Control your emotions. I squared my shoulders and walked by Rex, my heart firmly back in check.
Bryn sat at the kitchen table, one foot tucked under her rear, leaning over a map and biting her lip in concentration. Her hair was pulled back into a messy twist, and the long bangs were tucked behind her ear. She glanced over and gave me a hopeful smile that laid me wide open. Her aura sprang forth, so beautiful it stole my breath. Lush, vibrant green shot with ribbons of Caribbean blue.
Then I noticed the gray; a thin blanket, stifling all that was good. She loved Emma so much. She loved me. Her worry was suffocating her spirit, yet she was feeding it, allowing it to grow into anger and vengeance.
Aaron tensed beside me, and one look told me he saw the same thing. But he didn’t approach her, and I knew whatever was going on or had gone on with them stretched like a canyon between them.
“We keep coming back to the same place.” She tapped her pen on the map. I went closer to see she had circled it many times. Her scrying crystal lay on a green velvet pouch next to the map.
Rex grabbed a can of ginger ale from the fridge and then slid into the chair opposite Bryn as though he owned the place. “Like I said for the millionth time, it’s the right place. With my power and yours, and that pink chicken, there’s no way we could be wrong.”
My breath caught, his words like a sucker punch to the belly.
I spun around to find Emma’s pink chicken sitting on the counter.
I fell onto the bed, my face squished into her pillow, releasing her Cherry Blast shampoo and baby powder scent. She felt so close, and yet a million miles away. Tears wet the pillow, and I didn’t care anymore. I let them come. My nose grew stuffy and my head hot from the pressure. I pulled her pillow closer and curled into a ball, hugging Chickie and tuning out the rest of the world, feeling my heart breaking and not knowing how to stop it.
I woke with a hot, puffy face and dry eyes, which cracked open to see Bryn standing by the bed. I sat up in a panic, the fog of sleep cluttering my mind and speech. “What? Why did you let me fall asleep?”
How could I have fallen asleep at a time like this! I flung my legs over the side of the mattress, cursing my own stupidity. My daughter was out there, needing me, and here I was sleeping like a baby. I was sick, a horrible, horrible mother.
“Charlie.” Bryn stepped in front of me, preventing me from standing. “It’s okay. You’ll do her more good by clearing your head and having had a chance to rest. You were only sleeping for an hour.”
An hour. I rubbed my eyes. It felt like days.
My shoulders slumped, and I knew she was right. There wasn’t anything I could do until Hank and Zara came through, hopefully with a location that fit within Bryn and Rex’s scrying area.
Bryn must’ve sensed the direction of my thoughts. “Hank and Zara are on their way back now.” Then she moved aside and motioned over her shoulder. “This one showed up about twenty minutes ago.”
Filling the open doorway, Carreg gazed down at me, his dark features unmoving and blank. The soft light of the bedside lamp caught a glint in his unfathomable eyes.
A thought raced across my mind, shoving aside any lingering traces of sleep. If I wanted, I could see his aura. And I wanted. My strong, inquisitive nature needed to crack the mystery of this quiet Charbydon noble. So I remembered the same cleansing openness I had discovered in the League’s library and used it to see Carreg’s true self. Auras couldn’t lie.
Mesmerizing midnight blue shot with silver threads. Just like the color of his eyes. It was like staring up at a clear, starry sky on a cold winter’s night. It took my breath away.
“Charlie.” My name came through his lips like the purr of a giant cat. His intensity, an air of strength and power and magnetism, reminded me of those beautiful predators of our world; the wolves and big cats, those that could transfix another by the beauty of their stare and the stillness of their being.
“Carreg,” I greeted him neutrally as Bryn gave me a quick nod before leaving us alone. “A little risky to be here. Aren’t you afraid Mynogan will find out?”
That made him stiffen a fraction. “Mynogan does not inspire fear in me.” He moved to the window and pushed the curtain aside with the back of his hand, glancing out calmly. His suit jacket was gone, and he wore a clean white dress shirt, untucked, with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. The white made his olive skin glow and his hair look like black satin. He turned back to me, tucking both hands into the front pockets of his black slacks, and leaned against the dresser. Such a casual, easy gesture, one that seemed at odds with the powerful being in front of me. “He is, however, a cause for concern.”
I braced both hands on either side of my thighs and gripped the edge of the mattress tightly, remembering the images that filled my head when he’d grabbed my hand at the lab. He’d saved Hank, like he said, but was it a ruse? Something to gain my trust, perhaps? “Do you know where my daughter is?”
“No. I didn’t realize he’d taken her until I arrived here. Your sister told me.” A rueful smile tugged on his mouth. “She also had me sit down and write out every address known to Mynogan and the CPP.”
“That proves nothing.” I stood, preferring to be on even ground with him as I attempted to gather my power and search beneath the beauty of his aura. What I found was a massive roadblock. “What are you hiding?”
A raven black eyebrow lifted. “I am a private person. I have much to hide.” He pushed away from the dresser and took two steps closer. “How are you feeling, Charlie? Any sudden urges for blood?”
A silky chuckle escaped him. “I’m going to let you in on a little-known fact, Detective Madigan. After all, you’re now one of us. The noble Houses are cursed. Abaddon must take blood to survive. It stands to reason; the curse also extends to you.”
“Blood,” I repeated bluntly. “Are you trying to tell me Abaddons are vampires?”
“Not in your sense of the word, no. They abhor Elysian blood, and while humans are a step up, most nobles wouldn’t stoop so low unless starved to the brink of death. No, they take it mostly from Charbydons.”
Was this what Mynogan had referred to in the limo? The powers he spoke of. The threat to take my blood there and then if he wanted.
I cocked my head, refusing to be daunted by Carreg’s words. It might be true, but I had no desire whatsoever for anyone’s blood, so he could shove his words up his ass for all I cared. “And you? You said
“Life,” he joked softly, dipping his head closer so that the warmth of his breath brushed my ear and neck. Shivers danced along my spine as subtle notes of sage and cedar enveloped me. I couldn’t move. “That spark inside every spirit, that light that feeds and energizes, makes a being
Whatever the hell he was doing to me, he needed to stop. Now.
Refusing to step back, I ducked around him, dragging in a deep breath of air and composing myself before facing him again. Damned if I’d be drawn into his innuendo and talk of blood and excited spirits. I’d kill myself before taking another’s blood to feed some curse.
“Mynogan has defied the agreement made between my House and his,” Carreg said easily, as though he hadn’t just come on to me. “For the first time in ages, we stopped bickering and made a pact to work together to save Charbydon. What he has planned now will leave our world to ruin and cause greater destruction here in yours.”
“And why do you care?”
“Because I know our moon can be saved. Charbydon is my home. It has been home to my family for untold millennia. To give up our history, to let the blackness consume all of it without trying is the highest grievance there is.” He took another step closer, staring down at me with hard, penetrating eyes. “Would you let your world go? Walk away from it without trying? Would you take another that is not yours to take?”
“Of course not.” Perhaps we weren’t so different after all.
“You are right to be wary of me, Detective.” His voice dropped an octave to an intimate tone usually reserved
