Heart of Vengeance (Alice Worth #6) - Lisa Edmonds Page 0,82

hands on the bike’s grips. “I’ve got a long list of people and creatures to track down. Lieutenant Stone isn’t the only person working around the clock and putting in the miles. I’m not going to put all that aside because you think your wolf wants me along.”

Daisy growled.

“I’m pretty sure that’s what she wants,” I told him. “You don’t think it’s the least bit strange and significant that a wolf wants you to do something?”

“I think it’s plenty strange. Significant, no.” He turned his icy stare on Daisy. “Move,” he warned her.

She bared her teeth.

“If I don’t find this person in time, a lot of people are going to die,” I said.

He turned on the Harley’s gas. “If I don’t find the people on the list I just got, a lot of people are going to die.”

“Is that why you’re leaving? Or is it because of the money?”

“Both.”

The Harley’s deep rumble drowned out my short and rather profane response.

“Be seein’ you, Alice,” Ronan said over the roar of the engine.

He put on his helmet, flipped the visor down, and took off. Daisy jumped aside, but snapped her teeth at his leg as the motorcycle went by. He raised his hand as he passed Lucy. She gave him a one-finger reply.

The motorcycle and its rider rumbled to the end of the roadhouse and disappeared around the corner. I listened to the sound of the engine as it faded in the distance.

“What an asshole,” Lucy said when she joined Malcolm, Daisy, and me. “With things in the League being what they are, the bounty hunters are a necessary evil. Some of them are like Ronan. The rest of them are worse. Still, better than the Spartoi.” She rubbed her face. “We can’t go on the road looking and smelling like this. Let’s see if we can charm Charles into letting us clean up.”

“Ronan said he arranged some kind of disturbance in the bar to distract you while we talked out here. What happened?”

She raised her eyebrows. “A fight broke out in the back room over a poker game. I had no idea that was Ronan’s doing. Crafty bastard. Gotta respect his ingenuity, if nothing else. Well, and his ass.”

“It was pretty fantastic,” I admitted.

“Bordering on legendary,” Malcolm agreed.

Lucy sighed. “Come on—let’s go get washed up again and then we’ll hit the road. Next stop: a mass grave near Oakdale.”

17

A female server met us just inside the back door and hustled us up some back stairs to the room we’d used earlier. Apparently, Charles didn’t want us traipsing through the bar covered in shifter blood. As I’d noticed some shifters in the crowd downstairs, it seemed like a good decision.

I washed my bloody clothes by hand in the sink with detergent provided by Lucy, and showered while she got our bags from the locked storage closet. I scrubbed myself from head to toe and rinsed with cold water to help wake up.

As I washed, my thoughts about the Broken World versions of Charles and Hawthorne’s forced me to contemplate something I’d deliberately avoided thinking or talking about since I’d found out I would travel to another world. The moment Adam explained this world was very like our own, other than the fractured boundaries between the mundane and supernatural realms, I’d immediately wondered if an Ava Selene Murphy, granddaughter of Moses Murphy, existed here—and just as quickly banished those thoughts. If she did, she was not me.

As we prepared the spellwork for the mirror travel, Malcolm had wondered aloud whether some version of himself lived in this world, and if so, whether that Malcolm’s life had been better, worse, longer, or shorter than his own. Almost immediately, he’d come to the same conclusion I had: that it would be better not to know. We’d made a pact not to try to find out, and I still believed that decision was for the best. If anyone else we knew existed here, I didn’t want to find them, and I didn’t want to know. I saw no version of events where that knowledge would do anyone any good.

When I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel with another around my hair, Lucy had stripped to her underwear. She was well-muscled, with no visible tattoos. She was battle-scarred from head to toe. One scar on her abdomen must have been very nearly a fatal wound.

I wondered, belatedly, if there were no healing spells here. I had a variety of healing spells with me, but