” Bryce asks.
I glance at my watch. “Four.”
He nods and sits up straighter. “What do you know about these Wardens?”
“Nothing more than I’ve already told you.”
“You need to find out.”
Unease squirms in my belly. “Lorenzo isn’t picking up.” What if something happened to him? What if the other Mageri found out he’s been helping us? “I left messages.”
Bryce picks up the empty coffee pot and stares at it as if he can make it refill itself by sheer force of will.
“Let me.” I hold out my hand and he passes it to me.
Brewing coffee is calming. Doing something, anything that isn’t standing around and worrying about Quinn, about whether she’ll pass the test to make her immortal or not, is calming. Yeah, the Faoladh don’t know about the test, but I do, Quinn told me, and my stomach is in fucking knots over it.
He’ll keep her safe, though. Pontus, Dillon, whoever he is. He’ll keep her safe.
My phone rings. I set the coffee pot on the table in front of Bryce and check caller ID.
“Orina?”
“Hey, Tate, you with Quinn?”
“No.”
There’s a beat of silence then. “Tate, is everything okay.”
How to answer that. “No. It isn’t.” So much information. So much to go over. “Quinn’s in danger.”
An explosion of breath greets my sentence. “Tell me.”
I take a moment to organize my thoughts. “The Mageri found out she’s the taint’s progeny and they’ve sent Wardens to kill her. The Wardens will be here at sunset.”
A beat of silence follows my words. “Nyx and I will be there before then.”
NYX
I slam open my office door and stride in, trekking the gunk from the marsh onto the hardwood floors.
That’ll be a bitch to clean up.
I pull my phone from my pocket, dead after a tumble into the marsh, and throw it onto the desk before falling into my overpriced desk chair, the only piece of expensive furniture I own.
Chase has been gone for three weeks. It’s not the first time he’s upped and vanished. But it is the longest he’s ever been gone, and no case has been able to take my mind off that fact. What if something happened to him? What if he’s hurt somewhere? What if he’s…dead? No, fuck that. I won’t think like that.
He’ll be back.
He always comes back, and in the meantime, I’ll continue to take shitty jobs to keep my mind off the fact that he isn’t here with me. Still, there’ll be no jobs without a working phone.
I extract my sim from the damaged phone, yank open my desk drawer, and grab one of my many spare devices. I turn it on and sigh as the thing pings with message after message.
Voicemails.
I put it on speaker and hit play.
“Nyx, Quinn’s in trouble. I’m coming to get you.”
I sit up straighter.
A beep sounds, then the next message plays. “Nyx, dammit, call me back.”
“Fuck.”
Another beep. “I’ll be with you in thirty minutes, you better fucking be there. Dammit, I might have to go without you.”
What time was that sent? Fuck. I grab the phone and hit dial. It goes straight to voicemail.
Did I miss her? Did she go without me?
Dammit. I shove back the seat and stand just as my office door is flung open and Orina barges in.
She glares at me. “Do you ever check your fucking messages?”
She didn’t leave without me. I’d exhale in relief if the words Quinn’s in trouble aren’t going round in my head.
“What’s happened to Quinn?”
She rakes me over, nose wrinkling. “Grab a set of clean clothes and I’ll fill you in on the way.”
“Wardens?” I shimmy into clean trousers in Pea’s back seat, then meet Orina’s eye in the mirror. “Fucking Wardens? For Quinn?” I climb into the front passenger seat and then twist to face her. “This is bad.”
“I know.”
“Question is, do they know. Tate, the Faoladh. Do you think Lorenzo has filled them in?”
“I don’t know.” She brushes tendrils of silver hair off her cheeks.
I sit back. “Fucking Mageri. They have to stick their noses into everything.”
“I spoke to Tate on the way down. He says the Mageri are plan B to stopping the taint.”
“I thought the Faoladh were plan B and the relic was plan A.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“So fill me in.”
“Okay, so the relic fractured and the boundary weakened. Quinn went to Faerie and found the Dagda and somehow they managed to fix some of the damage, but then…Then the taint had someone manipulate Quinn into killing an innocent human.”
“What?” My voice rises in an incredulous shriek.
Orina winces. “Yeah, Tate says it was bad. Anyway, it also activated Quinn’s dark genes, which Tate believes is what the taint wanted.”
“Okay, but Quinn could never be evil.”
“I know. She isn’t. She controls the dark power inside her. But some shit went down with Henrik and the Raventhorn Pack and she used her dark power to protect herself and a fucking Mageri saw it. He took it to the Mageri council.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, Tate thinks she might have gotten away with it, but then this woman, Willow, someone she thought was a friend, the same bitch who manipulated her into killing a human, came back and she…She killed Bea.”
I stare at Orina’s profile. “Bea? Little brownie Bea?”
“Yeah.”
Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shit. I haven’t been around Bea for long, but I’ve seen her with Quinn. I’ve seen the two of them and there’s no mistaking the bond between them, a bond that has probably grown over the weeks.
I can guess what happened once Quinn discovered Bea’s death. “Quinn killed Willow, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, and the Mageri felt the taint’s power. They have a detection spell in Hawthorne.”
“And now they’ve sent Wardens.”
“Wardens are relentless,” Orina says. “We learned about them at the Order. They’re lethal, Nyx, and I’m not sure they can be stopped. I don’t think they can be killed.”
“Bullshit. Every living thing has a weakness. Every living thing can be killed. We just need to figure out how, and we need to do it fast.”
“I checked the Order archives. There’s nothing on how to hurt or kill the Wardens.”
“Of course there isn’t.” I smirk. “That kind of intel comes with a price tag, and I know just the person who might be selling it.”
I pull out my phone and scroll down to the name Persephone Sweet. Black market items and information dealer extraordinaire, Percy, as she likes to be called, is a bitch, but a useful one.
She answers on the fourth ring. “Nyx, to what do I owe the displeasure?”
“I need information.”
“You got the money to pay for it?”