Chapter 1 #2
“No.” Liam exchanged a pained glance with Felix. “But I can, at least for long enough to find Chambers or Patrick.” He frowned, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, baby, Calabro’s gonna have to wait.”
“Of course it is.” Felix’s eyelids fluttered, and he sighed into Sway’s curls. “Fine, but you owe me so many margaritas after this.”
“You’re not the only one who needs a drink.
Three more months and we’re renting out Snaps,” Jena grumbled, wincing as she stood and retrieved her messenger bag.
“In the meantime, I’ll head over to Matilda’s and get her to scry for Chambers and Patrick.
Maybe this time she’ll find something. Can you talk to Sal? ” she asked Chase.
He nodded chewing his lip. “Yeah.”
Ophelia looked between them, lost. Sal? Wasn’t he the troll that owned the grocery store on Main Street? “What the hell does he have to do with any of this?”
“Sal’s kind of like the unofficial spokesman for Below Havers,” Chase clarified, mussing his hair. “It’s where most of the lesser fae in town live.”
They made the lesser fae live in the sewer? What the hell was wrong with these people? “Sounds delightful.”
“It’s not what you think,” Felix said, smoothing Sway’s curls as she continued to bury her snotty little nose against his neck.
“The Below is supposed to put the rest of the town to shame. A century or two ago, an earthquake dropped everything on the north side of town into a chasm. Entire neighborhoods are down there. It’s below sea level, and the town abandoned it, declaring it a loss.
When they built over it, the lesser fae moved in, bougie-fied it, then evicted all the ‘thumps,’ still hanging around,” he finger quoted.
Ophelia cocked a brow. “‘Thumps?’”
“Big people,” Jena murmured, chewing a nail. “Weres, witches—supes and normys in general. It was a whole thing.”
“And they’re really particular about who visits,” Chase said. “I don’t know anyone who’s been down there, which is why there aren’t any updated town schematics. I doubt Sal will be able to get us in, but he can put the word out, and maybe if we offered a reward…?”
Felix buzzed his lips, detaching himself from the kid. “Do it. There’s still plenty of the dragon’s horde to make it worth someone’s while, though you’d think the threat of Fayet taking over the town would be incentive enough.”
“Oh, I have no doubt they’ll agree to catch the prick,” Jena said, grabbing her jacket and heading for the door.
“But if we want him back in one piece, it’s gonna take a more than a sense of civic duty.
Unless you can do something useful like turn into a legion of rats and root him out real quick?
” She batted her lashes at Ophelia and took Chase’s arm.
Ophelia’s mood turned blacker. “Wow. Why didn’t I think of that?” She pinched across her temples, a migraine imminent. “Oh, I know. Maybe because it doesn’t fucking work that way.”
At least not for her tribe, and even if it did, you needed to be a vamp for a hell of lot longer than she had before the virus gave you any bennies. Not that rupturing flesh was something she was keen to make a practice of. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t about to get into that with any of them.
Ophelia rolled her eyes. “Look, you work on finding him, and Liam and I’ll work on stalling the case. You ready, champ?” she asked Liam. He was still consoling the little shit that’d gotten them into this mess.
“Yeah. I just need to change.” His face was drawn, but he seemed resolute.
Ophelia didn’t care. His baggage had put them here, so he damned well better pony up to get them out of it. “Then I’ll meet you in the library in an hour, and you,” she purred at Chase, taking perverse pleasure in making Jena lose her shit, “I’ll meet wherever and whenever you want.”
The witch sputtered and Ophelia grinned. She looked him up and down one more time, then sashayed past him and his fuming wife, wondering exactly how long it would take for Jena to snap and make good on that threat to stake her.
Ophelia couldn’t wait.
Gideon stood on the rooftop of the apartment he’d leased in Klineville, unimpressed.
It was a pathetic excuse for a city; any one of the arrondissements on the continent across the ocean would easily bury its meager population.
The complacency that had once charmed him now rankled.
He’d been here for too long. No influx of new ideas, few opportunities for meaningful conversation, negligible intellectual stimulation—all of it was sadly stagnant.
His knuckles whitened at his side, reminding himself that he hadn’t come here for discourse or companionship, though there was plenty of the latter if he’d wanted it.
He didn’t, which begged the question why that needy little sidepiece, Monica, was still downstairs.
Gideon ran a hand over his face, excuses pinging through his brain.
Habit. Expectation. The high he got from ending it.
Twisted, yes, but he didn’t particularly care, and evicting her from his presence was long overdue.
Her belongings had begun to appear beside his own.
That wasn’t acceptable. She’d grown far too comfortable.
And he felt nothing, his heart long since consumed by another.
Heart. He didn’t have a heart. Not anymore. Stone. I am stone. He closed his eyes, the frigid wind teasing his tousled blond hair, grounding him in solitude.
The cell phone in his pocket chirped, and he sighed, scratching his stubbled jaw before he glanced at the screen. A bevy of emails had come in since the last time he’d looked, and he was due in chambers in another hour.
Gideon shoved the annoying device into the pocket of his sweats and lumbered across the icy rooftop to the stairway leading down. He reached his door all too soon. His apartment was on the top floor, a conglomeration of glass and steel, so different from the granite and limestone of his beginnings.
The manmade materials grated, but his options were limited.
The apartment’s one saving grace was that it looked out over the gothic church across the snow-covered green.
His jaw tightened as he let himself in. “Saving grace.” All the little carved grotesques lining its frosty roofline only served to make him even more homesick.
After this case, he was done. There was nothing here for him.
He’d tried making a life for himself on this new continent, but all that had gone up in flames.
His family had been right about him leaving, and he was only prolonging his inevitable return.
His place was beside his brethren protecting the node at the center of the City of Light, not finding legal loopholes for the Vampire Court to exploit.
And by the Gods, he was so damned sick of the gray. He longed for black and white. For a purpose.
This case would be the last in a very long line only serving to highlight that. Yes, he’d make enemies by leaving, but that wasn’t anything new, and honestly, it was quite satisfying to be hated.
He went over to his desk and flipped through the folio that had been delivered earlier that morning.
His phone chirped again, and he tossed it beside the stack of papers, sick and tired of dealing with emails.
If it was just Fayet’s mayor yapping at him it would’ve been one thing, but Gideon’s leash was held by those with considerably more clout.
And in retaining his services, Fayet’s Mayor Jeffries had climbed into bed with the wrong people, though the greedy idiot was too stupid to know it.
Gideon got that Fayet and Havers-by-the-Sea had some bizarre feud going on since time immemorable, but no matter how badly Jeffries wanted to sink the neighboring town, garnering aid from the Vampire Court was not the way to do it.
Especially when one took into account how eager they’d been to help.
That should’ve been the first of many red flags, but the bloated tick only had his eye on the prize: Havers’s node.
Gideon snorted. But then again, who didn’t want the node?
The power it represented was immense, and having been left unguarded for so long, the magical wellspring made a tempting prize.
He had zero doubt that the court had somehow manipulated events to put the two towns exactly in the situation they were in right now.
Well, not quite.
His gaze lingered on the name of the attorney representing Havers, his finger sweeping over her looping signature. Bold. Reckless. Taking up too much space.
Ophelia.
Gideon’s hand tightened to a fist, his knuckles popping.
He still didn’t believe it and had kept the opposing counsel’s name from the Vampire Court until he verified it really was her.
It had to be a fluke. How could she completely disappear off the face of the earth for twelve goddamned years only to reappear now?
The fates weren’t so cruel. She, however, was another matter entirely. If it really was her, she had to be doing this just to torment him.
Gideon would be damned before he let her. He’d moved on, and the cloud of chaos surrounding Ophelia Diamondé was not a part of that, nor was it going to be. He was going to bury her, along with Havers-by-the-Sea.
“There you are.” Hands slid around his torso, long, fuchsia nails trailing from his sternum to his abs. Monica pressed her lips to his shoulder blade, slicking herself to him. “I missed you. Come back to bed?”
“No,” he said, pushing her hands away. “I have to be in court, and it’s time you leave.”
She paused, then stepped away from him, her short, silken robe gaping. Gideon’s gaze roamed over her. She was a beautiful little viper. Spawned from old money, tall and lean with sharp cheek bones accentuated by her blunt bob, and a keen intellect.
If he’d met her first, they might’ve been happy, but as it stood, she, and all the rest of his dalliances, were poor simulacrums of the goddess he’d once worshipped. They were always beautiful, always poisonous, and always wanted more than he could give.
Ophelia hadn’t wanted any of it.
“Why should I leave?” Monica asked, coming close again to run her hands over his chest. “It’s only an initial status conference. That’ll take, what? An hour? Two? We can get a late lunch after. I wanted to try that new Japanese place on Fifth.”
“Then go by yourself. I’m not interested. Now, gather up your things, and leave,” he deadpanned. His lips twitched as understanding bloomed across her countenance. At the pain and disbelief. At her anger sparking. Gods, that never got old. Something almost stirred in his breast, then died.
“But—” She stared at him for a breath longer before her face contorted. “This is it? Jesus, Gideon, they warned me about you, but I thought after a year… You really are a cold bastard, you know that?”
He hummed, turning away to scroll through his emails. “Don’t forget your crêpe pan.”
“Go to hell,” she spat, storming away.
He glanced at her retreating from. Too late. He was already there.