13. Paul #3
“I’m fine, but I’ll need to send this suit to a tailor and replace one of my cufflinks.
These idiots really are taking a toll on my patience.
And I had to cancel an entire order of macarons Alexandria was going to make.
The McElroys have been hogging her for about a dozen or so birthdays in a row, so who knows when she’ll have the time again. ”
Before I could ask him which idiots he meant, he jerked his thumb behind him. I moved around the couch and the ornate cabinet behind it. Two piles of dust lay on the floor, a stake discarded between them.
Had… had my big brother just taken out two vampires? While I didn’t have a close personal relationship with the creatures of the night, I still knew that they were pretty on par with us. Enough so that two on one would be a very difficult battle to come out on top of.
“Assassins?” I asked. I already knew the answer. It wasn’t like there was any other reason why there would be two of them in our house in the middle of the day.
Wait, the sun is up. That means they infiltrated this place overnight and were waiting for one of us to arrive!
That revelation felt so incredibly invasive.
After our father and eldest brother had been murdered in our own home, I knew it wasn’t a safe place, but this added violation really drove the point home.
I’d always been described as relatively smart, but I certainly felt dumb now.
“Who else could it be? It seems that, with us hiding our dearest little brother, they decided to move on to their next target.” Chris started folding his handkerchief, then glanced at the bright blood spatter. He clicked his tongue. “Uncouth. It’s just so uncouth.”
“Hey? Is everything all right in here? You took off!” Cherry’s voice came from the open door.
I had sprinted off without so much as a thought about her not being able to keep up.
Whoops. It really was quite the transition to go from almost exclusively interacting with other shifters to needing to keep an almost-human’s stamina and speed in mind.
“Whoa, there’s a lot of em—psychic energy I’m picking up on in here. You okay, Chris-Man?”
I wasn’t sure what affronted my brother more, the blood staining his handkerchief or the fact that Cherry had just called him “Chris-Man”. Between the assassination attempt, the new nickname, and the mess the vampires had made, my eldest brother wasn’t exactly having the best day.
“I’m perfectly fine. We should get the detectives to come collect what’s left of these two.”
“These two?” Cherry asked, hurrying closer to see the dust piles.
“Assassins,” she said definitively, and I wondered if it was her empathic skills, her ADHD, or regular old logic that had her reaching that conclusion.
Although I still wasn’t entirely over Cherry lying to us about the basis of her powers, it was interesting to re-evaluate situations based on what I now knew.
“What else?” Chris said, seeming a bit less irritated. Maybe it was the comfort of thinking he had a psychic on his side?
Guilt twisted in my stomach. I was now also lying to him, but I really couldn’t see any other way. There was no way Chris would be able to move on from her deceiving us, and besides, it seemed cruel to rip away what little relief he found in believing we had an ace in our pocket.
Or maybe I was just selfish and wanted to keep Cherry around. Whatever. I was too busy to deal with that thought.
“If there’s already a hit out on you, then Paul is right.” I was? “Someone is trying to wipe out the entire VanMarche line.”
“I have been saying that,” I agreed. In fact, that was the reason I’d gone to her in the first place. I wanted someone outside of my family and the police to tell me that I was crazy so I could move on from my paranoia.
Funny how that worked.
“I imagine it would be difficult for them to get all the way to the UK to target your sister, right?”
“If whoever is doing this has enough dough on hand to put out such big bounties—enough that assassins are taking hasty risks to try to secure the kill—then it’s unlikely a flight across the pond would stop them,” Chris said.
For once, I decided to look on the bright side.
Not that I was all that negative usually.
Just a realist. And unfortunately, reality could be depressing.
“However, they would have difficulty with the fact that she’s working at a high-security law firm currently under the protection of the druids and working on a very publicized case.
She’s got a personal guard and has crash quarters at their building if she needs it. ”
“Yeah! Exactly!” Cherry said jubilantly, pointing to me.
“Exactly… what? ” And for once, I agreed with Chris’s incredulity. I had no idea what she meant.
“What I’m saying is someone is trying to go through your line in what they consider the order of least resistance.
The party boy was first. Then you, Chris, the one who’s stateside.
I’m guessing Paul would be next, then Penelope.
They’ll go round and round until they get what they want. Which is all of you dead.”
“Yes, we did put that together.”
“Did you? Because we’ve got a real triangle here, and now finally enough information to figure it out.”
Now I was really lost. “A… triangle?”
“Yeah, you know how you can figure out one side of an isosceles triangle if you have the other sides? Well, you know who they want to kill and what order they’ve tried to do it, so why don’t we use that information to figure out whoever the hell these people are?”
Ah, okay, now the triangle thing made sense. Although I liked the way Cherry expressed herself, it sometimes took a while for my brain to translate.
“Are you telling me you’re particularly familiar with the Pythagorean theorem?” my brother asked in that condescending tone that came so naturally to him. I’d really enjoyed getting to see the more vulnerable side of him the past few days, but man, he could really be such an ass.
But I should have known Cherry could handle it without breaking a sweat. She didn’t turn her head so much as tilted it backward until the back of her skull was nearly touching her spine as she stared dead at my brother.
“Can we skip over your assumptions about my intellect because of your preconceived notions about how I speak, and continue with actual progress in bringing your family’s aggressors to justice?”
I had to admit, it was rather satisfying to see Chris’s disconcerted expression. “Right. Continue. We were talking about… triangles and using the information we have to our benefit.”
Her head snapped back up, and I had to wonder if that bendiness was an oracle thing, an ADHD thing, or a uniquely Cherry thing.
“Right, so if we know they’re trying to go easiest to hardest, the best way to make it incredibly easy for them is to get Penelope over here and have you all in one place. One very conspicuous place. Especially if they can get that information ahead of time to plan. ”
Finally, it clicked in my head what she was getting at, and that feeling of being one step behind hit me. Was I too stupid to live or still adjusting to the world as Cherry saw it?
“You want to use the funeral,” I said. “The date would be public so our pack members from other states could attend. So will the two alphas of the largest packs here on the East Coast, and their immediate family. To show respect.”
“Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. They’ll know exactly where all y’all will be. There’s no way they could resist such easy pickings!”
“You’re not really making an argument of why we should do this. Unless you’re trying to use reverse psychology to get us to cancel the funeral?” Unsurprisingly, my brother wasn’t getting it. Probably because he was still trying to get over the creepy neck thing Cherry had done.
My heart skipped a beat at the thought, although I couldn’t tell if it was with dread or intrigue. Maybe both? One thing I’d learned was that very few things were so black and white anymore. “No, she’s saying since we know they’ll be there, we set a trap.”
At that, a broad smile passed over Cherry’s features. “Not just any trap. But a big one. A really, really big one!”