Steal the Sun (Thieves #4)(59)

“I doubt that he’s going to come around if he hasn’t already. You just have to face facts. Daniel is done with me and we just have to be civil for your sake.” He was quiet for a moment before relaxing slightly. “So, let’s have the story. How exactly did you end up playing a bondage girl? Have you found a fourth to tie you up and play dirty games with?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Would he be a fourth or a fifth?”

Neil smiled. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about Bris. I don’t think he should count since he looks just like Dev.”

“If you think about it that way, then Declan would be a freebie.”

A look of complete horror passed over Neil’s face and he shuddered at the thought. “Oh, there’s nothing free about that hot mess. He looks exactly like Dev so he’s hot as hell but god…not even I would go there. Now stop trying to derail my important venting session with sex talk,” Neil commanded as both the black dogs were now on their feet, growling low in their throats at something in the distance.

“Neil, it’s time to head out.” I pulled and tugged at the ropes in absolute earnest. I trusted the black dogs’ instincts.

“Furthermore, what made you think you had to lie to me? I can see lying to Daniel and Dev. They’re just husbands. They cause all sorts of trouble. But me? I’m your best friend.”

“Neil,” I growled as I saw the trees start to move across the pond.

“I’m the guy who helped hide the whole ‘I’m probably pregnant’ thing until you had to ruin it by actually being pregnant. I’m the guy who didn’t tell Danny it was you who ‘accidentally’ left a Justin Bieber CD playing full blast on his stereo while he was in a dead stupor and couldn’t get up to turn it off. And you hit repeat. I’m the guy who didn’t tell Dev that the boo hag who took up residence in Ether last year was your client.”

“You’re also the guy who’s about to be eaten by an ogre if you don’t stop bitching at me and get me the hell out of here,” I explained to him in a bitter groan as I saw the shadow of the ogre moving toward us.

“What?” Neil practically screamed the question and then did what he should have done in the first place. He breathed in the night air. He let it saturate his senses, and it was obvious he didn’t like what he smelled. He shuddered. “You followed the Hunter out here and he tied you up to feed you to an ogre and there’s something else, something rotty and gross.”

Now he was trying to get me untied. He tugged as hard as he could. “The Hunter didn’t mean to feed me to the ogre. He meant to use me as bait. The rotty gross thing is Lee’s new girlfriend, who also happens to be a baobhan sith.”

“Honey, I don’t know what that is.” He pulled one of the knives out of my thigh sheath. He brought it around to my back, slicing through the rope. “Use your English words.”

I sighed as the rope went slack and my hands were finally, blissfully free. “It’s a faery vampire. She lures hunters away in the night and has her way with them. She has both Lee and the Hunter.”

Neil looked over my shoulder as I massaged my wrists, trying to get them to come back to life. I took the cold iron knife back because Neil wasn’t big on weapons. He preferred to use his claws and teeth. “Holy shit, that’s big. We should run, Z.”

I pulled the gun out from the back of my denim shorts and clicked the safety off. “Running won’t help. He knows we’re here. He’ll follow us. You should change now, Neil.”

The dogs were seriously agitated. The hair on the back of their necks was standing straight up and they were in a crouching position, getting ready to pounce. The ogre moved toward us, though he was moving slowly. He would adjust his speed to match ours. As long as we didn’t run, he wouldn’t overexert himself. Even moving carefully, I could hear him. He sounded like a herd of buffalo, and he was definitely a mouth breather.

Neil started taking off his clothes. He stepped out of his slippers and shrugged out of the vintage jacket. He then took the time to neatly fold it.

“Hey, Monk, no time for neat,” I taunted as I got behind the tree I was previously tied to. “Just do that thing where you change and your clothes kind of explode around you. Let’s go.”

Neil huffed as he continued his OCD ritual. As he spoke, he painstakingly unbuttoned each pearl fastener on his pajama top. “If you had been where you were supposed to be, you would know that my boyfriend gave this to me and I don’t want it to be in a million pieces on the forest floor. He said the red made a lovely contrast with my eyes. That was part of our one-sided conversation. Do you know how much of my wardrobe I have to toss out because you need me to do a quick change? Of course, if you’d been where you were supposed to be, we wouldn’t be dealing with that. OMG, that is nasty.”

The ogre was standing not twenty feet away from us, and even I could smell the nasty thing. It smelled like rotting meat and atrocious BO. It stood at least nine feet tall and had to weigh close to five hundred pounds. Someone had made a type of tunic for it to wear, but it had seen better days. It mostly hung in tatters around the ogre’s strong frame. The pieces that were together were stained and unsightly. He hunched over and from my vantage point, I could see his back was humped. His hair was scraggly and he was missing a couple of teeth. It wouldn’t matter, though. He still had plenty left to do a fine job of chewing me up.