Dante continued his guttural “haw ha” sounds, and the ravens cawed back in a terrible symphony. He finally threw off his coat, and it landed with a flourish in the drawn pentagram.
“You wanted to meet my murder, well, here they are!”
“These are the women you took over the years?” Eilonwy asked, stunned at the realization. “I count thirteen, if you’ve been killing every year for twenty-one years, where are the other eight?”
Dante wiped the blood off his nose with his hand, and it smeared across his face. “I have been in this city for twenty-five years. I arrived with my beloved and lost her four years later. A raven without his mate is a painful thing. I tried to date among the humans, but they know nothing of loyalty.” He walked to the counter and grabbed a handful of paper napkins from a holder, trying to stanch the flow of the blood. Once again outside the pentagram.
“You started killing women when you couldn’t find a girlfriend?” Taran scoffed and stood near the pentagram, but across from him.
Eilonwy stepped back. Taran would take it from here, allowing her to work. She touched the feather in her pocket and searched the floor with her eyes for his blood.
“And what would you have me do? A raven needs either mate or flock.”
“Dude, vampires get dates all the time without having to kill them,” Taran taunted.
The ravens cawed as though they were laughing.
“Shut up!” Dante yelled, and the ravens stopped.
Eilonwy noticed two things: the flock was scared of him, and he threw the bloody napkins down on the floor.
“Dude?” Dante questioned. “You call me dude? And how many women do you have?” he angrily asked, stepping over to Taran.
Eilonwy couldn’t get to the napkins without attracting his attention, and the blood on the floor was impossible to find. Then, one of the ravens hopped off the counter onto the floor and gently plucked up the bloodiest napkin.
Taran saw this but didn’t alert Dante.
“I don’t need to enslave women to feel like a man,” Taran said, his arms crossed over his slightly puffed chest, chin up, two feet from the taller raven shifter, who was hunched enough to meet his eyes.
The second Dante lunged, Taran ducked, punched, spun, and threw the raven shifter down onto his coat in the pentagram.
The raven gave Eilonwy the napkin, and she wrapped it around the feather and uttered her blood magick. “By this blood I bind! On the ground and splayed you’ll find!”
Dante’s limbs immediately stiffened out, his back to the ground, his legs open. He looked like Leonardo da Vinci’sVitruvian Man. “Release me, foul witch! Attack, my beauties!”
The ravens hopped back and forth and cawed in agitation,and then one flew from its perch on the stairs and landed on his chest.
“I said attack them!”
The raven pecked at his face, biting his lip, tearing it in two. Dante howled and began to lay out a curse. “By my wings…” he began.
Eilonwy prepared to silence his spell, but the crow grabbed his tongue, tearing at it so he couldn’t speak. The remaining ravens swooped in one by one, each picking, then pecking a spot on him until he was a bloody mess bellowing without a tongue. Blood filled his mouth and nose, making him sound like he was drowning.
Taran ran to the doors and warded them closed, baffling the noise from inside, window by window.
Eilonwy waited.
Haley drifted down the stairs, a crow hopping down with her and perching on the railing post at the bottom. They watched the bloody, writhing raven shifter as he struggled, pinned by her magick. She observed carefully to make sure he couldn’t shift to raven.
Taran stood nearby, his brow furrowed. “How far are we taking this?”
“We are letting them have as much justice as they desire.”
Dante’s flock pecked, tore, gnashed, scratched, tortured, and cawed. It was bloodthirsty work.
Finally, Dante stopped moving.
Haley drifted to the counter. Her voice came out of the radio. “Carey says they will be free when he is dead.”
