Rene gave me a flat look. “Go on.”
“You didn’t come here looking for a detective. You came here looking for a hired killer. So why don’t you level with me. Why do you need me?”
A strained silence hung between us. A second passed. Another.
“I don’t know what Adam was building,” Rene said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I know that when I told my direct supervisor that Adam and the device were missing, he called his family and told his wife to pack the children, throw the bare essentials into the car, leave for North Carolina, and not come back until he called them.”
“He told his family to get out of town?” Andrea blinked.
Rene nodded. “My brother is bedridden. He can’t be moved. I can’t take him out of the city. I’m stuck in Atlanta.” She leaned forward, her face grim. “You care about your friends, Daniels. Enough to jump on a sword for them. You have a lot to lose and if you get worried enough, you’ll strong-arm the Pack into helping you, which is a lot more manpower than I can muster. Find Adam and find his device for me. Before the thief turns it on and does something we both will regret.”
THE DOOR SHUT BEHIND RENE. ANDREA ROSE AND moved to the narrow window, watching her and her goons cross the parking lot to their vehicle. “I’ve been hired for two hours and we already have a client and a job from hell.”
I took five thousand dollars out of the bag. Andrea moved away from the window, and I handed the duffel with the rest of the money to her.
“What for?”
“Gun budget.”
Andrea ran her thumb, riffing through the stack of twenty-dollar bills. “Cool. We need ammo.”
“Did she look scared to you?” I asked.
Andrea grimaced. “She is a cold bitch and she masks it well, but I spent my entire childhood reading faces so I’d know where the next punch was coming from. And I’m a predator. I lock onto fear, because it signals prey. She’s really rattled. We’re probably going to regret this.”
“Maybe we should take the other offer. Oh wait. We don’t have another offer.”
“You are so witty, Miss Daniels. Or is it Mrs. Curran?”
I gave her my hard stare. She barked a short laugh.
I set my bag on my desk and unzipped it to check the contents. Dead bodies had the annoying tendency to decay. The sooner we got to the scene, the better.
Andrea checked her guns. “So Ted told everyone you ruined his parade?”
“Pretty much.”
“One day I’ll kill him, you know.”
I glanced at her. She was deadly serious. Killing Ted would unleash a storm of catastrophic proportions. He was the head of the Atlanta chapter of the Order. Every knight in the country would hunt us down to their last breath. Of course, Andrea knew all that.
“I’m over it.” I swiped my backpack off the desk. “Ready to go?”
“I was born ready. Where is this workshop anyway?”
I checked the directions Rene had given me. “Sibley Forest.”
Andrea swore.
CHAPTER 5
I OWNED TWO CARS: AN OLD BEAT-UP SUBARU NAMED Betsi that ran during tech and a horrid nightmare of a truck called Karmelion. Karmelion took twenty minutes of intense chanting to warm up and made more noise than a gaggle of drunk teenage boys in a bar on a Saturday night, but it ran during magic.
Unfortunately the Beast Lord had condemned both vehicles as unsafe and instead I now leased a Pack Jeep I called Hector. Equipped with dual engines, Hector worked during magic or tech. He didn’t go very fast, especially during magic, but so far he hadn’t stalled on me either. As long as our high-speed chases stayed under forty-five miles an hour, we would be all set.
Andrea eyed Hector. “Where is Betsi?”
“She’s back at the Keep. His Furriness made me lease Hector from the Pack instead. Betsi didn’t meet with his exacting standards.” I climbed into the driver’s seat.
Andrea popped the passenger door open and Grendel bounded into the space behind it, where there once was a rear seat and now was space where I stored equipment. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I believe the exact words he used were ‘a deathtrap with four wheels.’ We had a glorious fight about it.”
She grinned and patted Hector’s dashboard. “You lost.”
“No, I chose to gracefully accept the Pack’s generous offer.”
“Aha. Keep telling yourself that.”
Careful, thin ice. “A third party explained to me in detail that when you’re running a business, people judge how successful you are based on your appearance. If you’re driving a shabby vehicle, they think you need money and your business is struggling.”
“That sounds like Raphael,” Andrea said.
And she nailed it. “Yep.”
She clamped her mouth shut. I started the engine and maneuvered Hector out of the parking lot.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
“So who is he hooked up with now?”
Three seconds. That was all she lasted. “Nobody that I know of.”
She stared straight through the windshield. “I find that hard to believe.”
Given that Raphael was a bouda and they viewed sex as a fun recreational activity that should be practiced vigorously and often, normally I would’ve agreed with her. But Raphael was a special case. He hounded Andrea for months until she finally gave him a chance. For a few blissful weeks they were in love and happy, but then Andrea had to pick between the Order and the Pack and it all fell apart.
“He hasn’t been with anybody since you had that fight,” I told her.
She snorted. “I’m sure some cute piece of ass will catch his attention sooner or later.”
“He’s too busy moping.”
Andrea glanced at me. “Moping?”
“Pining.” I made a wide curve around a large pothole filled with odd-looking blue goo. “If he starts singing sad Irish ballads, we’ll have to stage an intervention.”
“Oh please.” Andrea turned to her passenger window.
“He withdrew from the bouda clan.”
“What?”
“Not officially, of course.” I shrugged. “But he stopped doing whatever it is that the bouda alpha male does.” In the bouda clan, as in nature, females were dominant. Aunt B ran that clan with steel claws, and Raphael, being her son, served as the head of the males. “He killed Tara.”
Andrea’s blue eyes went big. “The third female?”
“Yeah. Aunt B mentioned it in passing the last time we spoke. He was in the bouda clan house for some sort of business-related thing and Tara came up and grabbed his balls. Apparently she wanted to check if they were still there. He punched her in the face. She shifted into a warrior form and went for his throat. From what Aunt B said, he didn’t just kill her, he ripped her to pieces. He hasn’t been to the clan house since.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I said.” It was one of those idiotic things that could’ve been resolved in a split second. Tara had no right to touch Raphael, and once she did, he had every right to punch her. She should’ve left it at that, and now she was dead because she didn’t. Bouda males voluntarily took the beta role, but in a fight they were vicious, and Raphael was the best of their lot. I wouldn’t fight him unless he left me no choice. I could take him, but he’d tear me up before I finished him.
“I keep thinking about the People thing,” Andrea said. “I think something went very wrong in the Casino.”
And we’d changed the subject. Andrea one, Kate the matchmaker zero. “How do you figure?”
“Two navigators fainted, both while piloting the same vampire.”
And one of these navigators was Ghastek, who could pilot a vampire through an obstacle course studded with rotating saw blades and pits of molten lava while carrying a full glass of water and not spilling a drop. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say the People had stumbled onto something, some sort of magic that was too much for them, and it had somehow tainted the vampire. But getting to the bottom of this mystery would be impossible. And besides, nobody had hired us to resolve the People’s navigation issues.