tighten her neck and shoulders to keep from turning to look at Ben. “Can you hear anything outside of these walls?”
“Footsteps.” His expression tightened. “Whatever you have to do, Kat. Remember that. Whatever—” The door opened.
A woman this time, not the man from before. She carried a small leather case, which she set down not far from Julio’s chair. “Good evening.”
Julio remained silent, even when the woman took an extra chair from the corner and brought it close to his, sat down and opened her case to reveal the wicked glint of metal.
Staged. It was all perfectly staged, straight out of a movie script, and Kat knew it was meant for her.
Not that they wouldn’t torture Julio—with Ben’s blood dried on her skin, she believed they’d do anything — but the precise movements, the slow reveal, the sheer theatrics of it all… They were trying to fuck with her head.
It was working.
Kat squeezed her hands together, even though she could barely feel her fingers. “I told you, I don’t know where the collar is.”
“Really?” The woman pulled out a thin knife, almost like a scalpel. “From what we’ve heard, you planned to take it to Wyoming. Did you?”
They knew too much, and yet not enough. Kat’s mouth went dry. The blade looked sharp, cold. The woman kept turning it this way and that, letting it catch the light. More theatrics, giving Kat ample time to speak as dread closed around her.
She’d seen the movies. She knew all of her lines. Quips and taunts.
No, they’d killed Ben, and they’d slice Julio to pieces next. Because she was the empath, the squishy-hearted one, and she’d break under someone else’s pain.
The scalpel dipped toward Julio, and Kat let out an embarrassing squeak. “Wait. Wait, don’t.”
Julio growled. “Kat, no—” The blade sinking into his skin silenced him.
Chapter Twenty
No more than a quarter hour after Andrew’s desperate, determined phone call, a willowy blonde stood in front of him. It didn’t matter that Wynne’s body was currently in Paris—she didn’t need it to help them investigate the addresses Anna had managed to locate. She studied the satellite map Mackenzie pulled up, closed her eyes and vanished.
Andrew paced the floor anxiously. Astral projection allowed her almost instantaneous travel, but she had to exercise care in popping in and out of her target coordinates, or she risked exposure. They were dealing with psychics, and if they thought Kat and Julio had help coming, they might not hesitate to kill them both.
In less than ten minutes, she reappeared. “Nothing there but a vacant lot. I checked the adjacent ones too, just to be sure, but nothing.”
The bell above the door jingled as Patrick shoved through it, a massive duffel bag over his shoulder and a smaller one in his hand. He stopped short and blinked at Wynne, then looked to Andrew. “You found an astral projector?”
Jackson scratched his head and eyed the white board. “It’s the only way to check all these places out without splitting up in half a dozen different directions. A hell of a lot quicker too.”
Wynne barely raised her head to smile absently. “I’m off again.” With that, she disappeared.
Patrick swung the large bag off his shoulder and dropped it on the desk in front of Andrew.
“Weapons,” he said shortly. “I flew private and brought everything.”
Andrew dropped to one knee and unzipped the duffel. Just about every kind of gun he could think of lay inside, along with several intricate-looking blades. “Magically silenced like your others?”
“Silenced, untraceable, warded ten ways to the underworld and at least halfway back.” Patrick turned to Jackson. “I know your spell wouldn’t lock on Kat, but I brought some of Ben’s things.”
Jackson nodded. “Give me the thing he handles the most and I’ll try.”
Patrick retrieved a laptop computer barely bigger than his hand and held it out. “This.”
“Got it.” He retreated to his desk and the map laid across it.
Anna beckoned Patrick over to the board. “I’ve narrowed down these possibilities. Does anything strike a chord, maybe something one of your contacts mentioned?”
“Not Tennessee,” Patrick said at once, pointing to an address south of Memphis. “Not Georgia either.
But I got hits on movement in Mississippi and Louisiana… I tried to get a guy on those bank accounts, to follow the money, but I’m used to having Ben.”
“Either they’re still traveling or they couldn’t have gone far,” Miguel observed.
It all depended on what they wanted—information, or something far more violent and personal.
“Closer means less time,” Andrew told him. “They’d have to consider that we might—” His breath cut off as magic whooshed through the room and lifted the fine hairs on the back of his neck.
He turned to find Jackson’s entire desk awash in golden, glaring light. Even after it died down, the wizard stared at the map in confusion, his brows drawn together.
It was Sera who spoke, her voice soft and worried. “Jackson? Was the computer warded? Kat has a ward on one of her laptops…”
“No, it’s…” He trailed off and shook his head. “Are any of those addresses up near Covington or Goodbee?”
Anna whirled and snatched up one of the files. “Yes! A foreclosed farm in St. Tammany Parish. The motherfucker’s in the middle of nowhere.”
Andrew’s knees wobbled, and he grabbed the edge of a desk. “That’s it?”
Jackson began to hurriedly fold the map. “That’s it.”
Mackenzie shoved her phone into her back pocket and turned to Sera, who’d already reached for her jacket. “You’re staying here, honey. Someone needs to wait for Wynne, and you know what’ll happen in a fight.”
The coyote tensed, anger flashing across her face, chased quickly by frustration. “It’s Kat.”
“It’s Kat,” Mackenzie agreed. “Which is why we can’t have you underfoot, giving our instincts hell.”
Sera jerked her coat off the desk and looked at Andrew. “I’ll stay in the car. I just…I can
He couldn’t imagine being left behind with his friends in trouble, and the pleading look on her face was one emotional straw too many. “You stay in the car and stay
She nodded with the blind obedience of a submissive shifter, so effortless he knew it was instinct. As Sera slid into her coat, Mackenzie gave him a searching look, then turned to the white board and scribbled a note with the address.
It couldn’t be more than fifty or sixty miles, less if they crossed the lake over the Causeway, but the thought of getting stuck in traffic on the bridge with no way out of it…
No fucking way. He hit the door, shouldering it open. The glass wobbled in its metal casing, maybe even cracked, but all Andrew could think of was getting out of the city.
Getting to Kat.
Chapter Twenty-One
Julio didn’t scream.
