Silas shrugged. “Doesn’t mean your kind will win.”
“Yes it does,” Grateful said. “Because not only will our kind be battling the creatures of the night, our nature will require us to protect the humans from slaughter. We’ll have to fight twice as hard, and we won’t have the protections we do today. Vampires will be able to walk in daylight. Demons will possess humans at will.”
“Exactly.” Julius finished his Scotch. “Chaos. Disorder. Thousands of years of war.”
Silas leaned forward, bracing his elbows against his knees. “So, how did you stop this witch?”
Only Julius’s eyes shifted toward Silas, the rest of him unnaturally still. “I seduced her and tore her heart from her chest with my bare hands. Sorry, but I doubt that will work on Alex. From what I hear, he doesn’t swing that way.”
“So then, we have to stop him from getting the ingredients for the spell,” Grateful said. “He’ll need a demon, a dragon, and a vampire. We have the only dragon locked in a room in St. Johns.”
“What would he want with unconsecrated bones?” Silas asked.
“If they are a demon’s human bones, they can be used to summon a demon,” Julius said.
“A demon’s human bones? I didn’t think demons had bones, let alone human ones.”
“If a human allows a demon to possess him or her and then dies, the demon will live on but will maintain a connection to the human’s bones. Control the bones and you control the demon.”
“Fuck,” Silas said. “So, he has access to a demon.”
“And he also has a vampire.”
“He does? How do you know?”
“Because two of my coven went missing recently. A couple. Both with ankh tattoos. The vampire Silas saw stab himself in the chest is undoubtedly one of our missing brethren, the male. His mate is still missing.”
“Which means Alex has her.”
Julius nodded slowly.
“He still needs a dragon,” Grateful said. “And we have Nickelova locked down tight. We can still stop this. It’s not like you can find a dragon on every corner.”
“Fuck!” Silas grabbed his head as he bound from the frilly chair and paced the space in front of the fire.
“What is it?” Grateful asked.
Silas turned toward the witch and the vampire. “I no longer have Nickelova’s heart.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The last person to have Nickelova’s heart was Meredith. She’d told him she’d put it somewhere safe, but was that before or after she’d aligned herself with Alex? Or was she always helping Alex?
Intuition was the lifeblood of good detective work. You could have all the facts, all the witnesses, but to know the truth took a sixth sense, the ability to ask all the right questions and to fit all the pieces together. Silas’s intuition was humming. There was something off about this Meredith thing.
It wasn’t only that he loved her, and he did love her. He’d never told her as much, but he supposed his heart had leapt out of his chest and ran to her the moment she’d showed up at his stakeout and revealed her Crescent Star tattoo. How could she be helping Alex of her own free will after knowing the man killed her father? No. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that she was infected with sulfralite and under Alex’s control.
He jiggled her key in her lock and let himself into her small home. The stench of melted fabric burned in his throat. Damn. The couch was scorched like a campfire marshmallow.HadSoleil meant to kill him? Would she have stopped if Meredith hadn’t shot her? Maybe. But only because he relinquished Nickelova’s heart.
A scrape came from the bedroom, wood on wood like someone was opening a window.
He froze. Silently drawing his gun, he crept forward, his gaze sweeping into the kitchen. A pot steamed on the stove, smelling of garlic and onions. The burner was off. She was here.
Quickly but silently, he raced for the bedroom. The room was empty. A few pictures lay on the bed. Pictures of Meredith with her father and a woman who must be her mother—he’d never met her. What the fuck was this? A trip down memory lane?
The window was open. He caught a flash of red hair and pale skin in the back yard. With superhuman speed, he holstered his weapon and dove for the window. His foot slipped, his traction suddenly gone, but he pulled himself through the opening fast enough to catch sight of her sprinting toward town.
“Meredith!” He barreled after her.
