“What’s going on?” she asked Sequoyah.
Sequoyah handed her the phone. “Anyone venture near the college lately?”
She took the phone and shook her head. “We don’t normally go there. The students have a nasty tendency to follow us around and throw food at us. Stupid entitled shits. They act like we’re pigeons.” She handed the phone back to Sequoyah, then looked up at Luke. “Hard to take their souls when so few of them have one these days.”
Luke snorted. “Hard to disagree given the number of them who try to sell their desiccated souls to my kin.”
With a heavy sigh, Sequoyah passed the phone back to Luke. “Have you talked to any Daimons?”
“Just a Dark-Hunter.”
Sequoyah scratched at his chin. “Try the vampires, then. Granted they’ve fallen out of public favor lately. But some of them do still haunt the campus, looking for Vampire Diary fans to prey on.”
Sorcha cleared her throat. “It’s Vampire Diaries. Plural.”
Sequoyah responded with an arched brow and a peeved glare. “Like I care.”
“Sorry we bothered you.” Luke turned toward the door.
As Sorcha started after him, the woman stopped her and cocked her head in a very bird-like manner. “There’s a darkness inside you. Don’t let it grow any larger.”
Those words chilled her. “Pardon?”
Instead of answering, she returned to being a raven and flew from the room.
Confused, she glanced to Sequoyah who shrugged.
“Starla’s complicated. But she sees things others don’t.”
“Meaning what?”
He shrugged again.
Okay then. Those words were haunting and terrifying. She definitely didn’t care for the bird people. They were very unnerving.
Her heart pounding, she followed Luke from the house. “Long way to drive for nothing except an ulcer I could have done without. Now I’m paranoid.”
He snorted. “I’m always paranoid.”
“Well, with your genetics, I get it, but I don’t like this feeling. What darkness? Am I damned?”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet?” she repeated. Those flat, dry words didn’t help her mood at all. “What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing,” he said with a grin as he opened the door and got into his car.
“I’m really not liking this job at the moment.” Or Luke, either. Couldn’t anyone answer one damn question?
“There are worse jobs to have.”
“I shudder to ask.”
His grin widened. “Helly? You want to take up the challenge?”
She didn’t move from her sleeping position on the backseat. “Working the shit pit in Hell…not sure what is worse. The ones being shit on or the ones who have to clean it. Either way, that pit is awful as they’re being doused in the scat of those with serious intestinal woe. Then there’s scraping roadkill off the highway that leads to Hell…in the desert…at four in the afternoon. Those who are chosen to be the guinea pigs for Hell’s new torture devices… I can tell by the sounds of their screams that is a really horrific job… Finally, there’s the poor souls in test audiences for bad movies and hokey TV shows.”
“Copy editors for technical manuals,” the car said through the radio.
