“You alright?”he asked, stroking my skin.
“Yeah.”With him, I was always alright.“Why are we home?”
“For one, it’s not safe at Dante’s as long as some of us might...have an incident—”
“Like going prehistoric at the drop of a hat?”
“—especially around the often deliberately provocative members of the leading clans.For another, we’re no longer too concerned about an attack by Rand, for some reason—”
No, I supposed not.Not with five Relics now in the house, assuming Cyrus and the others could still Change.I didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.
“—and most importantly of all, there is Sebastian.”
“He can’t know, Cyrus.Not about this.”
“He won’t.Your boss and I have an understanding.”
I felt myself relax, as much as possible at the moment, which wasn’t very even with him stroking my skin.
“Your wolf is angry,” he said, after a moment.
“Yep.”
“Do you know why?”I shook my head.Dark eyes found mine.“Would you like to?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Found this after you...passed out,” Caleb told me, sliding something over the dining table.
He’d shown up shortly after I got dressed and had stayed for dinner, which postponed whatever talk Cyrus wanted to have.But it was damned decent of him considering everything.Yet it seemed like this hadn’t been a social call, after all, because now that we’d reached the coffee and cake stage, he was getting down to business.
And I could already tell this wasn’t going to be something I liked.And the fact that he and Cyrus had made sure I was well fed before discussing it, something that usually calmed my wolf, wasn’t the only clue.I reared back before my nose got anywhere near the nasty little vial Caleb had just pulled out of an evidence bag, which was stinking up the place.
“God!”
“More like the other guy, in this case,” he said dryly.“Once I got back and reported in, the Circle sent a task force to rip apart that damned grocery—in full shields—and found that under some debris.It’s empty, but it once held Jenkins’ joy juice.The guys in the lab compared the residue and what the guys scraped off the floor to what we took from his lab, and there’s just no doubt.”
“So we know where the Relic corpse we found came from.”
“Yeah.Most agree that we’re dealing with a low-rent Reaper or maybe a Hunter trying to move up, who came across some of Jenkins’ brew when it was on the streets and got himself and an upgraded line.Or we were—”
“We were?Then they found him already?He’s dead?”
“Don’t get ahead of me.”Caleb hated being interrupted in the middle of a report.“No, as far as I know, he’s alive and kicking—and causing trouble.We think he’s been luring in street people, maybe with gifts like that expensive hoodie, then drugging, dismembering, and selling off the pieces.There’s good money in it, a plentiful supply of ‘donors’ in the area, and he had himself a nice little shop close but not too close to town and his client group.The Corps has cut back on patrols, so he was probably feeling pretty secure, until something went wrong.”
“Something that turned me into a monster?”I said, my voice hoarse.
Despite the very nice dinner we were finishing up, with a pineapple upside-down cake Kimmie had made because Cyrus was teaching her to bake, my wolf remained close to the surface and agitated.I could feel her pacing under my skin—almost literally, with claws out and pricking my skin from the inside.It was uncomfortable and very unsettling.
Like my emotions right now.
I hadn’t had a chance to really comprehend what had happened to me yet, but that thing on the table was making me want to grab it and smash it and grind it into powder.And the fact that I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t, or that I might not do a lot worse if anything agitated me, had me staring at it in something close to terror.I felt Cyrus take my hand under the table, and it helped somewhat.
I swallowed and tried to focus on what Caleb was saying.
“There were two more empty vials found in a back storeroom,” he told me.“But the others had only ever contained the standard variety Punch—the kind that brings out latent magical abilities in norms.Like our Reaper probably was at one time.”
“At one time?”I repeated.“What is he now?”
