“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Expression serious, he said, “Anything for you, Merri.”
Chapter
Three
ASHER
“So the last place we tracked the horsemen was here,” I said, pointing to the red thumbtack Gavin had shoved into the map on the wall. “The ruined penthouse.”
“Correct. We haven’t found any trace of them since the explosion, but a car was missing from the garage. If it weren’t for the CCTV in the city being down, we would have more to go on.”
I spared the Duke of Tears a glance. “Careful there, Count Orlok. You’re starting to sound like me.”
“An insufferable know-it-all?” he mocked.
“Tech savvy.”
Rosie’s vampire mate let out a long-suffering sigh. He did that a lot. Especially when Remi and Kingston were around. Which was part of the reason he’d banned them from our makeshift Situation Room. If you’d asked me a few years ago, I never in a million years would have pictured this stuffed shirt British duke and I working together. But what could I say? The Bridgerton knock-off and I made a hell of a team. We were a modern-day Starsky and Hutch. Mulder and Scully. Regis and Kathy Lee. Bert and Ernie.
No, not like Bert and Ernie. This wasn’t that kind of partnership.
“More like Seigfried and Roy.” Pan’s lazy drawl pulled me out of my jumbled inner ramblings, causing me to snap my gaze to his. He was manspread in a chair in the corner, fingers curled around a glass of brimstone whiskey as he watched us work.
“Did I say that out loud?”
Pan tapped his temple. “Group chat.”
“Fuck,” I muttered. I’d gotten pretty good at keeping my inner thoughts to myself, but I was stretched so thin these days, my mental barriers weren’t nearly as solid. And not just mine. The amount of weird shit the rest of our group accidentally sent to each other in the last couple of weeks was the stuff of teenagers’ nightmares. We’re talking wet dreams. Badly delivered one-liners. Pimple popping. The group chat, as we called the telepathic connection between Rosie and all of her mates, was more beneficial than detrimental, but sometimes I really hated it. I was a very private person. A hermit, actually. That was, until Rosie found me.
But that was a different story.
“You didn’t have to eavesdrop,” I grumbled.
Pan waved a hand. “It was a welcome reprieve from translating.”
“Translating what?” Gavin asked. “The need for that vanished with Lilith’s arrival. Your position on this team is redundant. You’re little more than a pretty hood ornament.”
Pan narrowed his lavender gaze on the vampire. “How very dare you? Need I remind you, none of you would be here without me.”
Gavin groaned. “Not this again. Every time someone puts you in your place?—”
“Nobody puts baby in a corner,” I murmured, sad Remi wasn’t here to appreciate my epicly timed reference.
“—you burst out in a one-man show about how you saved the day.”
“Well, I did.”
“Debatable. We all fought. We wouldn’t have been in the position to require it if you hadn’t been so self-serving and devious.”
Caleb cleared his throat from the rickety folding table where he was investigating his never-ending notes. “As much as I expected you all to start your incessant bickering sooner, would you mind bringing it down a notch? I’m trying to concentrate.”
“Now you made Daddy mad,” I muttered, the quip only serving to add to my longing for Remi and his levity.
Before we could continue, Lilith materialized in the center of the room, her power sucking all the air from my lungs for a moment. She was a force of nature on her worst day, devastating on her best.
