Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
JESSE
Iclimbed into the backseat. Caleb scrambled in after me and slammed the door on the smoke and the sirens. Emile flung himself into the driver’s seat.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
He gave me an exasperated look in the rearview mirror.
“I could ask you the same. I endured four hours of Fiumicino’s hospitality before I gave up and got a car.
I tracked you to the opera house, and then your scent disappeared.
I’ve been waiting. Couldn’t find a cigarette anywhere.
” He said the last like this was the most major inconvenience he’d encountered in his life.
Which, for a Frenchman, might have been true.
Emile yanked a duffel from the floor of the passenger seat and dropped it into my lap. “There are clothes. What the fuck happened with Gesualdo?”
Caleb took the duffel and rooted through it.
“Dead,” I told Emile. Caleb started working a T-shirt over my head. When I emerged, I leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” His blue eyes dropped to my makeshift tourniquet. “We should probably get you some…antibiotics or something.”
I smiled. “Werewolf.”
“Right.”
Emile stared at the opera house through the windshield. Flames had taken the roofline. The building shimmered against the night sky, every window lit up like a jack-o-lantern. “You did this?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Something else.” Magic I didn’t understand.
But the name Alessia had given us circled my mind, knocking loose things I’d read.
She’d called him Dun. If my suspicions were correct, Carlo had been doing business with Donn of the Dead, a Fae lord and rumored Umbral.
In Irish mythology, he gathered human souls on their way to the afterlife.
Like the other Fae, he was supposed to be in Undersomm.
Emile’s gaze shifted to Caleb in the mirror. “Bonjour. I’m Emile Laval. Wolfseeker.”
“Uh, hi.” Caleb stretched a hand over the seat, and Emile shook it. “Caleb Lawson. Seer, I guess.”
I looked at my mate. Soot streaked his face, his curls were gray with ash, and something he’d said days ago as we left the opera house shot through my head like an arrow.
We’ll figure out this Ulfrik thing. Maybe just kill him again. Put Carlo out of his misery while we’re at it. Burn down the opera house? Get really wild with it.
“You predicted everything,” I said, wonder spreading through me.
Caleb blinked. “What?”
“Killing Ulfrik again. You did that on the embankment when you killed Pyotr wearing Ulfrik’s body. Killing Carlo. Burning down the opera house.” Goosebumps lifted on my skin. “You were joking, trying to reassure me as we left Carlo’s for the first time. And every word of it happened.”
Caleb went pale under the soot. “Oh, shit. You’re right.”
A crow landed on the hood of the car. Unease settled over me, like someone brushing my fur in the wrong direction when I was in wolf form. I turned my head.
Across the street, standing completely still while smoke boiled into the sky behind her, was the forty-something woman from Carlo’s orgy.
The dark-haired, gray-eyed lawyer with the excellent plastic surgery.
Ruby studs winked in her ears, catching the light of the fire.
She stared directly at me, expression mild, as if there were nothing extraordinary about a burning opera house or two soot-covered men in the backseat of a car.
She hadn’t been there a moment before.
A crow fluttered down from somewhere and settled at her feet. A second dropped onto her shoulder.
Power washed over me. Ancient and earth-scented, it brought loam and rain and the ozone that builds before a lightning strike.
Change melted over her like honey in the sun.
Between one breath and the next, she was otherworldly beautiful, with clear skin, glossy dark hair, and piercing gray eyes.
Even with the distance between us, I saw the snowflakes drifting through her irises.
The tip of one pointed ear peeked through her hair.
Emile sucked in a breath.
She allowed us to see her this way. It was a greeting or a warning—or maybe something else entirely. Glamour was the heart of Fae magic. Transformation.
Now, Alessia’s voice ran through my head. Dun wanted to see what the blood would do to a human. Whether it would make something he could use.
My heart sped up.
The crow on the woman’s shoulder cawed. It swooped from her and crossed the street, landing next to the crow on the hood of the car. Somewhere between the woman’s shoulder and its flight, a little white card had appeared in its beak.
It dropped the card. Both crows lifted into the air and fluttered to their mistress.
She turned and walked away.
Then she was gone. No stairs. No door. She’d vanished with the crows.
“What the fuck was that?” Caleb asked.
“Fae,” Emile said, sounding like he’d eaten something bitter. He reached out the window and grabbed the card off the hood. He looked at it, then passed it back.
I took it and ran my thumb over the name engraved in black letters in the center.
Abigail Skinner, Attorney-at-Law
Nothing else. Not even a phone number.
Emile met my eyes in the mirror. “We need to tell Stefanos. Immediately.”
The sirens wailed louder, close now, coming from three directions.
“You know where the rental house is?” I asked.
“Oui.”
“Then get us out of here.”
Emile pulled away from the curb. A fire truck screamed up to the opera house.
I looked at Caleb. “Click it or ticket.”
“Are you serious right now?” He stared at me. I stared back.
He scowled and reached for his seatbelt. “Unbelievable.”
Emile pulled out his phone. Stefanos answered before he’d pressed it to his ear.
“You have Jesse and Caleb?” He sounded anxious. Not an emotion I associated with the Greek elder.
“Oui,” Emile said. “And we have a great deal to tell you.”