Chapter 28
ROOMMATES FOR ANOTHER NIGHT
LEVI
Once again, we were at the Willow Lake Inn—er, I mean Sanctuary. The young people we’d brought with us from the city had already gone up to their rooms, and only us Willow Lakers remained in the foyer. Parker had gone up with Finley to let his grandmother know what had happened.
He’d also been desperate for a shower to wash the blood off, so I suspected he’d be doing that now too.
I’d wanted to drag him right back to my place and take care of him there, but we’d had to stop here first to drop off the university students.
For all I knew, Parker would be staying here for the night too.
My insides twisted at the thought of sleeping across town from him tonight, but I’d deal with it.
“Some of the kids you brought wanted to bunk together,” Gage said, “which works out well since we don’t have rooms enough for everyone to have their own yet.”
“I’m not surprised. They clung to one another the whole trip back.” I nodded. I took a bite of the warm porridge Jake had made for me a few minutes earlier. The oats were helping to balance the magic I’d spent shifting tonight, but I wouldn’t feel fully balanced until I saw Parker again.
“Besides, it’s only one night.” Gage glanced at the stairs leading to the rooms. “We’ll get them back to their supe communities tomorrow, after the SC interviews them.”
“What about the human?” I asked him. “He’s in danger too.”
“He’s connected to supes. His sister is married into the same community as his girlfriend.”
Okay. That was good.
“Did you know Finley was a supe?” I asked. “Parker had looked shocked when he found out and I hadn’t sensed anything from him.”
“No.” The demon shook his head. “His talisman worked well.”
“Yeah. It saved him.”
The hunters hadn’t identified him as a supe, but I didn’t doubt for a second that Finley would have tried to get those kids out on his own.
It could have been so much worse if Parker and I hadn’t beenthere, because I suspected they would have been caught and there would have been a whole lot more bloodshed.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure why that hadn’t happened anyway .
We probably wouldn’t have escaped without everyone working together.
Finley with the water pipe that got us going.
The fire mage with their control over the lights and the diversion.
The shifters with their determination to fight their captors.
But, despite all those hair-raising moments, my mind kept returning to the moment when Parker had fired his gun.
The sound ricocheted through my head on repeat.
And every time, I relived the heart-wrenching moment afterward, when I hadn’t known who’d fired and if Parker was okay.
“So did yours.” Gage’s gaze dropped to the place where I was rubbing my chest to ease my suffocating anxiety. My protection tattoo just happened to be in the same spot.
“Yeah,” I agreed, not bothering to mention my stress. There was a good chance he knew all about it already. Demons were like that.
“Good. Nelson and Teague are back now too.” Gage watched the two supes walk over to join our group. I hadn’t realized until now that they’d been so far behind us. “Did you let the SC know that we’ve confirmed our suspicions about the hunters?”
“The campus security guards had already talked to them before we could, so they knew. No one else has been detained yet.” Nelson frowned. “When I checked out the place after you left with the kids, no one was there. There was just a weird fight cage in the middle of a large room.”
“Yeah. That’s where they took us,” I said.
“I think they were going to pit the supes against one another like some kind of supernatural fight club. I don’t want to know what they would have done to them after that.
” We could all speculate, though. Those hunters hadn’t seen the supes as people.
They wouldn’t have cared if any of them were hurt or killed.
They probably would have reveled in it. I shuddered.
“Are Kyle and that professor with the SC now?”
Nelson nodded. “They were turned over within an hour of you detaining them.”
I let out a shaky breath. That was something, at least. Tammy was still out there, but I doubted she had the resources to do much on her own. And if she started spouting off about magic and monsters to the average person, they’d think she was a conspiracy theorist.
Except there had been a lot of other people in that underground room. They might have connections.
“I wish we’d caught the rest of them too.” I frowned. “But we would have needed a fuck ton more backup to contain that many people.”
“Sorry about that…” Nelson rubbed the back of his head.
“Not your fault. We couldn’t have anticipated this turn,” Gage said. He squeezed Nelson’s shoulder. It reminded me of how Hayden calmed people in the pack.
“Nothing is going right lately.” Nelson’s dark eyebrows tilted down in a frown. I got the sense he was talking about more than just tonight’s events.
Gage met Nelson’s frown with one of his own. “This isn’t your fault.”
Nelson’s jaw tightened like he was clenching his teeth.
“I should have been down there when the shit hit the fan. I was following the older guy with that jewel they used to identify supernatural magic. If I hadn’t taken it when I did, I doubt he would have gone back down there.
” Nelson shook off Gage’s hand. “We should interview those kids and see what else they know.”
“The shifters might not be much help about what happened tonight. The hoods the hunters made us wear fucked with our senses.” I wrinkled my nose at the mention of that damn hood.
The stink of it was still clinging to my nostrils.
“But they might know more about the other students who’d been recruited.
Is the SC searching the professor’s belongings?
If he was teaching there, he must have an office on campus, right? ”
“Not sure they’ll find much. Hunters tend to be paranoid bastards,” Nelson muttered.
“But you got the amulet?” Gage asked.
“Yeah, I did. Picked it out of his pocket when he was standing in line for some fancy coffee, right after I emptied the bullets from his gun. It wasn’t five seconds later that he tapped his empty pocket and discovered it was missing.”
“Can I see it?” I asked, curious about the object that had likely been used to destroy many supes in the past.
Nelson nodded and pulled a pouch from his pocket. “I was going to give it to Teague. He has a vault where he keeps dangerous shit.” Nelson glanced at Teague after he said that, like he might have let something slip that he shouldn’t have.
When the death mage didn’t react, Nelson upended the pouch, and a dark stone bound in an elaborate gold filigree rolled onto his palm.
The stone was mostly blue, but hints of green and yellow flashed over it as it moved.
It was mesmerizing. As it rested on Nelson’s hand, a midnight blue glow pulsed through it.
It was picking up on Nelson’s magic. Teague stepped closer.
“Labradorite,” Teague muttered as his fingers fluttered across the amulet.
The blue glow transitioned to a deep purple under the death mage’s touch.
“An interesting choice. Magic has been woven into the setting, which fine tunes its use. Generally, the stone allows some people to see through illusions, but it’s often used for protection as well. ”
“Protection against supes? As if we’re the problem.” I stomped my foot. “And then they used it as an instrument of war too. What hypocrites.”
Nelson passed it to Teague.
“I’ll keep it safe,” Teague said as he tucked the gem back into the pouch. “Things like this show up on the magical black market from time to time, but I haven’t seen one in a long while. It suggests that these hunters are willing to use magic if it helps them. Not all hunters are.”
“The professor’s cohorts will be pissed when they discover the stone is missing,” Isaac mused.
The centaur had been unusually quiet since we arrived at the inn.
The guy looked like a surfer with his long blond hair and sun-kissed skin, and his laid-back attitude usually matched his looks.
He’d been doing most of the renovations at the inn, though, so I wasn’t surprised to see him here. The guy rarely left the inn these days.
Everyone nodded.
“If it was their only one, which it sounds like it might have been,” Nelson said, “they will probably be on the hunt for another one. If the hunter group on campus relocates after tonight, I’ll keep an eye out for them when I check out the black markets.”
“Why are you going to places like that?” I asked. Events like that were full of all the wrong kinds of supes. Had I misjudged these people?
“I’m looking for…” Nelson frowned as his words trailed off. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll keep an eye out. That’s all I’m saying.”
“He’s looking for that unicorn that disappeared,” Carter whispered in my ear. “You heard about that, right?”
“A unicorn? A real unicorn?”
“Yeah,” Carter said. “His name is Morgan. I don’t know how you didn’t hear about that.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Remember how Ogden was abducted a few months back? Well, the unicorn was caged there too. Nelson’s been looking for him since then.”
Wow. A unicorn. No wonder Nelson was stressed all the time. He was trying to find a supe that most people thought only existed in myth.
If Nelson was checking out black markets, did that mean he thought someone was going to sell the unicorn? Or the unicorn’s horn or something? I thought the kidnapping ring had been stopped.
Had anyone really figured out why all those supes were being trafficked to begin with? Maybe they had, and I just didn’t know about it. It wasn’t any of my business. Honestly, I wished the hunters were someone else’s business too, but somehow, I’d landed right in the middle of it.
At least with Kyle and the professor in custody, the rest of the hunters might disappear for a few years. I looked forward to life going back to normal.
But what did normal look like now?
Parker had slept in my bed one night, but we hadn’t kissed since I’d hauled him into my arms outside the café.
I didn’t count the little peck he’d given me Sunday morning.
I’d wanted to have him in my bed again every night since, but once the hunters had left town, it no longer made sense to insist on that.
The nights in my empty bed had been disastrous. How was I supposed to forget what it had felt like to have his arms around me and go back to living my life like last weekend hadn’t happened?
“Okay, Levi,” Parker said, as he bounded down the stairs. His hair was wet, so I’d been right about him taking a shower. “Let’s get out of here.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“It’s time to skedaddle.” Parker walked to the door without looking back, like he expected me to follow.
Which I did.
What was even happening right now?