know each other, but they knew their common enemy.
The girl obviously favored stealth, but she held her own as the three last vampires surrounded them. Christian fought with a long dagger in his right hand; the girl he had stumbled across fought with two weapons: in her left hand, a stiletto, and in her right, a steel stake with rings near the end that served as brass knuckles. He and the girl each dispatched one target, then turned together toward the last.
The vampire put his back to the wall, trying to keep them both in sight, but he didn’t ee. He had to know running was his only chance of survival when faced with two Bruja mercenaries, but his fear of his employer apparently outweighed his instinct for self-
preservation.
Behind his impromptu partner, Christian noticed a blood-slicked pair making their way quietly across the back of the room. The girl was letting the guy lean on her. She wasn’t his prisoner, and more importantly, they were both obviously too injured to ght even if they hadn’t been trying to sneak away.
Christian almost called out to them but then decided to let the battered and bruised runaways limp to freedom thinking they had never been spotted. If they spared a backward glance, it was only after he had returned his attention to his fight.
“Nice work,” he said as the girl he had been fighting with landed the final, killing blow.
She looked up at him, almost an eye-roll, as if unsure whether he was patronizing her.
“You didn’t do too badly yourself, for an Onyx brat,” she answered, the words paired with a challenging grin.
He glanced past her, but the prisoners had already made their exit.
“Want to get a coffee?” he asked, on impulse.
She lifted a brow, considered giving a snarky answer, and then said, “O er chocolate and
I’ll say yes. I always want chocolate after a hunt.”
There was blood on Sarik’s hands, and it was driving Jason crazy. He had refused to feed from the tiny human girl they had been ordered to kidnap, which meant he hadn’t fed in days. Healing the injuries left by Maya’s displeasure had weakened him even more. Maybe, if Sarik was grateful …
“I need to get this off me,” the shapeshifter said, her voice trembling.
They had holed up in a run-down motel that was the rst place they reached that didn’t seem like it would also be the rst place Maya looked. Now Sarik pushed past him and ed to the bathroom. He heard water running as she washed blood—hers, the dead girl’s, and his—from her hands, face, and hair. The water stopped, and he thought she might emerge, but instead he heard the door lock, and then the shower running again. With a vampire’s sense of hearing, he could easily make out the sound of sobs beneath the hissing of the water.
An hour passed before Sarik emerged dripping wet, wrapped in a towel, and announced, “My clothes are covered in blood.”
“What do you expect me to do about that?” he demanded.
She inched, but then re rose in her eyes, and she snapped, “I saved your
“I thought
“You couldn’t even
So he went to the touristy store down the road, wondering why he was even still with her. She was no one, a shapeshifter running away from home who had crossed into the wrong territory and gotten herself in trouble. Maya liked shapeshifter blood, called it sweet and spicy, so she had grabbed this one without hesitation.
The nearest gift shop had closed hours ago, but snapping the lock wasn’t hard. He picked clothes up indiscriminately, deciding that a large T-shirt and some sweatpants would be good enough for her to go out and find her own stuff.
She didn’t complain when he returned and handed her the bundle, but instead disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes before emerging in blue sweatpants that read SALEM STATE COLLEGE in large orange letters and a pink T-shirt emblazoned with a huge black lobster. Both were far too large, dwarfing her in their folds.
Jason couldn’t help it. He started laughing.
A lip quiver, a half smile, and a few seconds later, so did she.
CHAPTER 1
NOW
SARIK LOOKED UP at Jason with a grateful smile when he placed a cup of hazelnut co ee with a dollop of heavy cream next to her, and was startled by his brief kiss. She had been so absorbed in the papers she had been drowning in for the past hour that she hadn’t noticed he had left.
Next, he handed a steaming black co ee to a petite Asian girl who looked fourteen but in reality was the oldest person in the room. Lynzi was a Triste, a type of witch with the same physical agelessness as the vampires. She liked her co ee so strong Sarik couldn’t take a whiff of it without her eyes watering.
A fruity herbal tea with honey went to Diana Smoke, the witch who ran their organization. Unlike Tristes, Macht witches were as mortal as any human, but despite the ne lines that had recently begun to appear at the edges of her eyes, Diana had a presence that always made Sarik feel like she could be closer to immortal than any of them.
“Thank you, Jason,” Diana said as he set the tea in front of her.
None of them asked if Jason wanted anything for himself. Vampires could drink or eat anything they wanted, but they didn’t need to, and Jason rarely chose to indulge just for the taste. The woman who had changed him, and claimed to own him, had set strict rules about such things. Even now, six years after he had escaped her control, he still tended to be nervous about breaking those rules.
He also tended to anticipate and respond to the wishes of those around him, like making a beverage run and returning with everyone’s favorite without being asked. The thought that his constant consideration had been taught to him through fear made Sarik’s next sip of her coffee bittersweet.
“Israel said you asked for this,” he explained to Diana as he handed her another bulky file from the records room.
Diana nodded. She had been alternating between the files on the table in front of her and her phone, which periodically chirped to tell her about an email. “I may have found an applicant worth looking into,” she explained. “Central recommended her and sent over her file.”
SingleEarth Central, located outside Burlington, Vermont, was the nexus of the international SingleEarth organization, and Sarik’s hopes rose at the notion of a recommendation from them. Surely they had found a better candidate than anyone from the endless line of people who had applied for the open mediator’s position at Haven #4 as if it were some kind of resume-builder.
Diana handed out copies of the new file, still warm from the machine.
“Her name is Alysia Marks. She has been in SingleEarth for about two years now and has been in the Technology and Communications department at Central for the last eighteen months. She recently overheard a call she thought sounded suspicious, and when the sta at Central dismissed her concerns, she went to investigate on her own. She ended up spending two hours in a hostage situation with a panicked young man who had just learned about shapeshifters and decided to take drastic measures. According to witnesses, Alysia was the one who talked him down and convinced him to turn himself in to authorities. She also managed to take identifying information from all the victims so our crisis teams could follow up with them.”
Everything Diana said about this Alysia Marks made her sound like a perfect candidate for mediator, but Sarik’s rst glance at the le made it obvious that the witch had left out a
