Julius exchanged a long, wistful look with Grateful.“If you couldn’t trust me, you’d be drained and fed to the ogres downstairs by now.No one would ever find your remains, wolf.Ogres ingest everything, even the bones.”
“Is that a threat?”
“A reality.I have made my peace with this existence of mine.There are things… people… I would hate to see come to an untimely end.Suffice it to say, I’m on your side.Although my patience wears thin with your discourtesy.”
“You were saying,” Grateful interrupted, giving Silas the side-eye.“One thousand years ago…”
“I was close to a dark witch who wanted to break the natural law.It is said that if a son or daughter of Hecate sacrifices a representative of each of the primary sons and daughters of Panaal, that Panaal will rise, all the prior rules of order will end, and the game will be played again, most likely with a much different end.”
“Why would you assume a different end?”
“Because while the original game was played by the gods, with their new creations waiting in the shadows, the book says that the new game will feature all of us playing against each other.It will be an all-out war between creatures of the night and those of the day, and humans will be our pawns in the game.”
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 dark fae, and a vampire.We have the only dark fae I know of locked in a room in Saint 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,” Julius seethed.
“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 dark fae,” Grateful said.“And we have Nickelova locked down tight.We can still stop this.It’s not like her kind is common.”
“Fuck!”Silas grabbed his head as he bounded 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.”
ChapterTwenty-Three
The last person to have Nickelova’s heart was Meredith.He’d had it with him when Soleil had almost burned him alive and Meredith had shot her.Meredith had told him she’d put it somewhere safe, but was that before or after she aligned herself with Alex?Or had she always been helping Alex?He still hoped there was another explanation for her strange behavior, but if there was, he couldn’t guess it.
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 fit all the pieces together.Silas’s intuition was humming.There was something off about this Meredith thing.
