“Maybe I should neuter you now.”
His tooth was dry and coated with a layer of what felt like dust. I didn’t want to think about what it really was when I gave the elongated canine a wiggle. “Looking a little long in the tooth,” I teased, my voice bitter. He tried to clamp his jaws shut and bite me in the process, but the grip I had on his chin made it impossible. My fingers tensed on the fang.
“That’s enough,” Sig interrupted. His presence in the room caused the blue glow to shrink back into the darker recesses. Was there anything he couldn’t scare? “Secret, visiting hours are over now. You can come back and play with Monsieur Peyton some other time.” The French pronunciation spoken with Sig’s Scandinavian inflection sounded alien but somehow more beautiful.
I couldn’t let go. I’d never had the upper hand with Peyton before and I wasn’t willing to give it up on command.
“Secret,” Sig warned. He didn’t need to say more than my name. I understood the implication loud and clear. I couldn’t kill Peyton, and I couldn’t enact any kind of punishment on him without the express permission of my fellow Tribunal leaders. Sig might let me, knowing my history with the Cajun maniac, but Juan Carlos would point out that Peyton’s punishment was already worse than death.
Maybe he was right.
I released Peyton’s chin, and he wiggled his jaw.
“I hope you like it here,” I told him. “Because you’re never, ever getting out.”
“We…will…see.”
When I passed Sig on the way out of the hovel, I didn’t miss the fearsome look he fixed on Peyton. Sig would make sure Peyton never got out, I felt certain of that. As much as Sig often terrified me, he was a just leader, and it mattered to him whether I lived or died. This was one evil he could protect me from.
Outside, with the door closed behind us, I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that had begun brewing since we’d first arrived. “Why would you bring me here?”
“I thought it would be good for you to see him like this.”
I shook my head. “No.” Turning to him so we stood only inches apart in the small hallway, I stared into his pale blue eyes. “Some skeletons are left in the closet for a reason, you know?”
Sig smiled and took one of my hands, pressing my fingers to his lips as if he meant to kiss them. His soft mouth grazed the sensitive whorls of my fingerprints, but it was too late for me to pull back when he bit into me.
“Ouch,” I exclaimed, trying to jerk my hand away when sharp pain exploded in my pointer finger. “What the hell?”
“Touch the door,” he instructed, releasing me. “Touch it and you may keep your skeleton locked up as long as you like.”
I did as he told me, pressing my bloodied digit against the rough wood. The blue light engulfed the brown surface with a gasping whoosh, and the silver lock re-materialized.
“Wow.” Staggering back as the tingle of magic crawled over my skin, I inched as far from the door as I could without seeming to be afraid of it.
Sig came to stand beside me and placed an arm around my shoulder, giving me a friendly squeeze, only he was compressing my gunshot injury. Involuntarily, I yelped.
“What on Earth?” He gave me a quizzical look then his gaze trailed down to the small shiny circle of skin beside my clavicle. Eventually the scar would mostly disappear, leaving only a white mark instead of the current pink, but I couldn’t hide it from him now. He knew all too well what would leave a mark like that. “Silver?”
“You bet.”
“Who?”
A sad smile crept across my face. “I guess Peyton isn’t the only one who wants me dead.”
Chapter Eleven
A howl shredded the peaceful silence of the night, jarring my already rattled nerves. The full moon glimmered between the fingers of the forest trees whose spring foliage had begun to fill in. Instead of leaves, the limbs were covered with kelly-green buds, eager to open. Beyond the tree edge, the wide, sprawling field of Central Park’s Great Lawn invited me to step out of the woods and into the free expanse before me.
I inched forward, then stumbled. My feet had become entangled in the heavy skirt of the white wedding dress I was wearing. Layers of white tulle clasped at me like expensive shackles, and only sheer luck kept me from falling to the ground.
Deja