Roland blinked hard, tearing his gaze from Eddie. “You’re certainly free to go.”
“I wish I could. I have a grandchild I could be visiting right now, and you smell like a drunk.” Serena swung away from Roland to stare out the window. “But the new alliance stands. A Priori wants me here, and I work for them. Not Dirk & Steele.”
Eddie was already tired, but hearing those words stole the last of his strength — whatever was left in his heart. He couldn’t keep the bitterness off his face, and it made him feel like a different man. A worse man. Too much like the man who had burned those scars into his hands.
“It’s all the same,” he found himself saying, even though he wanted to stay quiet and hold in that bitterness and bury it, again and again, as he had been burying it for months. “A Priori. Dirk & Steele. It’s just family.”
Family and lies. And that was hardest of all to reconcile.
A Priori was one of the largest, most powerful corporations in the world. Run by a tight-knit family of men and women who possessed singular gifts of a paranormal nature, gifts that had been used almost exclusively for material gain.
But more than sixty years ago, members of that same family had broken away to form another, much smaller organization, one founded on values that had nothing to do with money or power. . but instead, helping others.
That organization had become Dirk & Steele. To the public, it was nothing but a high-powered detective agency — but in private it functioned as a refuge. For people like Eddie. And others, who weren’t human by any stretch of the imagination.
Until recently, however, almost no one at Dirk & Steele had been aware that A Priori existed, or that its connections to the agency ran so deep.
And no one, certainly, had known that Dirk & Steele’s worst enemy, the Consortium — responsible for human trafficking and experimentation, bioterrorism, mass murder — was part of that same family.
Your brother, Eddie said silently, looking at Roland, knowing he could hear his thoughts. Your brother runs the Consortium. You knew all along that it existed, and why. You never warned us, not even after it was too late.
Too late for me.
Roland flinched, but his bloodshot eyes showed nothing. And Eddie felt nothing except a dull ache when he looked at him.
At the other end of the room, a shadow detached from the walclass="underline" a slow, sinuous flow of movement made of perfect, dangerous grace.
Eddie had been aware of that presence from the moment he entered the room, but he still tensed; and so did Serena and Roland. It was impossible not to. The old woman who emerged from the shadows was deadly, in more ways than one.
Little of her face was visible, but her eyes glowed with subtle, golden light. She was Chinese, but so old — and so inhuman — that definitions based on ethnicity held no value.
“Ma’am,” Eddie said, with careful respect.
“Boy,” she replied, and the air seemed to hiss across his skin with power. “I’ve met immortals with younger eyes than you.”
He said nothing. Roland muttered, “Long Nu. Get on with it.”
The old woman’s hand flashed out, trailing light, and touched the corner of Eddie’s mouth. Not with a finger, but a claw — cool as silk, sliding across his lips, down his jaw. He smelled stone and ash, and a hint of sandalwood.
“You know what you have to do?” Long Nu said to him quietly.
“You want me to find a girl. A girl who can control fire.”
“A shape-shifter,” she murmured, as golden light continued to shimmer over her hand, and her flesh rippled with scales. “A dragon.”
Eddie reached up, very slowly, and pushed her hand away from his face. “I don’t understand why you don’t go yourself. One of your kind to another.”
“It would draw the wrong kind of attention. More than what is already focused on the child.” Long Nu glanced at Roland. “She is being hunted.”
Hunted. A girl, hunted. Eddie felt a cold, visceral disgust when he heard that. It made him think of his sister.
“No one told me,” he said.
“We were not sure. Now we are.”
“Who’s after her?”
Long Nu hesitated, and that was enough to convey to Eddie just how bad it was.
“They are called the Cruor Venator,” she said, in a cold, heavy voice. “Blood Hunters. Witches who steal power from blood.”
Serena sucked in her breath, a startling sound because it was filled with fear, dismay: two emotions Eddie had never, once, associated with her.
Eddie shared a quick look with Roland. “Witches?”
“Not just any witches,” Serena said sharply, continuing to stare at Long Nu. “Killers. Vicious, ruthless. They live for death. It’s their first, and only, pleasure.” She moved even closer to the dragon woman, as though stalking her, hands flexing at her sides. “But it’s impossible. That magic hasn’t been seen in a hundred years.”
Long Nu shook her head. “I know what such a death looks like. A shifter in Florida was lost to a group of them only two weeks ago. The same shifter who contacted Dirk & Steele about the girl.”
A hard knot of unease hit Eddie’s gut. “I didn’t know he was dead.”
Roland rubbed a hand through his hair and closed his eyes. “I only just found out. Long Nu discovered Estefan’s murder through different channels. When he stopped e-mailing me, I thought maybe he’d changed his mind about asking for our help in finding the girl.”
“I suspect he reached out to you because he had an idea of what threatened her. Except the Cruor Venator got him first,” said Long Nu in a cold, blunt voice — looking directly at Eddie as she spoke. “Estefan was ripped apart. Drained of blood. Part of his heart eaten. Skinned. It was a very bad death.”
Eddie did not blink or flinch. Long Nu, still watching him, added, “His wife is human, and was away when he was murdered. She explained that just before her husband died, Estefan told her that three women had been asking locals about a girl with golden eyes. It concerned him a great deal. . especially when he learned that they were using her real name.”
“You think those women are witches,” he said, “and that they found the shifter, and murdered him, because they were looking for the girl.”
“I know it,” Long Nu replied, with chilling certainty. “And even if I am wrong, the mere possibility makes it urgent that we find her as quickly as possible.”
Serena’s eyes narrowed. “Did he know that she was headed to New York?”
“Yes. And everything he knew, the Cruor Venator now knows.”
Deep, dangerous, waters, thought Eddie, feeling that old familiar shift inside his skin, as though he were a shape-shifter himself, transforming into a different person.
That transformation had begun as soon as Long Nu said the girl was being hunted. After all these years, it was natural as breathing. Part of him was always quiet, always waiting, beneath the fire. A mind-set, where nothing could be depended on, where violence was expected, promised, and always lethal. He had the scars to remind himself if he ever forgot. But he never had.
His heart donned a cold armor, where he would feel nothing. Nothing, until the job was done.
Because it was obvious the job was going to require doing things he was going to regret.
“Just find the girl,” Roland said heavily, clearly reading his thoughts. “Serena, talk to your contacts. I’ll do the same here.”