Chapter 18
Jon
“You were going to let that creature go,” Tammy’s voice rang out.
She stepped out of the wild shrubbery that stretched toward the ceiling, her black gown tattered around the ankles. The shredded fabric revealed a holster concealed along her right leg. It had to be special dispensation for such a tightly-watched event, furthering the bite of betrayal.
As she approached us, my grip solidified on my knife, and I was unsure for the first time in my life if Tammy was going to defend me or make me her next opponent.
“I won’t apologize for mercy where it’s due,” I said, my resolve hardening even though the hollowness inside me gaped anew.
“Jon, you’re hardly even a hunter anymore,” Tammy retorted. “Compassion for monsters?”
I gestured at the gutted ahool corpses splayed out behind the overturned truck. “It should comfort you that it’s in short supply.”
Her lips pressed into a thin line. “What happened to the boy I saved?”
A flash of dark memories crawled across my mind—of my father’s corpse at my feet.
Cliff’s arms under me, pulling me from the burning house.
And Tammy, our brutal guardian angel, who had appeared in the doorway when Cliff and I were bruised and bloodied by the insidious spirit that had possessed him.
She’d shouted guidance to my killing blow, had crushed us in an embrace in the safety of the wooded yard outside, whispering that everything was over, it was safe.
Tammy’s frown deepened. “After what happened to your parents, I can’t believe what you’ve become.
So easily swayed by a niamh? A fairy? These things are designed to lead you astray, muddle your mind with false desire—you know this.
I trained you to watch your back, to protect others from suffering your fate.
” She scoffed, shaking her head in utter disbelief. “Clearly, I wasted my time.”
The words cut deeper than any blade could have.
Losing her. I was losing Tammy the way I always lost people in my life.
“You taught me not to hunt from hate, but so that no one joins the people we’ve lost,” I said. “I’m still doing that. I’ve never faltered in that. I’m just not like you anymore. Things have changed.”
Sylvia had changed me.
And money had changed the woman I’d once seen like family.
Tammy was just a few feet away now, striking distance for either of us. Tension still radiated off of her, her gaze skating urgently over the bloodbath around us. Not the satisfaction of a successful hunt, but the horror of botched inventory.
“It’s Eros, isn’t it?” I asked, my voice miraculously level despite my thundering heart. “You’re helping him.”
Her shoulders slumped a little, shame and defensiveness warring in her expression. “It’s not how I usually operate. But there’s something good this is all for, even if you can’t see it yet.”
Yet.
“He’s asked you to kill me?”
“No.” She staggered even closer to me. “If you were any other asshole, you’d be on the ground already. But… I can’t. Even after what you’ve done, it would be like gunning down my own kid.”
She broke off, an odd, incomplete pause tightening the space between us.
Not kill, but bring alive.
“How long?” I asked tightly
“About three years.”
The breath whooshed from my lungs. Years. She had been working behind our backs, betraying the very foundations she’d taught us, keeping us in the dark. All the call-dodging and cryptic texts deferring our help snapped into focus. Suddenly, her increasing absence over the last few years aligned.
Fuck, we had tried to contact her feverishly when we’d first found Sylvia all those months ago.
Nausea washed over me as I realized how close we’d come to delivering Sylvia directly to these black market psychos.
“Please, hear me out,” Tammy said. “You can hate that I needed to align with these assholes, but you owe me five minutes to listen. Not here; we need to move. Come with me, and I’ll show you everything.
You can talk to Cliff.” She paused, wincing.
“It shouldn’t have been like that. I never wanted you boys involved, but…
Fuck it, it’s too late now. What’s done is done. ”
“What have you done with Everett?” Lee demanded harshly. He anchored his stance, raising a handgun in Tammy’s direction.
I gave him an incredulous look. Lee Rhodes holding a gun? It reeked of desperation, and I saw it then: the same earnest, ground-down resolve that burned in me to sacrifice anything, even our own principles, to save the people we loved so fiercely.
And it was well-founded. For all we knew, Delilah, Sylvia, and the others had only minutes to live.
Tammy’s gaze slid to him, sizing him up like she had just noticed he was there. Lee shuffled his dominant hand on the handle, his finger tentative over the trigger.
“Honey, your grip is a nightmare,” she said coolly. “Learn how to discharge that thing before you threaten someone.”
Lee’s eyes tightened at the corners.
BLAM.
“I’ll manage,” he said.
I blinked, and Tammy was stumbling, her back slamming into a gnarled tree that had shot through the concrete. Shock rippled through me, my breathing staggering. I threw Lee a stunned look. He’d fucking shot her.
Not only that, but judging by the blood trickling from her right arm, it was a damn good shot. A non-lethal clip to her dominant arm with an accuracy that took years to hone.
I rushed to kneel by Tammy, cradling her and stripping the gun from her weakened grip in the same motion. Lee’s hand shook like his own actions had violated him, but he strode closer.
“Enough sob stories. Answer my question. Where is Everett?” Lee asked again, force punching behind each word—because it wasn’t really Cliff he was after. “The woman with him—”
“The fucking witch, you mean?” Tammy sneered, her voice shaking with pain.
For a moment, I thought Lee would strike her for that.
Tammy clamped a hand over her arm, blood ribboning over her fingers where the gunshot wound seeped. Fire blazed in her eyes, that unshakeable fight in her I’d seen aimed at so many monsters over the years.
But tonight, something was different. A weariness flooded her, choking down the anger.
She leaned back in my arms, tension slowly melting even through the veil of distrust for a hunter who would spare a fairy’s life.
I wondered if she still saw a scared, gangly teenager when she looked at me, or if I’d surrendered those days now.
“If he finds out I’ve helped you—even with this—he’ll kill me,” she said, voice strained. She kept checking the wound, lips trembling with the effort of muscling through the agony. “He’ll hurt my boy.”
Something cold and cruel in me stirred. After betraying us, putting all of our lives in peril, maybe deserved Eros’ wrath.
But her kid didn’t. And even now, I remembered that fateful night that had changed my life forever—her fervent embrace.
How Tammy had smelled like safety and smoke, combing her fingers through my sweaty locks while terror wracked my body with shivers.
She had helped put my shattered world back together.
“Eros won’t know.” I nodded at the wound pointedly, then glanced back at the trembling weapon Lee still pointed at her chest. “It will look like a struggle—we’ll make sure of it.”
Tammy caught on, shuddering out a breath. She touched my face, gaze agonized in its pleading. “Come to your senses. Don’t do this, please. We should be on the same team, not committing suicide for the sake of these abominations.”
“You can’t change my mind, Coach,” I whispered.
She squeezed her eyes—against the pain of the gunshot or fear of Eros’ retaliation, I couldn’t be sure. “Unmarked transit shuttle, headed north on the highway.”
My heart staggered—they had already left the hotel.
I gestured for Lee to hand me his pocket square, which I fashioned into a crude but snug wrapping around the wound on Tammy’s upper arm. It would stifle the bleeding enough to buy her time.
“One of those abominations saved my life in more ways than I can tell you,” I said. “Maybe you’ll understand someday, if we all make it out of this.”
I stood, moving with urgency. We only had minutes for a shot at catching up to the transport vehicle.
I tossed Lee a line of rope found in the wreckage, instructing him to tie Tammy to the tree so she couldn’t follow us.
It would paint the picture that she had been loyal to Eros to the end, protecting her from retaliation.
At least, that was the hope.
Moving urgently, I sourced additional weapons from the dismembered bodies of the guards that mingled with the corpses of the monsters they’d been attempting to transport.
I tried not to stare at any one point too long, but the unsettling imagery of Roisin’s vinework sprouting through eye sockets and body cavities was everywhere, and the smell of earth and gore filled my lungs on every breath.
After being woefully underarmed all night, the heavy weight of a double-barrel shotgun slung over my back, and a pistol tucked in my waistband was a song to the adrenaline still thrumming in my veins.
A door clanged open on the second-floor landing, railed off and partially obscured by dangling vines. I braced for another flood of guards to come racing in, but a single woman bolted inside, her eyes wild and her loose raven hair mussed from sprinting a long distance.
“Lee!” Delilah bellowed, hands gripping the railing.
She looked like she might collapse in relief at the mere sight of him.
Lee dropped the gun he’d been fostering and left Tammy restrained on the bay floor as he sprinted for the stairs.
Delilah ran with a slight limp, favoring her left leg.
Halfway down the stairs, she crashed into him, airborne as Lee’s arms locked around her, swinging her around to his side.
“Thank God you’re alive,” he said into her hair. He pulled back, searching her. No Cliff. No Sylvia or Ben. Then he caught sight of the blood streaking down her calf, and paled. “Sweetheart, your leg!”
“My regeneration hex was hasty,” she said, wincing at the mottled wound. “Bullet’s out, but I’ll patch it up prettier later. I couldn’t waste the time.”
I jogged over to meet them, hope flickering that maybe—just maybe—Sylvia and Cliff would be bursting through that door shortly behind her.
“Where are the others?” Lee demanded. He cupped her face, thumbs brushing at the sweat beading there.
Delilah’s eyes moved to me, hesitating. For the first time since I’d met her, she looked entirely lost for words. Breathless in a dazed, horrified sort of way.
“Cliff took them,” she rasped. “He double-crossed us.”
The words barely registered. “No, he’s working the system,” I said. “We’ve done that countless times in tight situations.”
Delilah whirled on me, putting her face just below mine. “Jon, we were wrong. Eros isn’t just another player in these acquisitions. He’s Cliff’s father! The whole thing was a goddamn trap to pull him in.”
Cold shock washed over me. Chandler Everett. The name we hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade.
“No, he… He’s a pharma exec. He doesn’t—how could he—” I stumbled over my words.
“Clearly, things changed.”
“Cliff wouldn’t do that,” I said numbly, my own voice foreign to me even as it rose in volume. “He wouldn’t. You don’t know him.”
“He made his position pretty damn clear when he let me get shot,” she snapped. Pity flickered as she searched my frozen expression. “He caged Sylvia. I’m sorry, Jon. I saw it all. He chose his family, and we need to take him out to get the others back.”
Delilah caught sight of Tammy struggling weakly against her bindings, and her stare became murderous. “And her. That fucking bitch—”
She summoned a spell, the smell singeing the air like smoke as she shoved between us with a crackling orb of energy forming over her palm.
I seized her arm. “We’ll deal with her later.”
Her wide eyes met mine, holding such viciousness that I expected her to turn the spell onto me instead. She yanked herself free.
“Oh, I see,” Delilah spat. “I suppose she’s as fond of you as she is of Cliff? You better decide very quickly whose side you’re on.”
Although every pillar holding me together was coming apart, I didn’t flinch.
“I’ve done everything on my side of the plan.
If you take a look at the bloodbath, you’ll see the monsters are dead, and the guards are out of the way.
Lee is still breathing and on his feet. So listen to me. We are not killing her.”
My mind kept racing. Tammy had worked with Eros all these years and must have known his identity, yet she never told Cliff. Even if I could scarcely recognize the person she had become, I knew that was meant to be a kindness.
Lee cut in, cupping Delilah’s face and turning her toward him. “There’s no time to argue over it. You should save your strength—no use wasting magic on her. She says they’re heading north on the highway.” His heavy breathing shuddered, eyes brimming with panic. “We need to get Benny.”
After a beat, Delilah faltered and doused her magic, stalking away at Lee’s side.
I spared Tammy one last look, an array of emotions ripping me apart at the seams. “If I lose Sylvia because of all of this, there’s nothing and no one in the world that can protect you.”
She grimaced, too exhausted to struggle any further. “Mouth like hers, she may not last long. I suggest you get moving.”
A fresh blaze lit in my chest. They will not lay a single finger on Sylvia.
Catching up with Lee and Delilah, I squeezed through an opening in the wall: a garage shield that had been obliterated by one of the trees.
The mild air felt unnatural after nights of bundling for warmth.
We hurried around to one of the small valet lots.
Voices were coming from the other side of the building.
It was only a matter of time before panicked gala guests started running for the hills.
Mysterious as the rattling of the building was, most of them likely understood it was more than a mere earthquake.
Zeroing in on the valet podium, I undid the cabinet lock in record time.
I snatched the first set of car keys I could get my hands on and tossed them in Lee and Delilah’s direction.
The second set, I jammed the button immediately.
A motorcycle’s headlight responded. It had been a long time since I’d had to ride one of these, but it would be ideal to weave through traffic and close to distance faster.
I swung onto the bike, thrusting the keys roughly into the ignition. My fractured arm roared in protest, and my entire body heated with the effort to muscle down the pain as I moved. The engine revved to life with a guttural noise, then purred like a hungry beast when I squeezed the throttle.
I kicked off the asphalt, carving a path toward the highway.