“Yes, that was annoying.I thought Bleddyn could hold you for longer than that.”
“—and when that failed, you rounded up the Weres in Tartarus—for what?Hoping I’d hear and come running, and you could grab Jace?”
“No,” he looked regretful, “although I should have thought of that.Once you knew what I wanted, or would shortly figure it out, we had to grab them before you did, or lose our guinea pigs.”
“But when that also failed—”
“Yes.You’ve been, if you don’t mind me saying so, a real pain in the ass.”
“—you resorted to butchering some street person in a grocery?You alreadyhadthe potion.We found an empty vial of it at the scene!”
We’d assumed he was searching for the Reaper to obtain the rest of the guy’s stash.But if hewasthe Reaper, and every failed detection spell we’d used on that sordid little crime scene said as much, then he already had it.So what the...
“Oh, God,” I said, belatedly seeing the obvious.“The man we found wasn’t a victim.Hewasthe Reaper.You located him before we even started the hunt!”
The mage’s eyes flickered.It was so subtle that I almost missed it, lost in my own jumbled thoughts.But I’d been trained to notice everything, and that minute reaction told me I was off base somewhere.
But he agreed readily enough.“We’d been buying his work for a while, after discovering that we got a bit more...firepower...with his enhancements than with others.But his prices...”he shook his head.“Exorbitant, even by the current inflated standards.But then, he was the only game in town, wasn’t he?It’s not just anyone who can reap a Relic.”
“But another Relic can.”
“Hm, I suppose it was a case of getting high on his own supply.And figuring out that he had a little goldmine and starting to get a taste for the finer things in life.”
“The hoodie,” I said, remembering.
“Oh, more than that,” it was dry.“For what he was bleeding us for, he could have bought the damned store—and a dozen more besides.And worse, sooner or later, he was going to run out of potion.”
“Because he wasn’t making it.”
“No, our sources at your HQ told us about the late, great Mage Jenkins—leaving the only supply that which was already on the streets and the bit your Circle had taken from his lab.Fortunately, the Reaper had stumbled across some of the former.”
“So you tracked him down...but came up empty.”I didn’t make it a question because the fence in Tartarus had just died a few days ago.They wouldn’t have needed him if they’d found what they wanted from the source.
The mage confirmed it.“He’d said he’d used up the last of his stash and was preparing to leave town.And when I heard that all my hard work had been in vain, well.I became a little...perturbed.”
“So you reaped the Reaper.”Only he hadn’t.
He didn’t show up at that grocery with a squad—a big one—which would have damned well been needed for something like that.If he had, they would have been revealed by the forensic spells Caleb and I used.And while there might be one mage with some throwback ability to camouflage himself, I doubted there was a whole group of them.
Meaning he was lying.He hadn’t taken out a Reaper on his own, powerful or not.And speaking of power, I was pretty sure where he had been getting his.
He shrugged, too calmly.“We could use the parts, and it seemed a shame to leave them behind if that was all I was going to get.I was interrupted by some nosy parker types, but I’d almost finished anyway, so I left them to it.I had another line on what I wanted, after all.”
“Me.”
“And it seems I may have finally figured out something you’ll trade for it, doesn’t it?”
I glanced around the battlefield, half expecting to see Bleddyn.Maybe because my counterpart was still searching for him, and her eyes didn’t miss much when she bothered to use them.Like when they suddenly focused back on the mage, and the small mirror he was holding up, showing the image of a man, bound and thrashing inside some little cell.
And utterly furious, but not so much that I couldn’t make out his face.
Cyrus.
Chapter Forty-Three
For a moment, I just stared, caught completely flat-footed, while shock reverberated through me.Cyrus was supposed to be at Wolf’s Head.He was supposed to be—
Safe.
