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And as I glanced around, I realized my grandfather had stepped away, had his ear to his phone. Ethan, catching the direction of my gaze, looked, too. And soon enough, everyone was watching him, expressions tense.
When my grandfather put the phone away, he glanced at us. “At the risk of ruining the party—” he began, but Ethan shook his head.
“Please, go ahead. Say what needs to be said.”
“A judge offered bail to Sorcha and Adrien Reed.”
There were curses and disgusted looks throughout the group. Fistfuls of angry magic replaced the confetti that had sparkled through the air.
“You are freaking kidding me,” Mallory said.
“Unfortunately not,” my grandfather said. “Nick has pointed out the particular judge was mentioned in Reed’s papers. He was a supporter. But that lack of ethics isn’t the biggest news. The Reeds were driven home a few hours ago with monitoring devices. They were tampered with, which sent an alert to the CPD.”
We shifted nervously, waiting for the rest of it.
“Adrien Reed is dead. Killed, it appears, by his own hand. Sorcha Reed is gone. Their accounts have been cleaned out.”
Ethan closed his eyes ruefully.
“She killed him,” I said, and all eyes turned to me. “Her plan—her long-term plan to get free—to become queen, failed. Killing him, taking the money, running. She’d have considered that a consolation prize.” It didn’t fit with the Sorcha I’d seen on Reed’s arm, but it fit with the one I’d seen at Towerline.
“We’ll see what the evidence says,” my grandfather said. But there was a flatness to his voice that indicated he didn’t disagree.
“What if she comes back?” Mallory asked.
“Then we’ll deal with it,” Catcher interjected, putting an arm around her. “Just as we’ve dealt with everything else.”
“And we’ll help,” Ethan said, and looked around the crowd, got nods from his vampires, from the shifters.
“All for one and one for all?” Catcher asked.
“All for Chicago,” Ethan amended. “Because that’s what this is really about. Not vampire, not shifter, not sorcerer, not human. A man and a woman who believed they were entitled to more than they’d earned and were willing to use people to get it.” His eyes sparked like fire. “She tries something here again, and she’ll see how hard Chicagoans will fight.”
And until then, I thought, as he took my hand and squeezed, we had each other. And we’d try to make the best of it.
Read on for a look at the first book in Chloe Neill’s new Devil’s Isle series,
THE VEIL
Available now wherever books and e-books are sold
The French Quarter was thinking about war again.
Booms echoed across the neighborhood, vibrating windows and shaking the shelves at Royal Mercantile—the finest purveyor of dehydrated meals in New Orleans.
And antique walking sticks. We were flush with antique walking sticks.
I sat at the store’s front counter, working on a brass owl that topped one of them. The owl’s head was supposed to turn when you pushed a button on the handle, but the mechanism was broken. I’d taken apart the tiny brass pieces and found the problem—one of the small toothy gears had become misaligned. I just needed to slip it back into place.
I adjusted the magnifying glass over the owl, its jointed brass wings spread to reveal its inner mechanisms. I had a thin screwdriver in one hand, a pair of watchmaking tweezers in the other. To get the gear in place, I had to push one spring down and another up in that very small space.
