drop off with Bedelia and Carmen at Evangelina’s old place, the only safe place the witches knew. Gramma, Carmen, and the two human sisters were going to keep watch over them. The café would remain closed for the morning breakfast business. Asheville didn’t slow down for a little snow, and the locals without power usually came out to Seven Sassy Sisters Café en masse when snowfall hit. Snow days were big moneymakers. But not today.
Brute, who had been injured in the vamp attack, was on the sofa, curled around himself, healing with were-creature speed. I smelled vamp blood on him and in him. Once again, despite the hatred between weres and vamps, they had saved him. But he was deeply asleep. On one shoulder lay the grindylow, also asleep.
Outside, as the dawn grayed the sky, the vamps went to their hideouts for the day and the witches and humans took off on snowmobiles to the main road, which was freshly plowed. Box trucks that had been parked at a nearby gas station pulled up and the smaller vehicles were loaded in. I hadn’t even thought about needing to get around on plowed and clear streets and then back onto packed snow. “Good thing someone had a brain,” I said.
Understanding my comment, Alex said, “Box trucks were put in place by Eli and Shaddock during a break in the weather. Eli also has the helo on standby. And the sheriff’s office and Buncombe County Emergency Services have been informed that the Dark Queen’s people are searching for the Flayer of Mithrans. Your brother called. He said to let him handle it. I told him to . . . um . . .” Alex’s face went red. “I told him to do something anatomically improbable.”
My lips twitched into a smile before it faded. Pain brushed through me as if pushed by a broom, and I forgot to breathe. When I could speak, I griped a whisper, “I’m useless in this form. No wonder they left me behind.”
“Nah. You’re just a lone wo . . .” He stopped as Brute rolled over on the oversized sofa, lifted his head over the sofa arm, and gusted out a sigh that stank of dog breath. “Lone cat,” Alex said. “You’re just a lone alpha cat trying to lead a pride of alpha cats.” He grinned over his keyboard, curls dangling in his face. “Sucks to be you. Lemme play my tiny violin, Your Majesty.”
I threw a pillow at him. But I felt a lot better.
* * *
* * *
It was Alex and me in the house, alone—sleep deprived and ornery on Alex’s part; sleep deprived and in serious pain on my part—as the box trucks and then the snowmobiles moved our people around. I was hoping Beast would come back online, reboot herself, and help me into my half-form. If not, I’d have to change to Beast and then I’d be useless until she let me shift into half-form. I hated to admit it, but Beast had as much control over my shifting as I did. Maybe more, since we had spent more than a hundred years in her form.
On the screens and over the comms, we listened to the team travel, which was next to impossible on roads that were mostly but not always plowed and some that were not designed for anything bigger than a pickup truck. It was midday before they were in place. And by then, the cars I had followed as owl were all gone.
The team moved in to find a Halloween fright house complete with scattered viscera and gore, five beheaded vamps, six dead humans, and enough blood spatter to qualify the house as a testing ground for crime scene school. Legolas wasn’t there. Neither was EJ.
I could practically feel Molly across the miles, disintegrating. “Alex.” I made a cutting motion across my throat. The younger Younger cut the mic so we could talk privately. “Ask Eli on a private channel if EJ’s clothes or his marble locator device are on site. If not . . . I have an idea.”
“Copy that.” Alex opened a private channel to his brother.
I lifted the crystal prison that held a mermaid-predator creature captive. Soul was frozen inside the four-inch-long quartz crystal, her finger-fins wide open, her lips parted, her scaled body trapped in the midst of a twisting motion, like an eel trying to escape. Slavery was evil in every way.
But, for EJ . . . I twisted the chain, sending Soul’s