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“We both know we probably won’t even see any action. You just sent me on this mission because you knew how bored I was, and you didn’t want me to do anything stupid while I wait to hear back from Lynn.”
“That’s only part of it. Now tell me you’ll be careful. I need to hear it.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Has it… been terribly unpleasant, dealing with Helen?” he asked tentatively.
“Are you worried we’ll compare notes about you? Are your ears ringing?”
He paused, and I thought I could feel the pulse in his temple pounding in irritation as though it were my own.
I misread it though.
“I apologize that you’re in that position, that I ever—” he began in an agonized voice.
“Don’t,” I said quietly. “I was just giving you shit. It’s in the past. We both have regrets, but none of it matters now, right?”
“Yes,” he said succinctly and then something impassioned in Druidic that made my toes start to curl.
“Ditto,” I told him.
A few hours later found us at the address we’d been given with no one answering the door.
“Do we have a phone number for them?” I asked, pulling out my cell.
She checked her paperwork, rattled it off and I called.
No answer and still no response at the door.
Well, that was annoying.
Time to break in. It was a quiet neighborhood, and there weren’t a lot of people hanging around outside and we walked casually to the back gate, tried it, found it unlocked, and kept going.
The back door was locked, so I went to try the windows.
As I did so Helen kicked the door in and looked at me pointedly.
“Unnecessary,” I told her right before she pulled a gun out and charged in.
Okaay. We were going to have a talk, and if she got trigger happy with some humans, it was going to get ugly fast.
Turned out it didn’t matter right then, though. No one in that house was alive anymore. The half-angel’s adopted parents and their daughter were all facedown, dead in their beds. They’d been killed execution style, bullet to the head.
It distracted me from giving Helen the lecture she deserved.
We searched the small house, but found nothing but the bodies.
I had a gun drawn by then too, in case whoever had assassinated this poor family was still around.
I let Helen drive to the next lead so I could call Dom. I updated him.
“I don’t like this. I’m sending you backup.”
“Some local druids? That’s fine. Tell them we’re checking out the sites of the fires. It’s pretty much the only lead we have left over here. I really don’t think this is my father, but I’d like to stay and find the girl that was taken, especially since the poor thing is an orphan now.”
“You’re letting him saddle us with backup?” Helen asked after I hung up. She looked angry and disgusted about it. Way too bent out of shape in general.
“They’ll be fine. They won’t get in the way. Druids are unfailingly competent.”
