She opened her mouth to respond but they’d arrived at her family home and Amber was waiting in the doorway, cell phone in hand. “She’s home!” her sister-in-law said into the slim white device as soon as she spotted Ria. “No, she’s safe. Emmett’s with her.”
All but lifting Ria inside, Emmett ordered Amber to shut the door. “And stay inside.” He was gone before Ria could say anything else.
Blowing out a breath, she took the phone Amber was holding out. “Mom, I’m fine.” She repeated that for the next ten minutes, until Alex finally calmed down. By that time, her grandmother had prepared tea, brought out two giant hunks of Mr. Wong’s famous Divine Madeira Cake, and begun to make her special sweet black-sesame soup, one of Ria’s favorites.
“Sit!” she said when Amber began to stand up as if to help.
Amber sat with a thankful groan. “The baby’s kicking so hard. Want to feel?”
“Yes!” Ria scooted over. Amber was a great sister-in-law, but she was also intensely private. This kind of an invitation didn’t come often. Placing her hand on Amber’s abdomen, she stayed very still. Miaoling’s future great- grand(gender unknown) didn’t keep Ria waiting. She felt two very distinct thuds. “Wow, I think I felt the shape of a foot.”
Amber laughed. “Probably. Baby Wembley has a future as a football player. Fitting really, given the family name.”
“Don’t tell Jet,” Ria teased, biting into her cake. The familiar taste was as welcome as a hug, soft and comforting. “He’s hoping for a golf buddy.”
“What about you, Ria?” Breaking off a piece of her own slice, Amber brought it to her mouth. “You thinking of popping out any golf buddies sometime soon?”
“Amber!” Ria fell back, laughing. “Where do you think I’m going to get the other half of the equation now that the Great Match is done for?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Amber’s eyes turned sly. “But I know a cat who looks at you like he wants to eat you up, then come back for seconds.”
Ria was still gasping at the scandalous comment from her—usually—shy sister-in-law, when Miaoling began laughing. Slapping her thigh, she laughed so hard that Ria could do nothing but join in. “You heard”—she sobbed between bursts that left her stomach aching—“what Jet said. They don’t get serious with humans.”
“Who says?” Amber’s eyes were shiny with humor. “Just because we don’t know about any.”
That cut off Ria’s laughter. She sat back. Thought about it. Shook her head. “We’d have heard. I’d have heard at the college.”
“Not necessarily,” Amber argued. “They don’t exactly advertise things. I’d say I’d never met a more closemouthed lot, but . . .” She waved a hand.
Ria blew out a breath. “I can’t ask him. You know that.”
“Why?” Miaoling asked.
“Because then he’d think I was hinting at something!”
Her grandmother gave her a gimlet-eyed glance. “If you don’t hint, how’s he going to know?”
Ria’s mind flooded with the memories of her pressed up against that gym door, his hand stroking over her, his tongue in her mouth. “He knows.”
“Yes,” Amber said. “Changelings have a better sense of smell than humans. He can probably scent your you-know-what.”
Ria stared. “Amber, what’s come over you?”
Her sister-in-law picked up another piece of cake. “I’m going to blame it on the pregnancy.” A slow grin.
SEVEN
Emmett’s blood was at fever point. Returning to the restaurant, he caught the scent of the shooter and began tracking. Dorian and Clay had both picked up the trail while he escorted Ria home, but this was his hunt.
His fingers remembered the soft feel of Ria’s skin, the delicate roughness of the scratch that shouldn’t have been on her face. The leopard paced inside his skull, wanting out, wanting to do damage, but Emmett held on to his humanity. For now.
Minutes later, he found both Dorian and Clay standing frustrated at a busy intersection. “Fuck,” Emmett said, sensing what they had. The shooter’s scent simply disappeared.
“Probably someone waiting to pick him up,” Dorian muttered, looking around. “No CCTV cameras in this area. We need to fix that.”
Emmett narrowed his eyes, making a slow circuit of all four points of the intersection. It was clogged with people. “Can’t have been a pickup. It’d be too hard to make a quick getaway,” he muttered almost to himself . . . and looked up.
The old-fashioned fire escape ladder hung a few feet off the ground, just far enough up to confuse the scent trail with this many people around. Landing on the ladder with a single powerful jump, he began to follow the fading trail with the fluid grace of the leopard he was. No human could ever hope to match a predatory changeling moving at full speed.
Making it to the top of the building in seconds, he pursued the scent to the other side. Another ladder, this one looking down into a small parklike area thronged with elders playing what looked like a combination of mahjong and chess. Ignoring the ladder, he jumped straight to the ground, making several people scream. His cat ensured he landed on his feet, his body perfectly balanced.
Again, the scent was muddied by the number of people in the park. But worse, a few meters later it was overwhelmed totally by the strong disinfectant used to sanitize the nearby automated public toilets. Swearing under his breath, he did a circle of the park and came up with nothing. Frustration clawed at him. He was certain
Thrusting a hand through his hair, he was striding back the way he’d come when an old man waved him over. “Here—he left his motorcycle parked on the footpath. Very rude.” A piece of paper was put into his hand.
Opening it, he found a license plate number.
But that technical knowledge also came in handy when DarkRiver needed to hack into Enforcement databases. Emmett had an address to go with the license plate five minutes later. Assembling a team took only a further three minutes—Lucas, Vaughn, and Clay, with Dorian holding a surveillance position. The young soldier was turning into one hell of a sharpshooter.
“How’re we doing this?” Lucas asked as they got out of their vehicle a short distance from the shooter’s home, his eyes cold.
“I want the bastard alive,” Emmett said through gritted teeth. “We need to get Vincent’s location.” He glanced at Lucas. “We’re skating way past the edge of the law here.” Changelings had jurisdiction over crimes that involved their kind, but this shooter was most likely human. “It’s daylight—we’ll be seen.”
His alpha shrugged. “Let me handle that.”
Trusting his word, Emmett gave the signal and they fanned out, coming in at the suspect’s dirty trailer from all sides. The bike sat near the back—and it was sticky with the scent Emmett had detected at the restaurant.
Even that close, no one shot out at them, and a couple of seconds later, Emmett’s leopard picked up a new scent. Blood. Fresh and thick. “Goddammit,” he muttered under his breath, knowing what they’d find. He was right.
The shooter lay slumped over a rickety table, the back of his head blown off execution style. “Vincent knew we’d picked up his scent,” Lucas said, taking in the scene from the doorway beside Emmett. “I bet that blood is still warm.”
