She would pay. This weak, cruel waste of a human being. This piece of shit that tormented my childhood. She was the reason I’d woken up holding the f**king butcher knife. She was the reason Doolittle had had to take a saw to my arm. She would pay!
“Let her go, honey. Let her go, Andi. For your own sake. For me. For us.” Raphael kissed my fur just below my ear. “Let her go.”
I wanted to sink into the red. I wanted to see her blood on my hands. But his voice held me back.
“Stand down,” he said. “Her children are watching. Stand down, honey.”
I heard a tiny high-pitched sound, wailing at my side, and I realized it was the little boy bawling in hysterical fear. His sister sobbed.
“You are better than this, Andi. Do the right thing. Walk away.”
As I forced my fingers open, all the pain of my memories and all my frustration tore out of me in a sharp short scream. I spun and walked away, to the other wall, as far away from her as I could.
“She’s beastkin,” Michelle breathed out. “She’s—”
“She’s the clan beta and my mate,” Raphael said.
Michelle staggered back as if he had hit her.
Raphael’s eyes were two burning pools of blood-red fire. “Your application to the clan is denied. Gather your family and leave. If you’re in my territory by sundown, I’ll hunt you down and drag you before the clans to be tried for torture, abuse of a child, and whatever other charges our lawyers will level against you. You will be found guilty, you will suffer, and you will be executed. Your children will become the wards of the Pack and they’ll loathe your name by the time they grow up.”
Michelle picked up the prone body of her husband. Her daughter grabbed the boy and they ran out.
Raphael walked to me and wrapped his arms around me.
My anger broke out in tortured sobs. Tears wet my eyes. “I had her.”
“I know.”
“In my hands.”
“I love you,” he whispered. “I love you, I’m proud of you. It was the right thing.”
“No!” I couldn’t stop crying. I wasn’t sad, I just couldn’t contain it. “She should be dead. That would be the right thing.”
“For her, but not for you. It would eat you alive. It’s not who you are.”
I crumpled down on the ground and cried. I’d learned not to cry back then, because the more I cried, the more excited they would get, but I could cry now. Nobody would stop me, and so I sat there and let it all pour out, while Raphael held me and whispered calm, loving nonsense into my ears.
I could not kill Michelle. I couldn’t scar her children the way she had scarred me. But I could join the Pack and make sure that no other little girl had to face my choices. No other little bouda would be hiding, scared and alone, dreading to be found and abused again. Not on my watch. Not as long as I breathed.
Gradually my sobs died down. We sat together, Raphael and I.
“For the record, I had him,” Raphael said. I could tell by his voice he was baiting me. There was comfort in the familiar needling, and right now I desperately needed it.
“Didn’t look that way from where I stood. He had you all wrapped up.”
“That’s what you think,” he said.
“That is what I think.”
“Handling that purple carpet must’ve done some permanent damage,” Raphael said.
“To you.”
He leaned over and murmured, “I’m not the one with purple stains on my butt.”
Oh, it’s like this, then? “Would you like to be?”
He grinned and nodded.
“Maybe you needed backup to help you with Roman,” I told him.
“I don’t need backup. I can take him with one hand tied behind my back.”
“He had one hand tied behind your back.”
“Maybe it looked like that from where you were sitting…”
That’s how Jim’s messenger found us, sitting on the ground, bickering and flirting. Jim’s teams had returned from the Warren, the poor neighborhood by White Street, and they had brought information about Gloria back with them.
I sat at a large conference table filled with food and reports. Jim sat across from me, and Chandra, Clan Jackal’s designated expert on ancient Egypt, sat to my left. Between us teetered small mountains of paperwork—all of the information Jim’s team had squeezed out of the inhabitants of the Warren. Derek joined us after the first fifteen minutes. We were looking for clues. Somewhere at this very moment, Gloria’s associates were preparing to raise Apep from the dead. We needed to know where that location could be, and Gloria was our only link.
We’d been at it for hours. So far I had made two piles: a big pile of stuff I’d gone through and didn’t consider relevant, and a very tiny pile of paper that might be something. I’d covered half a legal pad in notes. I was hungry again. The lunch hour came and went without us finding a smoking gun.
“It would be nice if there was a map,” Chandra said. “With a town circled on it.”
“And a note that said ‘Secret Hideout Here’?” Derek added.
I scrutinized the paper in front of me. Gloria had used a private shipping service, which was faster and more reliable than the post office, but which also forced their customers to declare the exact contents of their packages. In the event your package decided to sprout tentacles when the magic hit, they wanted to be prepared for that eventuality.
This particular operative, whose name was Douglas, had tracked down the shipping company Gloria used and offered their rep an outrageous bribe for the manifest of everything delivered to Gloria’s doorstep. Handmade soap, thirty bucks a bar. Expensive perfume. Pricy bath salts. Someone was living high.
Doolittle walked through the door. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”
“I’m saving the world,” I told him.
Doolittle looked mournful. “I’ll make us some hot chocolate.”
I went down the list of deliveries: books, blah-blah, more soap, antimosquito cream. Hmm. Georgia was in the grip of a drought. I hadn’t seen a mosquito in ages.
“Mosquito cream,” I said.
Derek raised his pen. “Boots. She went down to Carlos’s Footwear and got herself a pair of rubber boots two days before you killed her. Some kids from the Warren nagged her for change and she told them to piss off.”
Fatal mistake. Never upset the street kids.
“So we have water,” Jim said.