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  The more Justin expected of me wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

  Granted, I didn’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it.

  We stood in front of a place that made my skin crawl. It also made me want to puke.

  This was how he expected me to help?

  The house smelled of blood, of death, of painful sex and evil.

  I’d been exposed to this before and I’d spent the past nine months trying to forget about it. The months since I’d gone looking for Mandy down in the tunnels below East Orlando might as well not have happened, though, because it was all just as clear, just as vivid.

  Except this was worse. Somehow. This was worse.

  Mandy had willingly gone to the rats. She’d been sixteen and stupid and sick and desperate for a chance at life. She hadn’t realized that the only thing the bite would do would hasten her death along. She’d still gone willingly.

  What I smelled here was fear. So cloying and thick, I didn’t think I’d ever get the stink of it off my skin. And under it all, innocence.

  Children.

  They’d just been children.

  “He brought them here, didn’t he?” I asked. My voice was scratchy, a bare whisper of what it should be.

  When Justin didn’t answer me, I turned my head and looked at him.

  He wasn’t looking at the house. He was staring at me, so intently, it left me unsettled. The green of his eyes glowed. Spinning on my heel, I closed the distance between us. He stood a good eight inches taller than me. I was all of five feet two. Plenty of people towered over me and under most circumstances, it left me feeling intimidated. Just then, I didn’t care. Reaching out, I snagged the collar of his jacket and jerked him down. His eyes widened. Snarling into his face, I demanded, “Did he bring them here?”

  He closed his hand over my wrist. But he didn’t pry me away. I felt the warm pulse of magic against my skin. It was a startling sensation. Startling, but not unpleasant, exactly. Just…odd.

  Then, the weirdness of the moment increased and he murmured, “There you are. I knew you were in there.”

  I blinked, the words strange enough that they threw me off-guard and blasted a hole through the anger I felt. My hand uncurled from his shirt and I backed up a step. “What?”

  “I knew you were in there somewhere.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” I stared at him, uneasiness creeping through me. My hand started to heat. In the back of my mind, I heard a soothing murmur. My sword, whispering to me. All is well, child…all is well. I am here…

  A weird refrain for her. I was more used to the words… Call me, I am here. She came to my call when I needed her, something I’d learned when I’d been trapped in the dirt, gasping for air and begging for an escape that I knew didn’t exist.

  Except it had.

  But she didn’t seem to think I needed her.

  Maybe I didn’t. This peacock was annoying, but I didn’t think he was dangerous. Not to me at least.

  A queer smile lit his eyes and he just continued to watch me. “I knew something was under all those nerves you wear like a second skin. You ready to come out and play or not?”

  Play?

  “You think this is a game?” I curled a hand into a fist. Surprise ricocheted through me as I realized something—I wanted to punch him. Arrogant, cocky piece of work.

  “No. It’s not a game—it’s a hunt and you want in on it as much as I do.”

  He was right. I knew it. Not that I’d tell him but he was right. And I still wanted to punch him.

  Something of that must have shown on my face because he laughed. Quick as a wish, he reached out and cupped my chin. Something hot shivered through my veins as his thumb pressed against my lips. “Keep that thought, Kitty-kitty. You and I can go a round after we catch this son of a bitch.”

  I curled my lip at him, jerking out of his reach. “I’m starting to think I’d rather not mess with you. Maybe I should try to do it all by myself.”

  “Oh, really?” He cocked his head, green eyes all but laughing at me. “You think you can? You’ve never done anything but hunt down a couple of rats and you knew where they’d go to ground. This is a different beast entirely.”

  “Then maybe you should tell me about him instead of baiting me.” I looked back at the house and asked again, “Did he bring them here?”

  There was a brief hesitation and then Justin said quietly, “Yes.”

  “How many?” I had to force the question through stiff lips. Some part of my mind demanded, What does it matter? But the rest of me already knew why it mattered. A hunter needed to know her prey. Maybe my family had never taught me about what I was. But I’d still learned, bits and pieces.

  “I’m still trying to figure it out, but I think he probably had a good ten victims over the years. Only six of them have figured it out.”

  Ten…

  It hurt my heart, twisted my gut, turned my vision red.

  “Tell me more.”

  The house was clean, almost disturbingly so.

  I caught the scent of magic and it had me pausing to look at Justin as we stood in the doorway.

  “What am I smelling?” I asked softly. Sometimes I hated that TJ was right so often. Like now. If I’d listened to what she’d been telling me, maybe I could have figured this out on my own.

  He glanced at me and shrugged. “I had to do some clean up in case people came by. It’s just an echo.”

  “An echo.”

  “Yeah.” Justin frowned. “Man, you really aren’t around magic much, are you?”

  He didn’t bother waiting for me to answer, or maybe it didn’t matter. He headed on into the house and stopped at an angle, staring into a room I couldn’t yet see. “I killed the wolf. It got messy. I had to clean up so you’re picking up on the echo of the magic I used. If you’re sensitive to it, magic has a scent, a feel, all its own and each different form of magic is different.”

  “So I’m basically smelling your version of spring cleaning.”

  He shot me that wide grin again. “In a sense.”

  Moving to stand at his side, I studied the wide open space. I guessed it would be the living room. I’d never had a house. Until I’d moved to TJ’s, I’d never had my own space, period. The space I had now consisted of a room. But Colleen had a house—a wide-open one, bright and cheery.

  It felt nothing like this place.

  Her home felt of life and laughter. Even with Mandy gone, I could feel the hope there.

  Despair clung to this place like a cloak of cobwebs, all but sticking to me as I moved in a slow circle around the room. Brilliant light shone in through the wide windows, across the golden planks of the floor. The wolf hadn’t hurt for money, that much was obvious.

  Money didn’t change the fact that evil lived here.

  Or had.

  It had thrived here.

  My neck itched.

  Look…look…look…

  It was a low mutter in the back of my mind and without even thinking about it, I just let myself go.

  Moments later, without understanding how I’d come to be there, I found myself in the garage. It looked like a man’s paradise—if the man was into tools and cars and building things. Nothing in there looked familiar to me.

  “Our boy wouldn’t know what to do with this,” Justin said from behind me.

  Looking back at him, I asked, “How do you know?”

  “I’ve got a read on him.” Justin came deeper into the room, lifted a hand and let it hover over what looked to be one sleek, sexy car. Her paint gleamed midnight blue, chrome glittering in the light streaming down from overhead. “It was the wolf who worked in here. He all but got a hard-on playing with the car. I can…”

  His lids drooped and I tensed as I felt a spark of magic ripple out of him.

  “I feel it. This was his place, his territory. He might as well have pissed on the floor, the way he marked it.”

  His lids flicked back up and he grim
aced as he looked at me. “Sorry.”

  “I’ve heard much stronger language than piss.” I rolled my eyes and moved around him, bypassing the car. Something…something…

  “Levett has an office. If you think you can pick up on something I couldn’t, then it will be…what are you doing?”

  The clattering on the tools practically drowned out his voice. I didn’t bother to answer him.

  There was something here.

  I knew it.

  I don’t know how.

  I just knew.

  That certainty screamed inside me and I brushed aside micro wrenches, batted away what might have been a mini laser torch. Screws, bolts, an automated screwdriver. Nothing. I upended the next drawer.

  Nothing.

  The next—

  It wasn’t in the drawer.

  “There….” I whispered, my heart thudding against my ribs like a fist. Taped to the bottom of the drawer I still held in my hands, I could see it.

  You found it. You found it.

  That voice continued to hum in the back of my mind, no longer a driving pulse. It settled into a reassuring croon as I reached up and peeled back the tape. It was a small, yellow envelope and when I spilled the contents into my hand, I was even more confused.

  A micro-chipped key.

  Looking up at Justin, I just stared.

  “Well, well, well…” he murmured. He reached out and plucked it from my hand, eying it for a second before shifting his gaze to me. “Just how did you know this was here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Chapter Five

  Finding the key had been relatively easy.

  This part wasn’t going to be.

  Oh, Justin knew what it was, and what it was for. If only he’d just let me leave him to it, I’d have been just as happy as a clam. Whatever that meant. But no. He wanted me along.

  I still didn’t know why.

  But there I was, huddling over a table in a diner across from a building that filled me with terror.

  My gut hurt just to look at it.

  It was one of the exchange centers—the formal name was Center for the Assembly Exchange. Basically, it was a bank for our kind. You didn’t have to be a member of the assembly to use the standard services, but the rates were higher if you weren’t. I kept my money elsewhere, because I wasn’t paying a thirty-percent upcharge. Since I hadn’t presented myself to the Assembly yet, that upcharge wasn’t negotiable.

  Never let it be said that non-humans didn’t understand the power of the almighty dollar.

  I heard a soft brush, far, far over my head and I pressed myself to the side of the building. Shooting Justin a venomous look, I tried to decide just how I’d let myself get talked into this.

  He wanted to walk in there, in broad daylight, and use that chip.

  Broad daylight is the only way, sugar. We can’t go at night—Assembly security is all but impossible to crack.

  “You think you can flirt your way into distracting a guard if we made it to the back hall?” Justin studied me from over the rim of a cup of coffee, long fingers bracketing it. His nails were painted black. I frowned when I noticed it. I hadn’t noticed it before. Why was I even noticing it now?

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” I asked. Then I remembered. “Oh. Flirt…you want me to flirt with a guard? In there?” I gaped at him. I wouldn’t know how to flirt if my life depended on it. I could poke sharp things at people and I could run like hell when I needed. Sneak around, sure. But flirt?

  He sighed and put the cup down, leaning toward me. “We need a distraction. If I pull magic in there, they’ll pick up on it. Active magic draws attention. Now I’m good at sneaking around, but I need a distraction. As it is, I’m still going to have my hands full.”

  I blinked, and then looked down.

  “I can do it,” I said in a rush.

  He leaned back, his eyes narrowing. Then he shook his head. “You’re quiet and you’re fast, but have you ever had to do anything like this?”

  “No.” Then I braced my shoulders and met his gaze. “But I’m sort of a natural at not being seen.” Looking around, I put my coffee down and then slid out of the booth. “Come on.”

  I couldn’t believe I was going to do this.

  I might not—not if my gut started to scream at me in warning. Not if that familiar panic started to scream inside.

  But it never did, not once as I led him down a narrow alley and looked around, not once as I looked back to face him. “Nobody knows about this, except Colleen. It stays that way.”

  He lifted a brow and leaned back against the crumbling brick wall. “Okay.”

  “You can’t tell,” I said, the urgency in my voice bugging even me.

  “I won’t. I promise,” he said, his voice soft. Then he sighed. “Witches don’t break promises, Kitty. Well, some do, but it backfires on them. Your word means something—it’s part of you and if you break it, it tears out a chunk. When you’re in the magic, you feel that loss.”

  “Okay.” I nodded, slicked my hands down the sides of my jeans and then I stared at him.

  I could still see him, even as I faded from sight.

  The faint shiver of my skin let me know it had worked.

  But I’d know that, simply by the look on his face.

  He came off the wall so fast, it was like a wire had jerked him upright. “What the…”

  He shot out a hand, sudden, so sudden I couldn’t evade him and an electric shot ripped through me as his fingers grazed the upper slope of my breast. “Hey!”

  I darted back, the invisibility dropping as my focus shattered.

  He blinked and looked me up, then down. “What…how…”

  “It’s part of what I am.”

  “Do it again.”

  “I’m not a dog. I don’t perform on command,” I muttered, shrugging my shoulders and trying to brush away the feel of his fingers brushing over my skin.

  He came closer and this time, I was acutely aware of the electricity arcing between us. “I didn’t so much as feel a pulse as you did that. I should have felt something. Do it again.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I can’t feel it, neither will anybody else.” He lifted up a hand. My breath caught as he touched his fingers to my cheek. “All in all, that’s a damn cool talent, Kitty. Show me again.”

  So that was how it came to pass that Justin flirted with a guard and I slid past them.

  My skin itched from some sort of charm or spell he’d placed on me. You might not be visible to the eye, but if one of them hears your heart or scents you, we got problems.

  The spell/charm thing was supposed to eradicate those signs, too. I’ll admit, I was mildly terrified that it would eradicate them by stopping my heart or some sort of thing.

  But my heart continued to pump. I could even smell the light scent of my own sweat as I moved past the throng of customers. Justin had sketched out a rough map of the interior, told me where to go, what to look for.

  Now I just had to figure out a way—

  A woman, dressed all in pink, strode past me.

  There was a tall, heavily muscled man at her back.

  The second the men behind the counter caught sight of her, a silence fell through the room.

  “My…my Lady.”

  My knees threatened to buckle on me. My Lady—the Cat alpha. TJ had plenty of things to say about her and none of them were good. Pressed to the wall, my gaze shifted to the man at her back, tall, golden-skinned, dark-haired. He placed himself roughly two feet behind her and stood, hands linked, eyes on nothing.

  A nice little toy soldier.

  “I need access to my secure room.”

  Awww, now. You gotta be kidding me.

  That was exactly what I’d needed, and the exact wrong sort of person I wanted it to happen with.

  Okay. If I was going to pull out, I needed a sign.

  Instead, I found myself focusing on the pair as a manager came out from b
ehind the counter. He had a bright, false smile in place. I deliberately focused on him, not the woman. I couldn’t look at her. If I did, the terror would swell inside me and I just might lose it.

  I didn’t look at the man at her back either—no…not a man. Shifters. Both of them were so strong with it, their power made my head pound. Once they’d passed me, I slid into step along behind them. I was so close, I could smell them—he smelled like the forest. She smelled like snow and death.

  And the manager, some sort of cat shifter himself, he just smelled like fear.

  There was a hiss, an electronic whine and then a blast of recycled air.

  The door was open. Behind it lay three halls, each branching in a different direction—I could make them out just barely as I peered around the broad body of the man who guarded the alpha’s back. The door started to shut right behind him and I just barely came through, shoving inside with enough speed, my hand brushed the bottom of his long flannel shirt.

  Biting back a hiss, I ducked and rolled, not stopping until I was in the corner, pressed against the metal paneling. Still unwilling to let myself look directly at either of them, I stared at the manager as he paused. “Is everything well, sir?”

  His voice shook. The terror in it made my bowels clench.

  “Fine.” That voice, hard and flat, left no room for argument.

  I could have sworn I felt a pair of eyes drilling into me, but the invisibility hadn’t dropped. My skin still itched with the vague sensation left by Justin’s magic. I didn’t dare let myself breathe out a sigh in relief.

  Not yet.

  Not while they were still in here.

  The narrow area branched into three halls and as I crouched there, the small group went to the left. Licking my lips, I rose and eased to the right. That hallway opened into a wide, circular area. Small, numbered squares stacked so high into the air, I couldn’t read them all. I couldn’t even see where they ended. The ceiling was easily two dozen feet in the air.

  Shit.

  If this one was out of my reach, I was in trouble.

  Luck, though, was one my side and I found it right by the door, in a place that gave me a clear view of the hall. Shooting a look up, I grimaced at the camera. Grimaced. Debated.