back. Before we left, my familiars discovered three deer in the woods with their hearts missing.
“Obviously, it’s connected,” I mutter and send Evander a text, telling him to get ahold of me when he can. It’s Friday, and he’s probably teaching a class. “What demons eat hearts?” I ask Binx, mind racing. “Several kinds, but tying up a victim makes me think they had to perform some sort of ritual, and lower-level demons don’t usually get that complex, right?” I scroll through the article. Gloria went missing two days before her body was found. She was from the unincorporated part of Thorne Hill, which is closer to our neighboring town of Paradise Valley on the other side of Thorne Hill from where her body was found. Her family believed she was kidnapped while walking the dog in the evening. The dog—an eighty-pound German Shepherd—never returned home either.
“If the demon is going after women around my age who are walking dogs, then Scarlet and I—” Binx lets out a low growl. I purse my lips and let out a sigh. “Scarlet and I will not be bait because I promised not to get involved with demons.” I close the Safari app on my phone and toss my head back against the headrest. “We both know if this was a ritualistic killing, the demons will probably kill again. What am I supposed to do?” I ask Binx. “Turn this over to the police?”
He steps into my lap, rubbing his head against me to help calm me down.
“Thanks,” I say when he lets me know he’ll take Freya and Pandora and patrol the woods as soon as we get home. My stomach grumbles, reminding me that I need to go grocery shopping. I call Kristy on my way, and the call goes straight to voicemail.
“She’s been spending a lot of time at the Covenstead lately,” I say out loud to Binx. I not-so-secretly want her and Evander to get together. My best friend and my older brother…sounds like a romance novel waiting to happen, I know.
And it would be awesome.
Evander and I started referring to each other as brother and sister only a few months after Tabatha unofficially adopted me. I never thought about the legalities of anything back then, and to this day I have no idea how William Martin went about selling me. I’m assuming he kept up the pretense I was at home, or that I had to be shipped off to some school for troubled youth, which means he lied on his taxes, claiming me as a dependent. I’m sure there’s a way to use that against him, but at this point, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Demonic fish.
And it’s going to drive me to the point of insanity to sit back and do nothing. The guilt alone is enough to make me crack, and it’s not like I’m in short supply of it already. I’m keeping too many secrets, from not letting Abby know she almost died to not cluing in any of my friends on the angel-business that’s been going on.
And the longer I keep these things from them, the harder it’s going to be to tell them.
“Dammit,” I mutter, slowing to a stop at a light. It’s a chilly, overcast day, yet people are out and about, walking around Thorne Hill totally clueless to what really happened days ago.
“They didn’t kill her on Samhain,” I muse, unable to stop thinking about it. For years, this was what I did: read about a weird case like this in the paper and handle it. I know there are many, many more demonic killings than I can handle, but seeing one right in front of me, in my own fucking town, and then doing nothing goes against every fiber of my being.
It nags at me the entire time I’m grocery shopping, and I load my cart up with extra junk food to emotionally eat later as the guilt chips away at me.
I shut the door with my food, setting the last grocery bag on the kitchen floor. “Hey,” I call through the house. Lucas is probably in the office again, finding another multi-million-dollar property to buy so he can sell it years later and turn a huge profit. “I heard something funny while I was out.”
I wash my hands and then start unloading the groceries. Lucas comes into the kitchen and helps me put the food away.
“What was it?” he asks.
“A body was found in the nature park. Missing