people needed killing, but it didn't make me feel any better about it.
Most of this crowd had fought together. They knew each other. While they'd never be the perfect, happy-go-lucky bunch I'd seen in sitcoms, I still considered them family. A wonderful, bizarre, dysfunctional family. At least I knew what they were, rather than the lie of a perfect family my parents had smothered my childhood with. For all I knew, my mom had blurred out all the negative memories, leaving me with only positive ones.
It doesn't matter anymore.
My parents might as well have been dead.
Nyte was speaking with animated gestures to Shelton and Bella, probably begging for magic tricks. He'd already extracted a promise from Ryland to transform into a wolf, though I expected he'd hovered close to the lycan so he could gawk at Stacey's shapely form.
Meghan stood near the roaring fireplace, while Adam took up a position in the center of the room, his tablet ready with whatever information he'd gleaned. His face looked pale. I had to assume he was worried sick about his sister. Meghan's eyes locked with mine and held contact for the space of a couple of seconds. If she was trying to tell me something, I didn't get it.
"Oh, lamb," Stacey said, walking a circle around me, a purr in the back of her throat. "You look absolutely delicious." She glanced at Leia. "I really must have you style my hair sometime. You do a marvelous job."
"A Templar hair dresser?" Shelton said from his position on a leather sofa to the left of the table. "I don't get it."
Leia shrugged. "It started out as a cover for one of our operations many years ago. By the time we were done, I realized how much I enjoyed styling. So I continued."
"If you'd ever take off that cowboy hat, maybe she could gussie you up," Ryland said to Shelton with a wolfish grin.
Shelton grunted and pulled off the hat to reveal his close-shorn head. "For one thing, wolf man, this is a fedora, not a cowboy hat. As for hair—" He gave a disdainful look at Ryland's thick head of long, unruly hair. "I got a pair of hedge trimmers that might improve that mess."
Ignoring the verbal jousting, I set my arcphone on the table in the middle of the room. "Before we start talking about waxing body hair Brazilian style, maybe I should go over the plan." I spoke some magic words to pull up a holographic image of Maximus's crib. Unless the rogue vampire had changed things up, the map appeared accurate, including the location of the crypt where he'd kept my father deep beneath the old building. As I looked it over, apprehension settled over me. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined setting foot back in the place where Elyssa had almost died. The place where I'd first manifested into demon form and annihilated a mob of vamplings. The place where Felicia had sicced those very vamplings on me and Elyssa. How ironic it was, going back into that place to save Felicia.
"Are you okay, Justin?" Bella said, concern etched in her face.
I shook my head. "Yeah. Sorry." I covered my worry with a smile. "Just some bad memories of this place." I glanced at Nyte, whose eyes were glued to Stacey's backside as she prowled about the room. I cleared my throat. "Anything you and Ash want to add before I go over the plan, Nyte?"
Ash looked away from Katie, a guilty expression on his face. "No?"
Nyte wiped the corner of his mouth and jerked from his ass-induced trance. "Uh, no. I wish we had more inside info."
I waved to Adam. "Want to show us what you found on Maximus?"
The gawky Arcane came to the table and set his tablet on it. Flicked a finger across the surface. The black-and-white image of a man with a monocle and an oiled mustache flickered into the air. "Meet Simon Barclay, aka The Master. This is the vampire turning noms for Maximus."
"What a horrid moustache," Stacey said, wrinkling her nose.
Adam smiled, though it didn't look like his heart was in it. "Barclay isn't ancient by vampire standards, having been around only since the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but from all the information I was able to find about him, he's anti-establishment."
"He doesn't like the Red Syndicate?" Ryland asked.
Adam shook his head. "Back before vampires modernized to the Syndicate, they ruled with an elder council. Barclay thought vampirism was a gift they