a tree cut down long enough to turn mushy with rot. This one, he could tell, belonged to Cass.
“You must be my replacement,” a feminine voice called. “She’s always had a thing for blondes.”
Boaz’s fingers spasmed around Addie’s, and he tightened his grip on her. “Who are you?”
“Not Delacorte, if that’s what you were thinking.” Her laughter was high and light. “I’m Serena.”
Addie’s fingers went limp in his. “Cass said you died.”
“I did.” The speaker made no move to reveal herself. “And then I was brought back. Resuscitated. The sheriff was in Delacorte’s pocket. He set the whole thing up to keep Delacorte’s hands clean.” Her voice trembled. “Delacorte meant to give me to Cass as a gift, or a bribe, I don’t know. It mattered to him that she accepted his offer of eternity, that she wanted it, but she kept refusing him.”
That explained why they got it wrong. Serena knew Cass well enough to guess where she would go looking for her, at the Lovers, and Serena had laid a false trail to give her time to arrange one last tableau. She had gone as far as to plant Ari’s scent there, perhaps using a piece of clothing, and attacked him and Honey to further make it appear as though her plans had been thwarted when they had been stumbling deeper into her trap with every step.
Hand to her throat, Addie said, “I’m sorry for—”
“I don’t want your pity. I want revenge.” A short woman wearing jeans and a flannel shirt stepped from behind a cluster of trunks. Her blonde hair was worn high in a tail, and her brown eyes were warm. “Lovers always say they’ll die for one another, but it’s only words. Not for us.”
Careful to keep Addie a step behind him, he engaged the vampire to get her focus off Addie. “Why punish Cass when you’ve admitted she’s just as much a victim as you?”
“He enjoyed what he did to me so much, he did it to her too. He was tired of waiting. He beat her half to death, really got his jollies, and then got the sheriff to call in the same necromancer to make it all go away,” Serena said. “That left him no use for me. He should have killed me true dead or set me free. He could have sold me into an immortal brothel, and I would have thanked him, but no. He kept me.”
Slowly, he crept forward, doing his best to scan the area for signs of Cass while inching closer to Serena. “Why?”
She had come here to talk, and he was giving her the platform she craved with a live audience.
But the sky was lightening, pinks and purples on its edges, and he had to move this along.
“He planned to use me to leash her, I think.” She tugged on her ponytail. “I’m pretty sure that was the plan.” Her gaze twitched to her left, to him, drawn by his movement. “But he never got the chance.”
“Cass killed him,” Addie said, making herself the focus while he crept forward, eyes alert.
“She did, but you know what? He didn’t register his precious angel with the Undead Coalition. He was too paranoid. Me? He registered me right away. I was the only member of his clan listed on his records. When he was killed, the UC knocked on my door, not hers.”
“They blamed you for his death,” Addie realized. “They punished you for it.”
“They found me locked in the basement of his manor. It was obvious I had never been allowed out. I was filthy and half starved. I barely knew how to feed. They didn’t care. About any of that. They only cared they had someone to pin his murder on.” Her gaze zinged to Boaz. “Sentinels, the lapdogs of the Society.”
An odd sort of coil surrounded a tree in the distance, the color right to be vines, but the thickness… Boaz needed to get closer to tell for sure, but he thought maybe it was their break.
Addie stepped forward to steal her attention back. “What did they do to you?”
“For one hundred years, they kept me in a room with only a bed and sink. I was given books to read, which was a mercy. It kept me sane and current on the world.” She quit twirling her hair. “Do you know what kept me going every second of every minute of every hour of every day?”
“Revenge,” Boaz supplied, having moved too far to escape her