Most importantly, supernaturals tended to avoid the area because it was claimed by the city’s resident sorcerer. A man who was currently missing.
Want to know who let me in on that little fact?
Natalia.
The person missing wasn’t the real sorcerer—that man had been gone since before my return to the city—but rather his apprentice, Peter, who’d been pretending to be him for the last few years. None of that mattered. Just the fact he was absent and his territory currently unclaimed.
“Head for Easton,” I said.
Liam aimed the car toward the highway. “That’s exactly what I was thinking too.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Claim something was your idea when I said it first.”
He hummed lightly. “Is that one of the ground rules you and Connor made?”
I fixed him with an incredulous look. “Is that what this is about? Prying into my relationship with your nephew?”
“I’m curious.”
I snorted in disbelief. No, he wasn’t.
Liam tried to hide his smile but failed. “Alright, I’ll stop.” A second later, he murmured, “But that really would have been my guess too.”
His snicker held a note of lightness that made it near impossible not to join in. I shook my head in resignation, turning to watch the neighborhoods speed by.
“How was being around your sister again?” Liam asked.
I lifted a shoulder. “Good. Really, really good. You know—before everything went to shit. Her asking if I was a monster kind of put a damper on everything else.” I looked out the window again. “But for a moment there—it was perfect.”
It was like having my sister back. The good parts. Those times when we weren’t constantly fighting.
I rolled my head to look over at him. Diabolical man. How dare he be so silently attentive and inspire me to share things I would have normally locked up tight, thrown to the back recesses of my mind so I could pretend I didn’t feel all those messy emotions.
“We’ll protect her,” Liam promised.
I shook my head. “It won’t matter. There will always be some boogeyman waiting to jump out of the shadows.”
Unless I was willing to bring Jenna fully into this world, the safest thing I could do was keep my distance.
“You can’t guarantee her protection by breaking off contact,” Liam argued. “Look at what happened to you. A soldier on leave meets a stranger in a bar and ends up with fangs. There’s always a chance of our world spilling into theirs. At least if you remain close, you have a chance of preventing that.” Liam glanced at me with a wry smile. “Besides, she’s your sister. Who’s to say she’d pick safety over having you in her life?”
That surprised a laugh out of me. “I never thought I’d see the day where you were the one on the pro-family side.”
Especially when his own history with family had ended so tragically.
“Maybe you’ve had more of an impact on me than you thought,” Liam teased.
“I doubt that.”
The sound of an animal licking its jowls came from behind my seat.
What in the world?
I twisted, my heart giving an uncomfortable thump at finding Alches’s wrinkled face inches from mine. The shadow hound licked his lips again, the sound impossibly loud in the silence of the car.
