Jonah hesitated for a second on the curb, then sighed and headed over the concrete.
“Shiloh,” he said.
“Babylon boy,” Shiloh said lazily. The bruises had gone, but there was a faint stain ofsomethingin his faded eyes. Not something he was going to talk to Jonah about, though. “Not going to ask how I found you?”
Jonah snorted. He could still feel Shiloh’s hex if he thought about it, hooked to his few freckles like pins in a board.
“I’m not senile,” he said. “I remember. What do you want?”
“Maybe I need to call in my first favor.”
Good or bad, Jonah wasn’t sure. It would get his debt whittled down, but he’d hoped to ignore it a while longer.
“Do you?”
Shiloh laughed and pushed himself off the truck. He grabbed Jonah by the back of the neck and pulled him into an unexpected, exuberant kiss. Despite a recently-made date, Jonah didn’t try very hard—or at all—to get out of it. He leaned into Shiloh’s body and curled his arm around lean hips.
Heat spilled through him like sun-warmed honey, sticky and almost too sweet. His balls tightened in reaction as Shiloh scruffed him.
“You’ve kicked off a war, pissed off the farm, and now you owe my family. You’re knee-deep in Jerusalem’s underbelly,” Shiloh said when he came up for air. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Jonah Carrow?”
“Now, that never crossed my mind,” Jonah said.
“Could have fooled me,” Shiloh said. “Try and remember you aren’t in future.”
He kissed Jonah again, quick and hard enough to bruise, before he pushed him away and left. Jonah licked the taste of curses and meat off his lips and wished he could do what Shiloh suggested.
Unfortunately—Jonah climbed into the truck and glanced at the hex-box he’d stolen from the farm—Jonah Carrow was a hard man to leave behind.
There was a single name etched into the name tag on the box.
Carrow.
Like his gran had always said, she knew plenty of things she’d never tell her boys.
Jonah started the car and headed home. For the second time that week, he blew past the Babylon sign and ignored the twitch in his wrists that wanted to head that way. There might be answers there, but everything else was too.
It was twelve miles to Babylon, but if Jonah went back, he didn’t think he’d get away again. Not even by candlelight.
