Cipher

Chapter Eleven

Three days of peace shattered with the rumble of a motorcycle engine.

The warehouse’s downstairs kitchen was close enough to the main entrance that Andrew heard not only the engine, but the dull thump of boot soles on the pavement outside. He didn’t drop his dishtowel until the side door rattled and the bell buzzed.

Kat glanced up, peering at him over the top of the laptop she’d opened on the island. “Are you expecting someone?”

“Not particularly, but sometimes people show up.” He waved her back, walked to the door and opened it.

The man on the other side looked like trouble, from his scuffed boots to his sunglasses. His leather jacket was unzipped just enough to reveal a shoulder rig, and tattoos climbing down the sides of his neck and disappearing beneath a black T-shirt. He had a duffel bag over one shoulder and a grin that outdid Alec at his most arrogant.

He also had an aura of magic that felt like nothing Andrew had ever encountered before.

When he spoke, it was in the flat cadence of TV newscasters, though a hint of southern drawl lurked around the edges. “You must be Andrew Callaghan. I’m looking for Kat. My brother sent me.”

Ben’s brother, the one who liked to play with swords. “Patrick, I guess?”

“Patrick McNamara,” he confirmed, holding out his free hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too. Come in.”

As the newcomer stepped into the warehouse, Kat appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her eyes lit up, and she took two excited steps forward before jerking to a halt. “Oh shit. How bad is it?”

Patrick McNamara looked like trouble—or like the kind of guy you’d send in to deal with trouble.

Andrew laid a hand on Kat’s shoulder. “Maybe we should all go sit in the kitchen and talk.”

Kat didn’t move, but her shoulder was tense under his fingers. “How bad is it?” she asked again.

“Bad, Kat.” The man nodded to Andrew and lifted his bag higher. “I’ve got the printouts in here. Ben didn’t want to take the chance they’d get intercepted.”

Andrew hesitated. “Want to lay them out on the counter, Kat? We can look at them together, or you can have some time.”

She drew in a steadying breath before shaking her head. “If it’s big enough for Patrick to drive over here personally, it’s not just about my family.”

Despite the truth of the words, no one else had quite so personal a stake in the information contained in those printouts. “Did Ben give you a rundown before you left?”

“The basics.” Patrick followed them across the open entryway to the kitchen tucked in the front corner of the warehouse. “I read through the highlights. There’s a lot of information here, and it’s a crazy kind of scary.”

Kat cleared her laptop out of the way so he could start pulling out files. “Information about…”

“Psychics.” The folder he pulled out looked like the one Ben had given them with fake identification.

“Kids, mostly, or people who were kids ten years ago. Whoever drew up these files was looking to build an army of psychics and planned on using them to break the world wide open.”

Andrew took the proffered folder, thick with pages, and flipped it open. As soon as his eyes focused on the list of names on the cover sheet, he understood why Patrick had given it to him instead of Kat.

Psychics of Interest. A list, and lengthy enough to be exhaustive. He recognized too many of them-ones he’d heard in passing, and even people he knew. Members of their community.

Not to mention the woman Kat’s mother had trusted with her daughter’s life. “Peace Kristoffersen had a power called psychic obscuration. That’s what she was talking about, why Alyson gave her the key. The cult literally couldn’t find her.”

He flipped the pages, and his blood ran cold. There were other lists— To Watch and Eliminate.

Callum, Kat’s mentor, was on that one, along with a few others Andrew didn’t recognize.

The last section wasn’t a list but a collection of dossiers complete with pictures and a header on every page that left his hands shaking.

Of Particular Interest.

A much-younger Kat smiled up at him from one page. It detailed her strengths and weaknesses, as well as her most appropriate uses— morale and personnel control. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

Kat was oblivious, her attention on another set of papers. “This is what she meant.” Her voice held an edge of horror. “Turning me into a weapon.”

Andrew shuffled the remaining papers. “There must be three dozen dossiers here.”

She caught his hand and pushed one paper toward him. “It’s not recruitment, Andrew. It’s enslavement.”

Patrick cleared his throat as Andrew stared down at neat specifications for a collar and an accompanying charm. “It’s a prototype, and according to the notes, they made one. Slap the collar on a psychic, and anyone with a whiff of psychic power can control them. Use their powers, do whatever they want.”

None of the information on the lists was groundbreaking. Even if Kat’s mother had taken it all, it would be easy to reconstruct, something the cult could have done ten times over in the years since her death.

“That must be it, then. She must have taken it, and they have reason to think she wouldn’t have destroyed it.” He frowned at the schematics. “So why didn’t they build another one?”

“That’s just the user manual,” Patrick said quietly. “The wizard who built it died around the same time this disk was made. His house was razed. Ben’s pretty sure it’s the last thing Kat’s mother did before they killed her.”

“So this is their only shot.” If it wasn’t so damned dangerous, if Kat hadn’t been shot already, Andrew would have laughed. “All their eggs in this tiny basket.”

“They could be looking for another witch or wizard,” Kat pointed out. “They could be trying to make another one. But I think, if they’d managed? They wouldn’t be risking this much. Chasing me around has the potential to drag the Southeast council into this. And hell, Derek and Nick and Nick’s dad.”

“The whole Conclave would get involved in something like this,” he corrected. “Though they obviously meant to intercept the drive before you had a chance to decrypt any of these files, the fact that they didn’t has upped the ante. You could leverage this stuff into a lot of help.”

“There’s something that’s not in the files.” Patrick leaned back, draping his arms across his chest. “Ben didn’t print it out. Made me memorize it. GPS coordinates, and we’re pretty sure it’s where the collar ended up.”

Andrew pulled his phone from his pocket. “Did you run them?”

“Nope. Didn’t want a record left if something happened to me.”

Patrick rattled off the number for Andrew to enter as Kat opened the third folder, her eyebrows coming together. “They were outlining missions. Not vague goals either. This one uses Ben to obtain additional sources of funding by shaving interest off of thousands of corporate accounts.” She flipped a page. “These are detailed. Insanely detailed.”

“And useless without the collar.” The GPS search program on his phone returned the results. “It looks like a spot out in the middle of Terrebonne Parish, south of Houma. The back end of the bayou.”

Kat snapped the folder shut and pushed it away from her. “So we go find it,” she said quietly. “We go find it, then we fly to Wyoming and let Michelle Peyton use her badass Seer magic to erase it from existence.”

It sounded simple, easy. “We have to plan on being followed, one way or another, which means we plan for a fight.”

“Which means we bring Julio.” Kat glanced up at him. “And Anna. I don’t think we should waste time calling people back from all over the country. We should go as soon as we can round everyone up.”

Which left out most everyone she hadn’t already named. “And Miguel,” Andrew noted. “This is his fight too, whether he knows it or not.”

“What about that wizard you work for?” Patrick asked. “Jackson Holt, right? Isn’t he still in town?”

“He’s out west, helping his wife track down a relative.” The words were absent, most of Kat’s attention fixed on Andrew. “Are you sure about Miguel?” she asked, almost tentatively. “It won’t be complicated?”

It would be hell, especially if shit went down and they ended up in a fight where Miguel’s instincts might very well lead him to try to protect Kat. “I won’t love it,” Andrew admitted, “but we can’t afford to leave valuable people out of the loop because they make us cranky. It won’t be a problem.” Nothing I can’t control, anyway.

Kat nodded and turned to Patrick. “And I guess that’s why you’re here.”

“I’ve chased down a rogue psychic or two in my day,” he agreed. “We better assume they know they’ll be facing shapeshifters, though. The question is if they’ll underestimate your friend Andrew, here.”

“Most people do.” He was a new wolf, barely a year made. A mongrel mistake. “Not as many do it twice.”

Patrick lifted his bag. “Well let’s not give them a second chance.”

The bayou was just remote enough to be creepy without being remote enough for a supernatural showdown, which was the perfect recipe for a nerve-wracking clusterfuck.

And Kat couldn’t get her bangs to stay out of her eyes.

In lieu of calling off the vital mission until she could get a grown-up haircut, Kat settled on unfashionable but practical pigtails. Fussing with her hair as they waited for the others to arrive didn’t seem very heroic, but at least it put her somewhere between her two companions on the fidgety scale.

Andrew was calm and unwavering as he leaned against the bumper of his SUV, his arms crossed over his chest. Julio, on the other hand, was taking advantage of the fact that half the outside lights were out at the tiny bait shop off Little Caillou Road, and pacing broodingly in the shadows.

Finally, he scraped his boot into the dirt and sighed. “I don’t like the skulking. I think that’s the part that gets me.”

“Being sneaky,” Kat corrected, the words muffled by the ponytail holder held between her teeth. She finished gathering the rest of her hair and tied it off into a second pigtail just high enough to keep her vision unimpeded. “Shapeshifters should do it more often. Not everything has to be a full frontal assault.”

“If this freaky-ass cult had mounted that sort of attack, we wouldn’t be hanging around in the dark. And the cold, damn it.” He shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. “We’d be done and out for beers already.”

Kat turned to pick up her gun and glanced at Andrew. “Is that what we’re doing after we save the world from psychics? Getting beer?”

“Sure.” He was looking off down the dark highway, and the drone of a car engine materialized. “That’s what we always do after we save the world.”

They were night and day. Julio edgy and intense, Andrew utterly motionless. She remembered the jittery moments after she’d been shot, when color had faded from the world around him. “Are you all right?”

He smiled suddenly, and she knew he was trying to reassure her. “I’ll be better if I don’t have to get naked in the bayou tonight. Julio’s right. It’s cold as balls out here.”

Nothing sexy about nakedness when it was a prelude to a fight. “I’ve never seen you as a wolf, you know.”

“No.” He straightened from the bumper as the noise of the engine drew closer. “No, you haven’t.”

He hadn’t even paused to consider. Just no, and now she wondered if it was deliberate. If he was hiding that part of himself from her.

Tonight, if things went badly, he might not be able to hide. Kat checked her handgun carefully, deciding in the end to leave the safety engaged. “Anna’s car?” she asked. “Or is that Patrick? I can’t really tell cars from motorcycles.”

“It’s both,” Julio answered as headlights came into view over a small rise. “Anna’s little sportster and one mammoth bike, from the sound of it.”

Sera was safely ensconced at Dixie John’s for the late shift, and Anna had left from there with Miguel in tow. Three shapeshifters, one telepathic shapeshifter, an empath and a bounty hunter whose tattoos held more magic than anything the Ink Shrink had ever created. Ben had hinted once that his brother’s ability to compete with shapeshifters was due to some sort of mystical exchange, a boon paid for in blood and ink, but the one time Kat had pressed for details, Ben had become evasive to the point of avoidance.

Not that it mattered why the tattoos worked. Patrick held his own against monsters every day. Andrew and Julio were council members. Anna had been trained in combat by the Conclave. Kat and Miguel had psychic power to burn between them, and gifts that lent themselves well to offensive attacks. The gun clutched in her hands might make her feel secure, but it was nothing compared to the power of her mind.

Whatever waited for them in the frigid night, they were equal to it.

If she repeated their qualifications enough times, maybe she’d even believe it.

Swallowing, Kat slipped her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She’d copied the GPS location from Andrew, because someone who wasn’t going to end up on four paws needed to have it. “I did a quick sweep a few minutes ago to check for followers, but Miguel can do one too, when he gets here. He’s got a wider receptive range than I have.”

A silver car slowed—barely—and whipped into the gravel lot, kicking up dust. It had barely stopped before Anna shut off the engine and climbed out. “Someone tell me this guy on the bike is with us.”

Kat bit her lip to hold back an entirely inappropriate laugh. “Yes.”

Patrick made a less showy entrance. He parked, dragged off his helmet and smoothed down his dark hair. “You drive like a maniac, lady.” It sounded like a compliment.

Anna rolled her eyes and started to turn toward him. “Yeah, I drive the way I…” The words faded away, and she snapped her mouth shut. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

Basic shields didn’t block out surges, but Kat wouldn’t have needed the tingling shock to recognize attraction that intense. Anna looked discomfited, maybe even pissy, but Patrick just grinned at her and swung his leg over his bike. “Anna Lenoir. You screwed me out of three grand last year. I chased McPherson across seven states before you put him down.”

Whatever else, she recovered quickly enough to shrug. “When he showed up in Vegas, that made him mine.”

“That’s what my client said when he refused to pay up. Don’t suppose he cut you a check?”

“No such luck, cupcake.” She pounded on the roof of her car. “Out, Mendoza.”

Miguel stepped clear of the passenger side door with a sigh. “Want me to listen for company, Kat?”

Kat hesitated, then glanced to Andrew and Julio. Four shapeshifters, and if there was one thing she’d learned from Alec, it was that wolves lived by their hierarchy, whether they wanted to or not. “Who’s calling the tactical shots here?”

Andrew squared his shoulders. “Kat, you and Miguel are on lookout. Patrick and Anna too, only more with eyes and ears and less with psychic ability. If there’s trouble, it’s not the kind we can plan for very well, except that they’ll probably bring a shifter or two. So we fight.”

“And if we’re outnumbered?” Anna asked quietly.

“Then we need to make damn sure that, no matter what else happens, these crazy fuckers don’t get what they’re after. So someone needs to take responsibility for it, and cut and run if necessary.” He looked around. “Any volunteers?”

None of the shifters looked like they wanted to offer to run away from the fight. Neither did Patrick.

Kat braced her feet and met Andrew’s gaze squarely. “I can do it. I’m not that fast, but I don’t need to be.

If I can get clear of the fight, I can make sure no one can get close enough to matter.”

Andrew dug his keys out of his pocket and held them out to her. “You keep whatever we find,” he whispered, “and if things are bad out there, you get gone.”

“You better follow me,” she replied just as quietly. She reached for the keys and caught his hand as well. “I can agree. I can promise. But you shapeshifters don’t have the monopoly on blind instinct.”

He nodded, with only the barest movement of his head. “Now, where is this thing, anyway?”

Kat pocketed the keychain and retrieved her phone. “A quarter mile northwest of here.” She indicated the tree line behind the ramshackle shop. “That way.”

They made their way quietly in the darkness, past a dilapidated storage shed and two cars that hadn’t run in any of their lifetimes. It grew darker when they entered the trees, and the steady, low drone of the gnats on the swamp faded.

In its place rose another kind of buzz, one that she thought she was imagining at first. The itch started at the base of her neck, then skipped down her spine until goose bumps dotted her arms. “What is that?” she whispered.

“Magic,” Patrick replied quietly. “Big, scary magic.”

“We must be close.” Julio looked unusually pale in the scant moonlight.

The backlight on her phone had shut off. Kat used her thumb to activate it again and squinted at the display. “Twenty feet or so? At this point, the buzz is more accurate than the GPS.”

Andrew hefted his shovel and spun in a slow circle, finally settling on a direction. Five sure steps later, he stopped. “Here. It’s right here.”

He began to dig.

Kat slipped her phone into her back pocket, tightened her grip on her gun and stepped close to Miguel.

“Have you picked up anything?”

“Nothing,” he whispered. “But I don’t like it. It’s not—not quiet, exactly. It’s…silent.”

“As the grave.” Anna began disrobing as she offered the words, kicking off her boots as she tugged her shirt over her head.

Kat half-closed her eyes and cracked her shields, just enough to let her power ease out in a slowly growing circle. She brushed Miguel first, whose excellent shields couldn’t hide his unease—or his vague appreciation of Anna’s naked form.

Patrick next. Kat pushed past him quickly, uninterested in sharing his far more intense interest. Julio was his usual pool of steady strength, and Andrew was quiet concentration. She flicked past Anna and got a sense of steely determination and the tiniest flicker of satisfaction.

The circle widened. She used Callum’s trick of quieting the minds she’d already touched, relegating them to silence by imagining them each packed away in a cardboard box. Her own imagery—not as fancy as Callum’s chalices, chains and locks, but it worked.

Beyond her group…nothing. Stillness that spoke of the utter absence of people. She could keep pushing. Test her limits, stretch herself thinner, like warm taffy. Eventually she’d find minds. She could dip into the hearts of every person in ten miles, taste their emotions and know their fears.

Instead she held her power in a tight sphere. Five hundred feet in all directions, and if anything disturbed that quiet, she’d know.

Magic zipped through the air, raising the fine hairs on the back of Kat’s neck, and a pale wolf shot off through the trees. Anna, making her own sort of perimeter sweep.

Miguel reached for his shirt, and Julio stopped him. “You might need to use your words, baby brother.”

But Miguel only snorted out a laugh. “It’s all right, Julio. If I need my words, they’ll be there.” He dropped the rest of his clothes, knelt and shifted. He was a lean man, tall and almost slender, and his wolf form reflected that.

He ran off, and Andrew struck something with his shovel. The sound rang out, hollow and metallic, and Kat eased closer to Patrick. “Is this what it always feels like? Like someone’s about to jump out at you at any second?”

“Sometimes.” Patrick had stripped off his leather jacket in spite of the cold, leaving his arms bare of anything but the full tattoo sleeves that ended at his wrists. Each hand held a gun. “These are the good times, though. The bad times are when it doesn’t feel like that, and they jump out at you anyway.”

“Yeah, speaking of jumping…” Julio arched an eyebrow. “You really want to have a couple of honking guns at the ready? This isn’t exactly an unpopulated area.”

Patrick grinned and lifted them both. “No one will hear these. Silent and untraceable. You don’t want to know what they run on the black market, though. I could have had a beach house in Malibu.”

Andrew knelt and uncovered a battered metal container. “Looks like a fire-resistant lockbox.” He looked up at Kat and held her gaze. “It’s locked, but I can open it, no problem.”

Opening it felt risky. So was leaving without being sure they’d gotten what they’d come for. “We should check.”

He wrenched open the lid a split second before a howl shredded the night, and an even louder shout reverberated through Kat’s mind with an echo that felt like Miguel, smoky and smooth.

“They’re here.”

It was all the warning they got before emotion exploded five feet behind her. Feral anticipation, determined focus, and a satisfaction that crawled over her as she spun around. Two men stood behind her, one already in motion, lunging past her toward Andrew. The other…

Shock held her in place. She recognized the dark eyes and floppy hair, that half-cocked smile that made him look like he was laughing at a joke he would share in the next breath. Christopher Gilbert. The man who’d taken her to dinner and discussed movies adapted from video games with such enthusiasm that she’d been enjoying herself for the first time in months—until a shapeshifter jumped them on the street and he’d vanished into the night while she’d fought off her attacker with a stun gun.

In the aftermath, Jackson had broken it to her that there was something fishy about the guy. Bad news, the wizard had called him, but Kat hadn’t cared. She’d had Miguel by then, and the newness of their relationship, and little thought to spare for the sort of guy who’d run out on his date while she was being mugged.

Run out—or teleported away.

It took two seconds for the thought to form, and two seconds was already too long in a fight with shapeshifters.

“Kat, down!” Julio surged past her, swinging the shovel, but the man vanished.

Andrew had the other one on the ground, landing blow after blow, but a second later Gilbert reappeared, his boot already en route to Andrew’s face. It connected, and Andrew howled as his head snapped back.

They were moving so fast, almost too fast to see. Magic snapped through the air, and at least a half dozen emotional flares burst into existence, staggered in a semicircle in the direction Anna had run. She caught her breath and shouted a warning as she raised her gun again. “More coming in from the road!”

Vicious snarls rose in the night, the snaps and growls of more than one fight. Julio had managed to divest himself of half his clothes, and Andrew recovered enough to punch Gilbert in the side of the knee.

The blow connected before he could dematerialize, and his grunt of pain hung in the air after he’d vanished.

The shifter Gilbert had dropped on top of them rolled to his side, then reached for the box. Her gun was a weapon of last resort, but she had a more powerful one at her command. Eerie calm had settled over her, a tribute to Callum’s training, she supposed—or Zola’s. It seemed easy to touch the shifter’s aura, and it didn’t take much. A push. A whisper of danger, of the right flavor of fear, and instinct had the man scrambling blindly to his feet, poised to face a threat that wasn’t there.

Which made him an easy target for Patrick, who proved his guns were silent by slamming a bullet between the man’s eyes.

The fights in the forest drew closer—Anna and Miguel, undoubtedly pushing the interlopers closer to them. Closing the fight to a workable distance.

Kat sensed Miguel before he tumbled out of the trees in a tangle of fur and limbs. He landed hard, rolled again and sank his teeth savagely into the other wolf’s throat. His opponent thrashed and fell still as Miguel reared back with a snarl.

Another flash of emotion coalesced before her, and Gilbert reached for her only to be knocked aside by a flying form. Anna, who must have startled him, because she bore him to the ground and snapped her teeth shut on his arm before he disappeared.

Julio hit the ground on four paws as Andrew rose, cold rage spilling from him. He barely moved, just stood, his hands clenched into fists and his head cocked as if listening for something.

Kat concentrated on the people around them. Pain flickered from the dead and dying, but none of the gravely injured were their own. The interlopers were mostly fear and nerves now, with one pulsing light of rage barreling toward them from the direction of the road.

“One coming in behind you,” she told Andrew, surprised at how steady her voice sounded. How cold.

“And he’s mad.”

“Good,” he growled. “So am I.”

The man broke free of the trees, and Kat got the second shock of the evening. If she hadn’t seen Gilbert, the features would have been naggingly familiar, the sort of echo that might keep her up at night wondering where she’d met him before. But there was no mistaking him here, now, as the anger inside him twisted up his face when he caught sight of her.

He’d attacked her before, smashed her head into a car before she’d rammed her stun gun into his side and left him unconscious on the side of the road with a self-reliance that had given her back a bit of her own pride.

Clearly he hadn’t forgotten. Neither had Andrew, who scooped up the shovel and launched himself past the fray with a roar.

The man dodged his first swing and grabbed the shovel, snapping off the business end with a vicious jerk. Undaunted, Andrew swung the handle up and slammed the shifter across the side of the head.

A soft pop and a laugh had Kat spinning again, her gun swinging up. Gilbert grinned at her. “Try to pull the trigger before I disappear again. How many shots will you get out here before someone calls the cops?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Patrick spin and lift his arm. His weapons were silent, but the movement of her eyes must have been enough warning. Gilbert disappeared again, and the bullet dug into a tree a few feet past where he’d been standing.

Another growl jerked her attention back to Andrew, who dropped his opponent with one last blow. The remains of the shovel handle disintegrated in his grip, and he tossed the shards aside and bent low. “Get up. No cage to save your ass now, so you get up and fight me.”

A snarl. The shifter twisted his head, gaze sliding over the small clearing. All of his allies were down.

Anna, Miguel and Julio stood as wolves, tensed and ready. Patrick had his feet braced on either side of the unearthed box and both guns up.

No rescue, not unless Gilbert popped in and out again. Sudden desperation spiked through Kat hard enough to force a gasp from her lips, leaving her breathless. “Andrew, look—” The shifter lunged upwards. Not at Andrew.

At her.

He didn’t make it off the grass. Andrew hit him, over and over, until Julio—who had regained his human form and gotten half-dressed at some point—stilled his arm.

Before Kat could draw another breath, magic popped and an arm materialized around her throat.

Everyone froze.

Gilbert’s hoarse command stirred her hair. Stirred her rage. “Nice and easy, guys. Hand it over, no tricks, or I’ll disappear with her.”

He’d disappear with her either way. She’d seen her own face in those files, had read every nauseating word over Patrick’s protests. They’d slap the collar around her throat and aim her at the nearest opposition. She could start riots, burn out minds, force pain and rage and fear on anyone they needed subdued.

She could kill, which was what Gilbert never should have forgotten. Everyone else was dead, everyone who wasn’t one of hers. And she knew what she was doing this time, thanks to Carmen’s careful explanation. She brought them all into her shields effortlessly, too easily, so easily it was dangerous, and she didn’t care. She gathered them to her like picking up stones from the beach, even Miguel, who could have fought but didn’t.

She clutched them to her. Anna, who was so tough but so brittle, like she might shatter if you hit her in the wrong spot. Patrick, whose confidence defied arrogance—he had nothing to prove, except he wanted to prove everything when he looked at Anna. Julio and his sturdy strength, like a deeply rooted tree, unshakable, and Miguel who trembled with the need to fight-kill-rip-tear.

Andrew. She pulled him the closest, cradled him against her and ached at his weariness, at his fear, and yet even tired and scared, Andrew was the one who burned the brightest, with a rage that could break open and devour the man who held her.

They were all imperfect, and beautiful and, for one shining moment, Kat loved them all.

Then she let go, crashing into Gilbert’s mind with all the rage inside her, fed by the helpless fury of the minds wrapped safely within her own.

He didn’t make a sound. He didn’t release her either, not quite, just shook, a fine tremor that bloomed into violent trembling as he dragged in one shaky breath after another. His pain echoed through her, terror so blinding she felt like the cruelest kind of sadist when satisfaction twisted in her gut.

Not enough to make her stop. Not until Gilbert fell, his body jerking in fits and starts, his eyes wide open and unseeing. Only then did she ease back, letting the power drift away like smoke after snuffing a candle.

Kat couldn’t look at Andrew. She didn’t want to look at anyone. Gilbert twitched helplessly on the ground, a husk of a body with a mind that would never be whole again. Dead, except for the technicalities.

“Patrick, could I use your gun? Mine’s too loud.”

Silence, until Andrew rasped, “Give her the gun or do it yourself, McNamara.”

Patrick moved toward her. Wary, slow, his eyes filled with worry and, almost worse, a quiet assessment. Alec had done that endlessly in the first days after she’d shredded through Andrew’s attackers. Watched her the same way he’d watched Julio upon his arrival, studying him for strengths and weaknesses, quantifying his usefulness—and his danger.

Living through it once had been enough. Kat quietly slipped the others free of her shields and retreated into herself until she’d have time to rebuild them properly. Then she held out a hand.

“Kat…” Patrick almost sounded pained. “You don’t have to—”

“I already did.” She kept her hand out until Patrick reluctantly handed over one of his guns. Letting him finish what she’d started wouldn’t wash the blood from her hands. Nothing would.

No, this she deserved to feel. Every gut-wrenching moment of it, a suitable punishment—and a necessary reminder.

So she took careful aim and ended Gilbert’s suffering with a bullet between the eyes.

The gun didn’t make a sound. Neither did Gilbert’s head, really, or if it did, she couldn’t hear it over the pounding in her ears. It seemed wrong, somehow, like a human life shouldn’t be that easily extinguished. It should be louder. More horrifying.

God, it was quiet. So quiet that Kat wanted to hug Anna when she spoke, if only for breaking the silence. “I know a guy, a cleaner. I can call him.”

“The party might not be over,” Miguel interjected. “There was someone else in the woods. A lookout, I guess. Definitely not really there.”

Andrew sighed wearily. “Astral projection?”

“That’d be my guess.”

“Then we need to get gone.” He rose to his full height. “Kat and I will take the collar and head back.

Can the rest of you stay until Anna’s guy shows up to take care of the mess?”

No one protested. Patrick took his gun back with a shallow smile and tucked it into its holster, then turned to say something to Anna, as if the matter was already settled. Maybe they all had faith that she and Andrew could handle any threat.

Maybe none of them wanted to climb into a car with her.

Kat pushed the thought away and moved to retrieve the box. With the metal lid torn, it was easy to open, to lift the collar and charm and clutch them in her numb fingers. Adrenaline had faded, leaving the night chilly for a shapeshifter and damn near freezing for her. “I’m ready to go,” she told Andrew, unwilling to lift her gaze higher than his chin.

He didn’t speak. Instead, he picked her up and walked toward the SUV.

It was stupid, and weak, and she let him do it. She let him do it because it gave her the chance to close her eyes and rebuild her mental protections. Andrew was there, his faint relief drowned in worry, but she resisted the urge to build her shields around him. To cling to him as a distraction from her own thoughts.

She wrapped herself in layer after layer of icy steel, until her fortifications were solid. Until her mind was her own.

Not a pretty place to be. Gilbert’s last seconds replayed over and over again, the terror in his animal noises, the utter vacancy of his eyes. She knew suffering. She’d felt it a hundred times, a thousand times, all the ways humans could hurt themselves and each other. With all the pain in the world, the last thing she should do was add to it.

But she’d made her choice. Not the first time, either. The last time had been to protect Andrew, and the aftermath felt burned into the back of her eyes in jolting, overlapping memories. Nick driving her away from the city. Jackson trying to talk her down. Andrew’s blood had been everywhere, on her dress, in her hair.

Last time, he’d damn near died under her hands. This time he was whole. Strong and unshaken. So she found it painfully amusing that her body reacted in the same way. When Andrew set her down, she barely had time to shove the collar into his hands before she staggered two steps away and threw up everything she’d eaten that day.

At least she hadn’t puked on Anna’s pretty silver sports car.