“Kill me?” I whispered.
“For taking her on without me.”
I laughed, or tried to. Pain zinged through me. Lightningboomed. Beast ripped the Gray Between open and I shifted. The last thing I saw before the change took me was human-shaped fingers. I was changing back from fighting half-form to human, which was a good thing, as it was still daylight-ish. If I’d changed to mountain lion, I’d have been stuck in that form until nightfall, an irritating glitch in my skinwalker energies.
CHAPTER 9
Sword of the Enforcer
“You want to tell me why you took her on alone?” Eli’s voice was low, almost a whisper. The way he sounded when he was seriously ticked off.
I licked my fingers, cleaning the burger juices off them, thinking. He had sent Shemmy to get me a dozen burgers and fries and a couple of two-liter Cokes. He had waited until I ate every single bite to ask me anything at all.
I almost said,I came alone because you were nearly drained of blood last night and were weak. But I figured he might just shoot me. I almost said,You were busy. Ditto on the shooting. I settled on, “I was stupid?”
“Very.”
“Thank you for the clean clothes? And the food?”
Eli grunted. He was sitting on an undamaged pew beneath the crucifix, bent forward, forearms resting on his thighs. His hands no longer held a weapon but dangled between his knees. He skin was very dark in the church’s shadows, his hair buzzed close, brown scalp showing through, gray eyes looking charcoal. Eli was a seriously pretty man. And was seriously ticked.
I was on the floor at his feet, eating like the calorie-starved person I was after so many shifts and half-shifts in quick succession. Oh. And nearly dying. Nearly dying is hungry business. Plus my hair was a mess and I didn’t have lipstick with me. Not that I’d ever say that to Eli. No freaking way.
Though I might look a mess, the magics coursing through me, the ones that now formed a star, and were so different from my usual skinwalker magics, felt steady and smooth and relentless. So that was good, right? Except, Eli. Ticked. Dangerously ticked.
“Babe. Don’t do it again. Even disabled I’m better than nothing.”
He said it as if he’d been disabled and had still held his own. The scar on his collarbone shone white above his black tee, which was rain soaked, though no longer dripping. He had acquired more scars since coming to work for me, pale streaks on his neck and across his chest, but I seldom noticed them, not in competition with the white, puckered scar on his collarbone.
His dress pants were soaked. His skin was covered with chill bumps, gleaming in the church lights. The jacket he’d worn to HQ was gone. When he breathed, steam blew from his mouth. It was unexpectedly icy in the old church.
“I won’t. Pinkie swear?” I held up my little finger, crooked.
There was an instant of silence, then Eli laughed. An actual out-loud chuckle. “Babe.” He shook his head in resignation.
“I know.” I dropped my hand.
Behind him, NOPD detectives and crime scene techs were working up the scene, which was hard to do with the bodies being in several places, scattered all over the church. With the perpetrator crumbling to ash. And with her being dead three times now. The paperwork was gonna be a disaster, I thought. Fortunately not my problem. The crumbling to ash was the weirdest part. I’d never seen such a thing, but then I’d never seen a thrice-dead vamp out in daylight and then dead on holy ground. I was expanding my horizons and not in a good way.
“We need to talk and you need to know something before we go back outside,” he said.
“That sounds ominous. Not as ominous as a revenant chewing on my shoulder, but bad enough.”
“Alex asked a question. One I hadn’t thought through.”
I nodded for him to continue and wadded up the garbage.
“Why are all these vamps buried with their heads? It’s common knowledge that vamps killed with silvershot, blades, or stakes can rise as revenants.”
I thought back to the only buried vamps I’d seen, in a mausoleum in the vamp cemetery. The vaults had been raided and the bodies tossed around. I honestly couldn’t say if they’d had their heads or not. “I don’t know. That sounds like a very important question for Leo.”
“Another one, then. Why were these suckheads buried in human graveyards instead of the vamp cemetery?”
“Huh. More questions for the MOC. That it?”
“No. Bruiser is outside, dealing with the media and with law enforcement for the riot and for the crime scene here.”
“And that’s important because...?”
