She snorted. “That wasn’t for you. Herne wanted to know when the two of you arrived.” She straightened some papers, then yielded the chair to Angel. “I fielded several calls already. Mostly just inquiries about how much we charge, things like that. Also, one former client who’s worried that their goblin problem has returned. I took their name and number so that you can return their call and do whatever it is that you do.”
“Thanks,” Angel said, sitting down and glancing through the notes. “I’ll call them back in a while. Do you know if we’re going to have a morning meeting as usual, considering it’s almost noon?”
“Herne said no—we’ll be meeting with Ashera at four, and we might as well just use the time until then to get organized and finish up paperwork.” Talia glanced over at me. I was slowly headed down the hallway. My head wasn’t hurting anymore, but I was still a little dizzy and my side burned. “You really got the stuffing beat out of you, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did.”
Herne popped out of his office at that moment. “Hey, love.” He kissed me quickly, but there was a distracted light in his eyes and he looked concerned about something. “Talia, we’re having the morning meeting after all. I just learned something that is…rather disconcerting.”
I groaned. “We don’t want disconcerting. We don’t need disconcerting. The world is disconcerting enough.”
“Toughen up, cookie,” Herne said, kissing me again. “I wasn’t the one who brought this issue to light, by the way. It was you and Yutani, so blame yourselves.”
Frowning—for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about—I slowly inched my way to the break room. As I sat down, Talia immediately veered toward the coffee pot. Without asking, she poured me a cup of coffee and brought the cookie tray over to the table.
“I know you probably just ate, but…here.” She winked at me.
“Hey, how’s that boytoy of yours? What’s his name? Tanjin?”
She smiled and that told me about all I needed to know. “He’s good. We’re good. Nothing serious, but I have to admit, I’m having a lot of fun and he seems to be, as well.”
“Are the two of you exclusive?” Viktor asked, leaning over my shoulder to snatch a cookie off the tray. He gave me a pat on the head. “How you doing today, Ember?”
“Sore but alive. That’s the most important part.”
“The stitches pulling on your muscles?”
I nodded. “They’re right where I bend to the side.” I motioned to my waist. “So they hurt like crap every time I turn.”
“That sucks,” Yutani said, coming into the room. “I’m glad to see you up and around, though.”
“Me too. By the way, Herne’s blaming you and me for whatever it is he has to tell us.” I gnawed on my lip, trying to figure out what it could be.
“Uh oh, that doesn’t sound good.” He sat next to Talia, who was nose-deep in a magazine that she pulled out of her tote bag. I leaned closer and saw that it was Dog Health Monthly.
“Rema and Roxy all right?” I asked.
She glanced at me over the top of the magazine. “Yeah, they’re doing fine. I just like to keep up on new treatments for their health and whatever, especially since they’re rescue dogs, and greyhounds tend to have a myriad of problems.”
When we were all seated, sans Charlie and Rafé, Herne cleared his throat and set down his tablet. “I wasn’t going to bother with a meeting this morning, but something’s come up that we have to talk about. Yesterday, Ember and Yutani discovered a murder case out on Whidbey Island that sounded suspiciously similar to the ones committed by Straff, Blackthorn’s son.”
I groaned. “Please don’t tell me we’re actually onto something?”
“I’d like to just gloss over it, but I can’t. I looked into the case and you were right—the wound marks are all too similar to the murder victims in the Straff case. So I called my father to ask him if Straff was still in the dungeons, or if he has any siblings around.”
“And—?” Yutani asked.
“And, turns out, someone helped Straff escape. Since he was in solitary in the darkest, deepest part of the dungeons, there were only a couple staff members who checked on him and brought him his food. Each guard takes shifts for three or four days. So when Tokkberry—the guard who discovered him missing—found out he was gone, he reported it to his commander.