Page 69 of Fallen Court

Lach

The bayou was out of the question. Though part of me wanted to test the waters with Goemon after our encounter in New York, there was no way that Roark was letting me step foot outside New Orleans. So, instead of enjoying the calm of unloading a clip in the swamp, I found myself stuck in a sterile private range that boasted about as much charm as a hospital waiting room.

By the time we left the Avalon, stopping for our guns and to alert our people to search for the missing witch, I was on edge.

“Look at the bright side. Now you have a membership.” Roark laid his steel case onto the gun rest and unfastened it.

“How is that a bright side?” I grumbled as he passed me a box of ammo.

“It’s not like you’re leaving the city limits anytime soon.” Shaw lounged against the partition, fiddling with his earmuffs.

“Thanks for the reminder.” I slid a cartridge into my 9-millimeter’s magazine. I was not going to shoot my brother today.

He had shown up after Cate arrived at the hospital, claiming Ciara told him he needed to give Channing space to speak with his sister and to go bug me. Maybe I did need to take back the signet from Ciara if she was going to use its connection to Roark to punish me with attempting bonding. Something we had never been very good at.

“Tell me who I should worry about with the covens,” I ordered Roark as I finished loading. I had an idea after the meeting, but knowing who had volunteered and who had been forced to help the family told me who to watch out for.

Roark hesitated, his eyes flicking to my brother.

“I get it,” Shaw muttered, finally tossing the earmuffs to the side. Like our guns, his had a built-in silencer—an absolute necessity, given our advanced hearing. He stalked into his own booth.

No matter how hard I tried to keep him out of this life, he wormed his way back in. I’d hoped when he left school, he’d choose a different path.

Roark waited until Shaw started his first round. “It’s pretty clear where everyone stands.”

“The witches didn’t seem happy.” I knocked off a shot, sending it through the center of the target. The gun’s vibration in my palm felt like the promise of action in the midst of all this upheaval.

“Second Parish is torn over the bona fides. Half wanted to help you.”

“And the other half want to see me rot in hell.” Nothing new there. The coven had been here when my parents arrived to set up court, offering them a way around the curse that had stifled their magic. Not everyone who followed the goddess had agreed with bowing to the fae then. Not much had changed since, but now that their magic was back, the bargains we made with the coven were fewer and further between. “You would think they’d be happy to have me in their debt.”

“Pretty sure that’s what swayed them,” he admitted.

“And First Parish?”

“The idea came from a familiar, but you know how it is in First Parish. The vampires were all in our favor.”

But while powerful, they only made up a small portion of New Orleans’s oldest coven.

First Parish had been a melting pot since the city’s earliest days, welcoming ancestral magic, voodoo, and the darker magics as well as vampires, fae, and other species into the Quartier Enchanté, the hidden, magical heart of the French Quarter. Many of the witches who lived there had aligned with vampires for protection even though they had to come to us for magic.

“Why do I feel like I’m going to pay for that support?”

Roark snorted. “Oh, you are definitely going to pay for it. Baptiste has already made it clear that if her businesses suffer, she will cut off your balls.”

That sounded like my ex.

“And don’t think she doesn’t know you went to her brother for help with the Infernal Court,” he added.

The last thing I needed was to owe her on three counts. “What does she want?”

“To be sure that her supply chain doesn’t dry up while the spell is in effect and that the tourists keep coming.”

“See to it.” That sounded too easy.

“I think the vampires consider it a business opportunity. Baptiste isn’t the only one who brought up opium to replace clover,” he warned me.

The shit was allowed in their private dens because it didn’t affect our own business. They saw this as a chance to move in on our territory. That was a slippery slope. “Over my dead body.”