me custom-fitted headgear, in his copious spare time. My eyes got teary at the thought, but I never took them from his slow, jerky lope through the snow-crusted trees. I could hear both men breathing deeply, but they communicated by hand signals, not speech. Bruiser moved right and down. Eli moved left and to higher ground. They disappeared from the screen, Alex working to find them again.
The two chasing cars came to a stop on the driveway. Headlights illuminated the falling snow. Two females leaped from the first car. Two men from the second car. They were wearing winter gear, holding weapons. Agile and fast. Well-fed blood-servants.
The women reached the undented car doors and wrenched them open. I expected Soul to leap away as an arcenciel. To attack as a tiger. Or even an African lion. Nothing happened. The bigger blood-servant reached into the car, holding something in her hand. Clear and iridescent.
She had a scale from a rainbow dragon. There was a smear on it. Blood? If so, whose?
Over the headset, I heard weapons fire and saw the two male blood-servants drop behind their opened car doors. Like that ever helped in real life. Not. Eli, however, was behind the trunk of a decent-sized tree, protected. Firing. Pinning the men down. Alex had found his brother’s vest camera and pinned it to the screen.
On the other side of the screen Bruiser appeared. He practically flew along the low-lying ridge. Firing.
The woman without the scale slid and fell. It didn’t look clumsy. It looked dead. The woman with the scale turned, her weapon tracking for the threat.
Bruiser leaped, weapon out front. Firing high. Cover fire. The woman didn’t fall or duck. She lifted the weapon to Bruiser. Still in the air, Bruiser fired. Collided with the woman. They rammed into the roof and side supports of the car.
Fell into the snow.
On the screen showing the chasing cars, the men ducked into their vehicle and backed down the driveway. Eli didn’t pursue them, but he did place three centered shots where the driver’s head should be and three more where the passenger’s head should be. The car kept moving away.
Eli eased from behind the tree and across snowdrifts to Bruiser. Together they zip-tied the hands of the two women with extrawide ties, which meant the woman I thought had been killed hadn’t been. Soul, wearing jeans and a sweater, and not her usual flowing garb, left the safety of her car but didn’t shift, even now. She looked cold. Miserable. Pale. Her silver hair was tangled. Something was wrong, but that would have to wait. We had prisoners. That meant we had info.
* * *
* * *
I left the TV room, the sotto voce argument between Big Evan and Molly, the louder discussion by the Everhart witch sisters about anchoring the hedge of thorns, and the puzzle the kids were playing. Walking around the last cottage toward the creek where Soul waited, I could make out the soft drone of voices and made a cone of my hands on the window to see inside the unfinished, unheated space.
The inner walls were two-by-fours and the outer walls were uninsulated, but it kept the wind out, which seemed good enough for Eli and Bruiser. They were talking to one prisoner, talking being a euphemism for a combo of military interrogation techniques and mind bending. My business partner/brother was asking the questions; Bruiser was standing behind the human woman with his hands on her head, whispering, pushing with his magic. Onorio energies had a scent and a texture—hot and burning and prickly. There was no mistaking it. The only other time I’d been around when he did this, the stink of burning things had been so strong I hadn’t noticed the sensory components of his magic. His mind bending. That was my word for Bruiser’s reordering of her thoughts, brainwashing her the hard-fast way, to force her to become his. He hated it; I could see that from the tension in his shoulders, the stress on his face and tears in his eyes. But . . .
The same old excuse military commanders had used for eons still held true here. Lives were at stake and she was our enemy. She would have killed us or Soul in an instant. She had value only because of what she might give us. Which sucked.
The woman was talking. Baring her heart and soul. I had known my honeybunch could twist vamps to love him. That was the