Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(64)

I blinked at him. “I fail to see your point.”

“You were distracted, and amazingly you didn’t demand that I leave, and you didn’t try to run away from me. Clearly, you can control yourself in my presence.”

“Trust me, I’m doing a superb job controlling myself right now. When I lose control, you’ll know about it.”

“Let’s join forces. The faster we find Pastor Haywood’s killer, the sooner I will leave this city, and your life again will be blissfully free of me, just as you like it.”

He planned to leave again. “Where will you go?” Why did I ask that?

The werewolf shrugged. “Home.”

“Where is home?”

“Not here.”

It was like a stab to the heart. Atlanta used to be his home. Kate, Curran, and Conlan were still here. I was… Right. I wasn’t.

I recognized the look in his eyes. Derek had locked onto a target. It would be impossible to avoid him. I had exhausted all of my emotional reserves trying to shove him out of my orbit. He was powerful. He was an asset. We would help each other, and then he would leave.

“Jasper was the self-proclaimed king of the Honeycomb,” I told him. “A little girl, a street kid, witnessed Pastor Haywood getting into a car with a fatso who took him to identify the artifact. Someone hired Jasper to find her, so he got two of his flunkies and crawled out into the city. I got to the girl first. When Jasper couldn’t find her, he caught one of the other street kids instead. The child wouldn’t tell him anything about the girl or me, so Jasper and his two assholes beat him to within an inch of his life.”

Derek’s hackles rose.

“Jasper had an iron hound and tracked me to St. Luke’s Cathedral. When I came across the three of them, they were dragging the boy on a chain with him. He was black and blue. He couldn’t stand. They broke his leg. They snapped his arm. They shattered his ribs…”

My voice was about to quiver. No. Not happening. I scrambled to maintain some semblance of control. Derek took a step forward.

A bullet dug into the concrete inches from my foot. I threw myself left and ducked behind a wall.

Derek swore and jumped over the edge.





*



I studied the two people Derek dropped on the concrete. He’d come up the stairs, carrying them by the back of their pants and dumped them in front of me. They seemed slightly rumpled, but their guts were still inside their bodies, which was a huge plus.

The younger one had short chestnut hair and bronze skin and was probably a young girl in her mid-teens dressed in oversized men’s clothes. The older one, about my age, had lighter skin, dark hair, a dark beard, and the kind of look in his eyes that told me he expected to be beaten and had come to terms with it.

“You sent a hodag after us.”

The man spread his arms. “You cut the cable three times. Honestly lady, what do you have against us? Do you cut other people’s phone lines or is it just ours?”

“Just yours.”

He leaned back. “What did we ever do to you? I don’t know you.” He turned to the girl. “Do you know her?”

The girl shook her head.

He turned back to me. “See? We don’t know you. We need that line to survive. We need food, we need clothes, we need ammo, and backyard gardening only gets you so far.”

“Gardening, huh?”

“Yes. We grow things, tomatoes, cucumbers. We’re peaceful folks. We mind our own business.”

I pointed at the hodag’s head. “To grow a hodag to that size, you have to feed it human meat.”

The girl looked freaked out.

Surprise flashed in the man’s eyes, but he recovered quickly. “So, he ate a few corpses. They would have rotted anyway. It’s a circle-of-life thing, lady.”

Uh huh. Circle of life. “What’s your name?”

“Don’t tell her, Cephus,” the girl whispered and clamped her hand over her mouth.

Cephus just looked at her for a second.

“I want to know about Jasper,” I said.

“We don’t know Jasper,” Cephus said.

Derek loomed above him. “Answer her or I’ll put your head in my mouth.”

Cephus swallowed. “Oh Jasper? That Jasper. Yeah, okay. We do know Jasper. What about him?”

“Yesterday he took two of you and left to do a job. I need to know who hired him.”

Cephus spread his arms to the sky. “Who knows? Jasper isn’t the sharing type. He isn’t exactly beloved. He had a hard childhood. The man has trouble processing his feelings, so when he has them, they make him angry. And when he gets angry, he lashes out.”

“The last time I lashed out, Jasper lost his head. It’s sitting on a metal tray in the Order’s morgue.”

The girl clutched onto Cephus. He put his arm around her and rearranged his expression, looking hurt. “No need for threats. We’re all friends here. The phone line is for everyone’s use. You pay into the jar per phone call. Sometimes money goes to buy medicine. Sometimes Jasper takes it. He has poor leadership skills. I don’t know who hired Jasper. I do know some people he worked with.”

“Give me some names.”

He looked at the sky. “Christi Constanza, Dallas Karen, Bambi Nolastname, Mark Rudolph, Felix Goswin…”