Kade drove down a weed-overgrown gravel road and parked his car behind a stand of Brazilian pepper bushes. Between Arlo’s drug running, some assault charges, and the old coot who’d seen a supposed gator ape, Kade had been to Castanega property enough to know his way around. There was plenty of acreage for the family’s enterprises, most involving alligators. Demons were no big deal, but those scaly, toothy creatures with perpetual grins gave him the creeps.
Kade walked the boundary between Castanega land and the long-vacant Garza land. This was not the cultivated, trimmed, and polished South Florida most people imagined. While the pepper bushes with the red berries took over open stretches of land, the tall feathery Australian pines created dense forests elsewhere. In places where the non-native plants hadn’t invaded, slash pine trees with their long needles offered more sap than shade.
A wet summer left the ground muddy and created large marshes sporadically. It wasn’t easy to walk quietly in muck. His black boots sucked free of the moist earth with every step. The smell of earth, mud, and decay filled his nostrils. Sweat trickled down his back. Even in the hot, muggy summers, Vega attire consisted of long sleeves. The black rayon offered freedom of movement and ventilation, but neither helped when trekking through the woods in September—a month that, in South Florida, was usually as steamy as August.
Mosquitoes buzzed all around him, but none dared land on him. They seemed to sense the magick in Crescents, largely leaving them alone. But they wanted to suck his blood and hovered annoyingly all around. A startled hawk screeched and alighted from a branch. If he hadn’t seen the hawk, he’d suspect it was the Fringe language, whistles and nature sounds they used to communicate over distances. As if warning of an intruder.
Two things the uniform designer did allow for were quick-drying material and ease in extracting Deuce weapons. Kade ran his fingers from wrist to inner elbow, feeling the spark of magick. The dagger tattoo thrummed with magick, courtesy of a specially commissioned Guard tattoo artist.
He suspected Violet’s home was a cabin in the western edge. Her face dominated his mind, the smell of her, the tingle he’d felt when her wrists were clamped in his hands, her body against the wall. A part of him had wanted her to dart off again, craving the chase. Because he knew he’d catch her.
He shook the thought away. Now he would catch her. And kill her. He didn’t have to like or agree with the order; he simply had to carry it out. It wouldn’t be the first time. Or the last.
He paralleled a gravel road, barely visible in the distance, until he spotted a burgundy Infiniti parked in the driveway. Synthetic pop music floated from somewhere beyond the house. He surveyed the area. The house was small but quaint, painted a soft yellow with white shutters and gingerbread trim. The recently mowed grass that surrounded the house in a tidy square was lush and green. Plants and flowers overran the planting beds, a wild mess. Except it wasn’t, he realized, seeing a loose but deliberate arrangement of the various plants. Somehow the undisciplined aspect intrigued him more than the sculpted bushes and trimmed trees in his yard in Coral Gables.
He recognized the music now: Berlin, from the eighties. “The Metro.” It fit Violet, tough and in your face. Odd, since Violet seemed too young to have been around in the eighties.
Who cared what she liked to listen to? The knife tattoo came to life, filling his hand with the heavy metal. He clutched the dagger as he rounded the rear corner of the house. Farther back sat a large workshop with several long tables in the center of the space and shelves that lined the walls. She was doing something at one of the tables.
He cut back into the woods and came up behind the metal building. As he sidled up along the side, he nearly gave himself away when his shoe bumped an alligator in the bushes. He slapped his hand over his mouth as he stumbled back. The alligator leered at him with glassy eyes. Wait a minute. Kade tapped the gator with his shoe. It was hard. Hell, the thing was stuffed.
He crouched near the edge of the open bay and watched Violet. Hopefully she was planning the next murder, doing something to prove her guilt. He tried to see inside the stacks of clear boxes on the shelves that looked to be filled with colorful stones. She worked a pair of pliers on a leather strap with jerky movements, cursing when a string of beads fell and scattered all over. Damn. Not destructive but jewelry. She bent and picked them up, her pants stretching tight over her ass. One bead bounced and landed within two feet of him. She hadn’t seen it, but a big, dopey-looking dog did. Then the dog saw him.
Uh oh.
Its tail thumped on the floor, which was covered in outdoor carpet. Okay, not a guard dog but still problematic. He stepped out of view and heard Violet throw the beads and issue a guttural expletive.
She darted out of the workshop, her face buried in her hands, and passed within three feet of him. The dog followed, glancing back at him. Kade remained in place, watching her heaving shoulders as she reached the thicket of cypress and pine trees and fell to her knees.
The dog flopped down beside her and rested its head on her thighs. She buried her face in its fur, her fingers curling into the folds of skin. Her muffled sobs clawed right through Kade. These were not the cries of a woman putting on a show or upset over something that didn’t go her way. This was grief, raw and keening. She said one word over and over, and finally he was able to make it out: Arlo.
She presented him with the perfect opportunity, too grief-stricken to notice if her Dragon warned of a presence coming up behind her. He scanned the surroundings as he readied his dagger for a quick, merciful kill. His pulse throbbed at the side of his throat as it did in these situations, and his fingers tightened on the hilt.
Except his body wouldn’t move. Every preconceived notion he had about Violet—unkempt, untamed, violent—fled his mind, replaced by vulnerable, fiery, and innocent.
Innocent.
Former fellow Vega Cyntag Valeron had just come to him that morning unexpectedly to decipher a magick book. He’d been cryptic about both it and the woman with him but clear about the advice he’d imparted: “Trust your gut above all else. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s probably not.”
Kade’s gut screamed, Don’t kill her.
Not because she was hot or any kind of fascination he had with her. It went deeper. The oaths he’d taken as a Vega to uphold the law at any cost fell away, replaced by a conviction that Violet was not guilty of some murderous conspiracy.
One moment he stood frozen in his inner turmoil, and the next, a Dragon’s gaping mouth was lunging for his throat.
He twisted but still got knocked on his ass twenty feet away. He landed in a marshy area, sending a wave of muddy water spraying. His breath escaped in a hard gasp, and he hardly had time to breathe before the Dragon moved into view.
Dappled sunlight shimmered off her amethyst scales. She lunged down at him, fangs stopping half an inch from eviscerating him. Inside her open mouth, magick flares capable of inflicting extreme pain fired to life. Her cat-like eyes shrank. “You!” The fierce flames in her eyes didn’t soften one bit. “How dare you sneak up on me!”
Her voice as Dragon was low and rumbly, but every bit of her anger projected through loud and clear. He rolled, coming to his feet in one swift movement. What to say? He knew she was embarrassed at being caught at such a vulnerable moment, and being Amethyst, she was all emotion, not to mention unpredictable and high-strung.
“Violet, I?—”
“Idjit! People are killing one another by sneaking onto our land. So, either you’re here to arrest me or you’ve got a death wish. And if it’s the latter, I’m more than happy to grant it. And if it’s the former, I’m good with granting it anyway.” She charged at him again.
He pressed a hand to her forehead and “shot” her. She Catalyzed to human in the same instant that she flew backward. Her body hit with a hard thud, her arms out at her sides.
He ran toward her, calling his dagger, which had been thrown, too. It burned back into his skin as he reached her. “You okay?”
