“Can you make it?” Linus hesitated when he should have started swimming. “Or do you need help?”
“Let me catch my breath.” I spread my arms and drifted. “Just give me a minute.”
With reluctance, he started hauling Hood’s limp form toward the two figures pacing at the water’s edge.
It must have been safe enough now, or he never would have left me. He would have drowned himself to save us both. That was Linus for you.
Shutting my eyes, I drifted in a quiet moment, allowing my tears to mingle with the river.
First Atramentous. Then Volkov. Now vampire assassins.
One, two, three. I was definitely out.
Cricket would never forgive me for bailing—yet again—and I couldn’t blame her.
“The Kinases have taken Hood to a healer.”
Linus’s voice carried to me over the hitching of my breath, and I rasped, “Good.”
“Grier?”
I kept my gaze aimed skyward. “Yep?”
“I’m going to bring you in now. Lethe neutralized the archer, but he may not have been working alone.”
“Okay.”
He hooked an arm around my waist, holding me steady, and I gripped his forearm to pull myself closer. We stayed that way a moment, even as the cool weight of his biceps made me shiver. Black filled his eyes, darker than the surrounding night, when he measured me with his gaze. “How bad is it?”
“Oh, you know. Someone shot arrows at me that could have killed my coworkers or our guests. Hood tackled me, cut off my skirt and tossed me in the river, getting shot in the process.” I tipped back my head. “Marit caught me looking over the railing earlier and asked me if I was going to commit suicide over Boaz. She probably thinks I was lying to her and went to lock my heart in Davy Jones’s locker the second her back turned.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. I grew up human, but I’m not one. Part of me always knew one day I would have to leave their world.” I stuck my toes above the waterline. “I just didn’t expect to get kicked out.”
His tone softened. “It won’t always be this way.”
“You’re right.” I kept watch on the sky as he brought us in. “It will get worse.”
No pretty assurances met with my pronouncement, and I bit my bottom lip to keep it from wobbling.
Back at the dock, he leveraged himself onto the wooden platform then reached down for me. We grasped forearms, and he hauled me from the river using the supernatural strength that came from being bonded with a wraith.
A strangled noise escaped him when he noticed what I was—or wasn’t—wearing.
The bright flush in his cheeks made public semi-nudity worth it. “I did warn you Hood cut off my skirt.”
“You did.” He fastened his gaze on mine and kept it locked there even while he knelt to pick up the discarded dress shirt he hooked around my shoulders. “I wasn’t quite prepared.”
“Trust me,” I joked, shrugging into the fabric that smelled like him. “Neither was I.”
“I called Tony,” he offered once I had everything covered. “He’ll be here in five minutes.”
For the tips from Linus alone, Tony must bless the day he signed up as a driver for a popular ride-sharing app.
“Oh good.” I crossed my arms over my chest, doing my best to ignore the breeze on the backs of my upper thighs. “How did you get here so fast?”
“I didn’t.” He flicked his gaze skyward. “The wraith—” at my amused look, he corrected himself, “—Cletus spotted the archer a half hour ago. He was unable to determine if the vampire was working alone, so I asked the Kinases for assistance. We’ve been scouring the area for the last fifteen minutes.”
“So definitely a vampire attack?”
“He’s been taken into custody by the Elite,” he confirmed. “He’s on his way to the Lyceum.”
The Savannah Elite. A pang had me wondering if Boaz still counted himself in their number, or if he had requested a transfer to a different city. Since he hadn’t stayed on my account, I doubted he would leave on it either.
“I left Cletus to stand watch over you while we hunted the archer,” Linus continued. “Lethe took down the vampire, but not before he injured Hood.”
“He saved my life.” I glanced over my shoulder, back at the Cora Ann, at the lie I could no longer tell myself. “He saved a lot of people.” I shook my head. “The vampires are getting bolder. They moved against humans tonight.” I started rubbing my arms. “We can’t let that stand.”
“No,” he said slowly, as though feeling out my meaning to see if our views aligned. “We can’t.”
The night unspooled around his ankles, whipping tendrils that struck out where the streetlights pooled on the worn planks. The urge to step back never manifested, and I wasn’t sure what that meant. I wasn’t sure about much of anything except I felt the walls rising around me, penning me into the life Maud never wanted for me.
“I think it’s time I met my grandfather,” I said softly. “Come with me?”
A stillness swept across his features. “Are you asking me, or are you asking Scion Lawson?”
Masks upon masks upon masks. Being asked which one he ought to wear told me my worth in his eyes.
“You.” I didn’t have to gut check to know it was the right call. “I want you.”
Scion Lawson had too many tangled loyalties. I wanted my friend. Linus. Him, I could trust.
“Rule number one,” he advised. “Don’t go to them. Make them come to you.”
Smart boy. I shot up an eyebrow. “Are you sure that’s coming from you and not Scion Lawson?”
“I might have picked up a few tips from him.” His lips quirked. “Come on, Grier. Let’s go home.”
Home.
The single best word in the whole English language.
Even if the wrought-iron fence surrounding Woolly was starting to feel a bit like the bars of a cage.
Two
Woolly strobed her porch light when she spotted the familiar grungy van rolling up her driveway. Not the brightest idea on her part, seeing as how Tony was human, and he spent enough time with us to assume we had the funds to repair any quirks in the old girl’s wiring since Linus dropped fifties the way Victorian ladies had dropped handkerchiefs.
Lucky for us, Tony came from oblivious stock. Put an energy drink in one hand and a slice of hot pie in the other, and he was set. He hadn’t even blinked when he found us soaking wet with me wearing Linus’s shirt and not much else.
“You two an item or what?”
The belligerent question when I had just been dismissing Tony’s mental acuity snapped me from my thoughts and put me on alert. “What?”
“You’re always together.” He met my eyes in the rearview mirror, his more bloodshot than usual. “Like always. I pick you two up. I drop you two off. Are you a thing?”
“Yes,” Linus answered, his voice as crisp as the unfolded bill in his hand. “We’re a thing.”
Alarm zinged through my nerve endings, and I stiffened on the seat beside him, but he was donning the mask of Scion Lawson and didn’t acknowledge my shock.
“We are…” I wet my lips, “…something.”
“Whatever.” The hiss of a fresh can opening made Tony sigh. “You’re both grown-ass adults.”
Apprehension had me searching out Linus, whose eyes had gone dark as he traded one persona for another.
The Potentate of Atlanta held my stare, almost daring me to tremble before him, but I had found the seams where his masks met his true face, and we both knew he would let me pry away this façade if I chose.
There was power in that, and I would be lying if I denied the rush was heady, but the kick in my pulse branded me a traitor to my own heart.
I loved Boaz, had idolized him most of my life, and those feelings didn’t come with an off switch.
The van rocked to a stop, and we exited after money exchanged hands.
Linus ghosted his palm over my lower back to guide me, blasting pleasant chills down my spine, but I turned as Tony leaned out his window.
“I’m always down to earn a few extra bucks.” He grinned at me from behind his liquid caffeine. “Got any plans for later? I can stay local if—”
“We’re home for the evening.” Linus kept his expression polite, but his eyes burned with cold fire. “Thank you for your assistance.”
Sobering under that stare, Tony rolled a shrug through his narrow shoulders then peeled out with a screech of tires.
We watched until his taillights extinguished, and then I huffed out a sigh. “He was fishing.”
“Yes,” Linus agreed, a bite in the word.
“Someone got to him.”
“It was time we cut him loose,” Linus said quietly. “Atlanta complicated things.”
When a man like Linus Andreas Lawson III climbed into a grubby van piloted by a human who hadn’t bathed in a week, it put questions into the mouths of dangerous people. And that was before Dame Grier Woolworth joined him.
This small betrayal was his fault and mine for exposing a human to our world and its myriad temptations, but it depressed me all the same.
There was no point in wondering who had bought him. I had too many enemies to count on one hand.
Flickering light caught the corner of my eye, a reminder Woolly had urgent news, and I opened myself up to the wards. Their song welled in me, the bright notes overflowing into my dark thoughts as her love surged within me. “What’s up, girl?”
A flurry of images smashed into me: a black rubber cord, a dented brass button, a blue-lipped smile.
“I forgot Oscar,” I gasped, my heart plummeting into my toes. “I left him on the Cora Ann.” I dropped my face into my palms. “Thank the goddess there’s no protective services branch for undead children.”