“I don’t know,” she said softly, reaching out to take his hand and give it a squeeze. “Hopefully, she just went someplace to cool off and will reach out to you later, so you’ll be able to fix this.”
Connor gazed down at the floor, broad shoulders slumping. There was so much baggage between him and his sister that it almost seemed insurmountable.
“I never meant to yell at her,” he said. “I only wanted her to have a normal life. I thought if she could accept that Hannah was gone, she could get on with her life and we could go back to being the family we used to be. But Jenna would never let it go, which only made me feel more like a complete jerk for letting go so fast myself. The truth is, she’s a much better sister to Hannah than I could ever be a brother. That’s hard to deal with.”
Kat wrapped her arms around him. Doubt, guilt, and self-recrimination were all emotional burdens she knew a lot about. She’d been carrying them around with her ever since her coven had been killed right in front of her. She’d lived under the constant crushing weight of wondering what she could have done differently, the knowledge that she’d played a big part in all their deaths, and the pain of trying to move on but feeling like it was wrong to do so. Connor was going through something similar and had convinced himself that he couldn’t get past it, not while Jenna was still trapped in the past.
Kat wished there were something she could say, some sage advice she could offer that would help Connor get through this a little easier. But if there were any magical words floating out there in the void, she sure as hell didn’t know them.
“Are you two planning to join us?” a voice asked.
Kat looked up to see Gage leaning out of the doorway to the bullpen, his expression curious. Connor started a bit, as if he’d been taken by surprise, which shouldn’t have been possible considering he had all kinds of werewolf senses. But she supposed he’d been too lost in his own head.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, tugging Kat gently toward the bullpen. “Just dealing with something personal that came up.”
Gage regarded them worriedly, his gaze swinging back and forth between them. “Do you two need to skip the call with Davina so you can focus on whatever it is? We’ll make do if we have to.”
Connor shook his head. “No, it’s okay. We’re taking care of it.”
Gage didn’t seem to believe a word of that, if his expression was any indication, but he gave them a nod and headed back into the bullpen.
As they followed Gage across the bullpen and into his office, Rachel, Trevor, and Hale eyed them with the same curiosity as their pack leader. Kat knew their hearing was exceptional enough for all of them to have easily heard everything, but she was used to them tuning out other people’s conversation as a way of maintaining privacy. Hopefully, that meant they hadn’t heard her and Connor talking about Jenna running away.
“There you are! I was starting to get worried,” Davina said.
Kat turned a couple times before realizing that the woman’s voice was coming from Gage’s computer. The monitor and attached camera had been turned to face the middle of his rather large office. She did a double take. They were seriously going to have a videoconference about witches and warlocks and sacrifices.
The woman with shoulder-length blue hair on the screen was studying them thoughtfully, her face showing the same concern that Gage had earlier.
“Sorry. We didn’t mean to worry you, Davina,” Kat said, taking one of the chairs they’d rolled away from the conference table and placed in front of the screen. “We just had to deal with some personal stuff.”
“Ah.” Davina’s mouth curved. “I completely understand. My daughter is going through some drama right about now. She’s trying to convince me that she’s in love with our gorgeous bartender, no matter how many times I tell her it can’t work between them.”
“Why can’t it work?” Trevor asked. “I met Lydia when I was out there in LA to help clean out that vampire nest. She seems like she has a good head on her shoulders.”
“She does,” Davina agreed. “But the bartender in question happens to be a skin walker. He’s very attractive at the moment, but how is Lydia going to handle it when she comes to work one day and the new love of her life is wearing the body of a sixty-two-year-old grandmother? They say that love conquers all, but in this case, I don’t think that’s true.”
Kat had about a hundred questions—most revolving around skin walkers, which she knew almost nothing about—but Gage chose that moment to interrupt.
“As interested as I am in this conversation, I’d rather hear what you found out about Marko,” he said, grabbing a chair with everyone else.
Davina nodded, the amusement on her face immediately fading. “To start with, I can confirm he’s by far the most cold-blooded person any of us have probably ever dealt with.”
“You won’t have to work hard to convince me of that,” Kat said. “I watched him murder the other members of my coven without a trace of remorse.”
Davina let out a shudder. “I began looking closer at that murder Zane and Alyssa were sent down to San Antonio to investigate. I don’t know if you know this, but the murder victim was a teenager, too. I’m guessing it’s no coincidence that the four kidnapping victims in Dallas are also teenagers.”
Beside Kat, Connor muttered a curse.
“It gets worse,” Davina said. “That poor kid in San Antonio isn’t the only one Marko murdered.”
Kat’s stomach dropped like a rock. She probably shouldn’t have been surprised Marko had killed others. She already knew how vicious he was. But it was still hard to imagine anyone targeting kids like that.
“Why haven’t we ever heard about any of these murders?” Connor asked.
“Because they occurred over an eight-month period, scattered throughout the entire southern portion of the country, with most of them happening in very rural areas,” Davina said.
A few seconds later, a map of the southern part of the United States popped up on the monitor, showing all of Texas, as far east as Louisiana, and northward up to Oklahoma. As Kat watched, red dots appeared on the map in seemingly random fashion.
