38. HUNTED DOWN
HUNTED DOWN
EMbrY WOKE EARLY AND DRESSED IN RUNNING CLOTHES.
As she smoothed her hair into a ponytail, Embry realized that perhaps she shouldn’t go running alone with Balthazar out there, trying to make a murderer out of her.
Magic sparking at her fingertips, she leaned in and scried in an arc above her face in the mirror: You up, Knighton?
His response was immediate: Yes.
Then: You OK? Lazarus OK?
Embry: Fine. Want to run with me?
Rye: Be there in five.
He actually made it in four minutes.
And Embry immediately understood why he had been looking in the mirror the moment she’d scried her first message. “You shaved?”
“Lazarus said business as usual.” Rye circled his smooth skin with a pointer finger. “This is business as usual.”
“I was beginning to like the scruff,” Embry admitted.
She might have been imagining it, but Rye’s bare cheeks were suddenly quite rosy considering they weren’t yet running.
“Not that I didn’t like it right away! It just took some getting used to.
” Rye was looking down at his shoes now, his hands propped on his hips.
Embry reached out and swiped a finger along his chin.
So. Soft. “All I know is the business as usual.”
Rye’s eyes lifted under crashed-together brows. “Think I should grow it back?”
“I think you should do whatever you like,” Embry replied, her voice suddenly very hoarse. Her thumb and forefinger sank into the silky-smooth edge of his jaw.
The black of Rye’s pupils seemed to swallow the sea-glass green of his eyes for the barest of moments, only making the color in his freshly shaven cheeks more striking.
Embry dropped her hand, feeling her own skin flush.
Rye cleared his throat.
She suddenly found she needed to retie one of her shoes. When Embry was finished, she addressed Rye while not actually looking at him, but instead out, down the long drive and the tall gate. “Um, so I thought we could take the route I do with Daddy? You know, business as usual?”
“Perfect,” Rye answered, stepping into an immediate jog.
They cleared both the gate and the wards, then ran down their shared street to the waterfront.
They were on the ocean side now but would loop around to the harbor side by the end.
To start, though, they jogged wordlessly together, side by side, as a heavy morning breeze rolled off a horizon of water tinged with the first fingers of dawn.
Blood pumping and cheeks now definitely flushed from exertion and the whipping wind at a mile in, Embry had the overwhelming urge to use this moment for an apology.
“I’m sorry I questioned your gut feeling about Balthazar,” Embry half shouted at Rye over the tide, gulls, and breeze, finally finding the courage to admit that for once her internal compass was not correct. “I should’ve listened more closely to your concerns.”
Rye looked up from where he’d had his gaze pinned on the path ahead of them, a little smile curving in his profile. “Apology accepted.”
Embry couldn’t believe that was it. Acquiescing to Rye Knighton wasn’t an experience that usually went so smoothly. She waited and was rewarded.
“The sorcerer was manipulating all of us from day one. Not just you, but the rest of us.”
Rye tapped his chest without breaking stride as they curved around the lighthouse on the northern tip of the island, skirting toward the harbor side.
“Balthazar knew exactly what he was doing befriending you as a way to get more access to Oakley. He killed her, that act revealed her family, and he’s been running all over New England on a vampire-hunting expedition when he’s not busy framing you and by proxy the coven.
I know it, you know it, and hopefully in the next few days the Table will know it, too. ”
“I hope you’re right,” Embry agreed. “But I worry they’ve already made up their mind—we’re the easier target and therefore the preferred one.
Which means that we’re going to have to prove to them that he was stealing her magic for the secret well sorcerers use or whatever, but it’s just so callous and, I don’t know, methodical that it’s kind of hard to believe he could be both a cold-blooded vampire serial killer and a card-carrying musical theater kid, too, you know? ”
Even Rye couldn’t deny Balthazar had the chops to play any role in Into the Woods, even if he’d been cast as Cinderella’s Prince in their production.
Rye punched out a frustrated breath. “You’re not wrong, Woodcross.”
Suddenly, the exhaustion of the past few days seemed to electrify every single atom in Embry’s body. It’d been great to get out and move her muscles after being cooped up and stressed, but now she didn’t just want to move, she needed to move.
“How would you feel about a negative split, Knighton?”
Rye side-eyed her. “I’m a rower not a runner, but in a boat that means you want to go faster on the way back. Is that—”
“Same concept. GO!” Embry took off.
“Wait! Is this a race?” Rye called, hesitating before beginning to chase after her.
“YUP!”
It turned out that though he was not apparently a runner, Rye could move, and Embry was both out of breath and deliciously exhausted by the time they sprinted through one final mad dash toward the towering gate of the Woodcross Residence.
Well, it was a mad dash until a squirrel picked an inopportune time to skitter into Rye’s path—but not Embry’s. As he hit the brakes to avoid squashing the fluffy-tailed little guy, Embry lunged past and tapped the wrought iron first.
She lifted both arms above her head in triumph—which felt good, because honestly, she was on quite the losing streak—and whirled around, grinning widely. “I win.”
“Only because I’m not a squirrel killer.” Hands on his hips and chest heaving, Rye smirked. He knew she’d done animal-directing magic, just as well as she did.
Embry flipped her ponytail and, instead of making a joke about aborted squirrel love spells, waved him off. “You could’ve dodged him just fine. You’ve got the reflexes.”
“Do I?” Rye asked and tapped the gate just as she’d done.
Embry was sure that smirk was more smile than anything else. Beyond that, his eyes were most definitely twinkling. It wasn’t even a trick of the light—dawn was behind him, illuminating the curling ends of his hair, which were extra wild from the wind.
Rye smelled of rosemary oil and sea salt.
That was when Embry realized how close they were, their hands looped around the iron bars of the gate, the tips of their running shoes nearly touching.
Then Rye’s fingers were in her hair. Collecting pieces that had flown out of her ponytail and slipping them behind one ear, then the other.
He always found an excuse to touch her hair, didn’t he?
Embry held his gaze through the whole movement.
Again, her fingers wanted to catch his hand. To kiss his fingers. To lean up and kiss him.
This feeling ebbed and flowed like the tide, never quite far enough from being in the forefront of her mind.
No matter what she did to shove it away, it came back.
It’d been barely twenty-four hours since she’d realized her heart bent toward him, and now she couldn’t—couldn’t—be without that knowledge, lurking in the shadows and spotlights of her mind.
It was the absolute worst time for these thoughts to be running through her head. The absolute worst time to admit how her heart swooped so low in her chest at the sight of him in that moment that she thought she might literally swoon. The absolute worst time to feel the most.
With strength she knew she possessed but never had to use in such an amount at once, Embry Woodcross turned away from Rye Knighton, unlocked the gate and the wards, and slipped onto the grounds, holding both open for him.
Rye hesitated.
Embry forced herself to look away, toward Daddy’s big house and beyond to the wonderful landscaping—which, of course, was courtesy of Rye. She knew that if she turned back to watch him, she’d hope to see evidence of the same feelings in him.
Maybe that he’d take an obvious breath to steady himself.
Or perhaps she’d glance back to see him staring after her with the same intense expression he’d worn while artfully arranging her for her homecoming court portrait before everything went so wrong.
Embry slowed but didn’t dare turn. “Knighton, you coming? Daddy’s espresso isn’t going to make or drink itself.”
In answer, she heard footsteps—quick and fast, jogging up the drive. Then there was a hand wrapped around one of her swinging wrists and then the other. Rye’s gentle grip all but stopped her procession toward the house.
“Hey, Em—”
She looked up at him, and Rye paused the second their eyes met. He blinked and pressed on. “There’s something I need to—”
Rye was cut off again—this time not by anything Embry did, but by the blare of an alarm.
“Did you shut the gate?” Embry asked, trying to see for herself and failing because Rye’s broad form blocked her view.
“Of course I shut the gate,” Rye answered as they both wheeled around to put eyes on it. “And that’s the alarm for the wards, not the—”
The gate was shut. But the wards were tripped.
Because someone was standing there beyond the drive, one arm thrust through the iron fence to activate the wards and set off the alarm.
Alistair Elton-Bentley.
Tall, dark, and handsome, in a sweater that cost more than a designer handbag and “sweatpants” that were clearly cashmere. The breeze ruffled his brown hair as he drew back his arm and gripped the gate. A chauffeured black town car idled behind him, one door ajar.
Embry blinked, uncertain and frozen, her wrists still in Rye’s embrace.
“Elton-Bentley, you have a lot of nerve showing up here,” Rye shouted at him, tone suddenly diamond hard, even as his touch remained tender on Embry’s skin.
“I know,” Alistair replied as his striking hazel eyes met Embry’s beyond the iron. “Embry, I’m here to say I’m immensely sorry I implicated you in Oakley’s murder.”
Embry opened her mouth. Shut it. Didn’t know what to say to that.
But Rye and his anger certainly did.
“You’re going to have to do a lot better than sorry if you want to—”
“I know. Which is why I’m here to tell you how to find Balthazar and clear Embry’s name.”