for what he’s done.”
Everything Anderson said was true. By killing Konstantin, we’d be saving innocent lives, there was no question about it. But I had the sense that I was taking my first step onto a slippery slope, and that there was a long, long fall ahead of me if I wasn’t very careful.
“I can wrestle with my conscience later,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “We have about an hour and twenty minutes before the moon sets. It’ll take us thirty to get to Alexis’s place, and that won’t leave us a whole lot of time to pick up the trail and figure out where Konstantin has gone.” Assuming I could get my power to work on command, which was far from a sure thing.
“Then there’s not a moment to waste,” Anderson said.
Together, we hurried out into the predawn darkness to hunt the deposed “king” of the Olympians.
I let Anderson drive, on the assumption that once we got close enough to Alexis’s mansion for me to start sensing Konstantin, I’d have to do my semiconscious tour-guide impersonation as I’d done with Steph on the night we’d gone hunting together. As soon as we were through the gates, I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes, trying to let my mind drift in just the right way. The darkness, the early hour, and my exhaustion from a mostly sleepless night threatened to drag me down into sleep. The pressure of the ticking clock, along with the burning need to ensure that Konstantin could never hurt anyone again, kept sleep from winning, but it didn’t exactly help me zone out.
The roads were an icy mess, making the drive painfully slow. A couple of times, I felt the car skid, and my eyes opened in alarm. Anderson knew how to drive in the snow and ice, however, and he quickly righted the car.
“Relax, Nikki,” he said, reaching over to pat my knee briefly. “I’m not going to crash the car. Trust me.”
I gave him a sidelong glance and frowned. The knee-pat had been an almost instinctual, absent gesture, and if he’d realized it was uncommonly familiar, he showed no sign of it. I bit my lip and sank a little lower in my seat. The last thing I needed right now was to distract myself analyzing every nuance of Anderson’s behavior when I should be tracking a killer.
“It would be nice if just once I was trying to find someone without being under time pressure,” I grumbled. It would be so much easier to relax if it didn’t matter so goddamn much.
Of course, if it didn’t matter so much, then I wouldn’t be doing it.
Anderson didn’t reply. I let out a long, slow breath and let my eyes slide closed again. I hoped Konstantin hadn’t gotten very far away from Alexis’s house by the time we got there. We were going to have precious little moonlight left, and if I lost the “signal,” we’d be back to square one again by the time the moon next rose. Konstantin was no dummy, and after poking the bear, he was going to be running as fast as he could. With Cyrus mad at him, without the full support of the Olympians, he would have to get out of the D.C. area, and who knew where he would end up? If it were me, I’d get out of the country. And if he left the country, I suspected even my hunting skills might not be up to the challenge of finding him.
The urgency made my nerves buzz as if I’d drunk a gallon of coffee. I was tapping the fingers of one hand restlessly against my thigh. I stopped as soon as I noticed the movement, taking another deep breath and urging myself to calm. I searched for that floaty, abstracted feeling I got when I was a passenger on a boring drive.
The car hit a bump, and my eyes popped open again, searching out the dashboard clock before I could stop myself. It was 5:29, and we had less than thirty minutes left before the moon set. My heart sank. Even if Konstantin hadn’t found out his assassination attempt failed until Anderson and I had left the mansion—and I was pretty sure he would have known before then—he had a good forty-minute head start. There was no way we were going to catch up with him before the moon set. My powers aren’t nonexistent without the moon, but they’re spotty at