Page 34 of Wretched Thorns

Jasper stopped. Barely.

“We finally know where she is,” he said.

“Roughly.”

“That’s enough.”

“Not if he’s warded the place.”

Silence hit the room.

Jasper looked like he wanted to tear the walls apart with his bare hands.

“If you go in blind,” Rowena said more quietly, “you could get her killed.”

That landed.

Nobody moved for a second after that.

Then Jasper turned and drove his fist through the drywall beside the pantry hard enough to rattle the cabinets.

Chapter eight

Big, Bad Wolf

Dex pulled out of Grandmère’s drive at first light. No music. No conversation. The truck rolled over gravel disrupting the quiet.

Tara sat shotgun with her go-bag between her boots. Behind the seat, Grandmère’s working tools rode in a wooden box she’d packed herself before either of them had finished their first coffee. Spanish moss hung slack in the cypress. Bayou air came in warm and wet, the way Louisiana liked it before the sun finished climbing.

Grandmère rode in the back. Eyes closed. Tuned to whatever she tuned to.

Tara had slept maybe two hours.

Two of them, because something about this wolf put her on edge and she’d refused to leave a wolf she didn’t trust alone with her grandmother while he worked a finding spell. Refused was the polite version. Planted her ass at that kitchen table with her arms crossed and her mouth shut was more like it. Grandmère had let her stay without a word about it. The wards had given them evidence of Marcus’s location and not the location itself, which Grandmère said meant they needed somebody with broader reach to break through.

So Dex called Bodie. Bodie asked if they were coming up to Magnolia Creek in a tone that closed the conversation. Dex said yeah once, and that was the end of that.

Now they were driving north. Grandmère had said Beaumont like it tasted bad. Like she'd been carrying the name around for years and was tired of its weight. Now Tara was riding toward a pack of werewolves with one of their own at the wheel. The massive male currently had one elbow out the window and that unnerving stillness in his shoulders that she was beginning to recognize as wolf-near-the-surface.

She made herself look out the window.

Lasted four miles.

When she looked back, his eyes were on the rearview mirror. The scar along the line of his jaw caught the early light. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking past her.

“What.”

“Nothing yet.”

“That is not a no, Fontaine.”

He made a sound that almost qualified as a laugh. “No, chère. That’s a ‘I’m paying attention.’”

“What did I tell you about that word?”

“Don’t remember.”

“Bullshit, you don’t.”