my head, you evil bitch, I thought, half desperately.
“You know, whatever those demons are that are eating you up…”
I gulped in another breath of air and lowered my hands, ready to tear into him, ready to turn around and bury my blade in him and screw the consequences.
I turned around. Saw him standing three feet away. “Seems to me you managed to leave them far enough behind. If you can pick fights with vampires, crazy cats and entire packs of rats, I’d think you could deal with whatever those demons were, too.”
Then he went back to his weight bench.
“Bad vibes. I want you to know, going in, I’ve got a bad, bad feeling about this,” Colleen said when I called.
I had two cups of coffee and a pastry nearly as big as a plate in my belly and I suspected I’d need more sugar and more caffeine just to get through this. “I get nothing but bad vibes about this entire mess,” I said into the phone as I leaned in and studied the donut case.
Chocolate.
That was the ticket.
Pointing to one liberally smeared in it, I smiled at the lady behind the counter. She wasn’t paying any more attention to me than she had to. She gave me the donut and then went back to staring at Damon.
Human. Even if I hadn’t been able to tell just by looking at her, I would have figured that out after she continued to stare at him for the first thirty seconds and didn’t look away even after he pointedly shoved his sunglasses onto his head and glared at her.
Another shifter wouldn’t have done that with him. Hell, most of them would have been cowering the second he walked inside.
“Okay, we both have a bad feeling about this,” I said. “Glad we have that established. Now that we do…why am I calling you?”
“Three witches from one of the outer houses have seen…something.”
The outer houses were basically subsets of the main houses. Green Road was huge and its outer houses covered most of the south. “Oh? And how does this have anything to do with me?”
“All ties into kids. One of our girls went missing, but we were able to find her and get her back. She’s still in seclusion and I don’t know what all happened, but I thought it was kind of odd, especially after I heard another witch—unaffiliated—disappeared a week later. She hasn’t been recovered yet. She’s seventeen.”
My skin started to crawl. Unaffiliated witches didn’t practice with a house. It wasn’t common, but it happened. And it wasn’t a good thing, either. Witches were more vulnerable on their own. They pretty much defined the phrase strength in numbers. One or two witches alone, especially young ones, were easy targets. Warriors were far and few between. Now one warrior witch was a sight to behold, but still, even they needed to be trained.
Sitting up a little straighter, I braced my elbows on the table as Damon slid into the booth across from me. He had a massive pile of toast. Just toast. And milk.
“What else?” I asked, staring at those neat little triangles of bread.
“I heard from a contact that somebody from the wolf pack had a kid go missing, too. I can’t confirm, but…”
“I can.” Images of a boy’s battered face flashed through my mind.
Four teenagers. Wasn’t exactly a pattern, but…
“You can, huh?” Colleen made a little humming sound under her breath. “Curiouser and curiouser.”
“Well, I can’t confirm he was with the wolf pack, but I do know that a wolf kid was found. I saw his body the other day.” Made me think about the tests I had yet to see. Needed to log into my other email. While Damon sat there contemplating his mountain of toast and listening to my phone call, I pulled my tablet out of my bag.
“So four kids. All NHs,” Colleen said.
I thought of Keeli and murmured, “Maybe five.”
Hell, considering all the reports I had to go through, there could well be more. But no way to know yet. Yeah, decent parents would report the runaways, but despite what Damon said, not all parents were decent and that didn’t change just because somebody was a shifter. They were still people, and people often sucked.
Colleen continued to speak as my tablet powered up.
“The witches in the outer house are located near the Everglades.”
My gut roiled. “The Everglades.”
“Yeah. One of them thinks she saw the witch, the day before she disappeared. After I sent up an alert