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Floor-length black dress with every thread of it in place. Midnight-blue hair up. Emerald eyes going over that yard like a woman checking a hotel room for dust.

Every wolf on that land turned toward her, and every single one of them stopped. There's a particular stillness predators get around something they aren't confident about.

She looked at the dead imps. The broken floodlight. The upturned slabs of gravel. The ropes of dead root lying across her granddaughter's ruined lawn.

Then she looked at me. On my knees. With an imp's insides drying on my hands.

"Well," Danika said pleasantly. "You have been busy."

Chapter Seven

"Busy," I repeated numbly.

I got up off my knees. It took longer than I'd have liked but I did it. Something in my left shoulder had come loose when I hit that first imp, and my bare feet had found every piece of broken gravel in that yard on the way to Jack, but he was alive and that's what mattered most. Not that I complained, mind you. I made it all the way upright before I realized I was still holding a fistful of something that used to be inside of a demon.

I wiped it down the front of my shirt. Slowly. While looking at her.

Danika's eyelid didn't so much as twitch at the horrid display.

"There's a nine-year-old in that house with his leg sliced open," I told her, annoyance evident in my tone. "So, if you came all this way to lecture me about my manners, Grandmother, you picked one hell of a time. Even for you."

"I've come because the Council is voting in four days." She said it the way you'd read a grocery list out loud. "And because you have caused a mess across two counties. I have you to thank that the entire supernatural population of this country now knows that the Gatekeeper's Coven cannot control its own bloodline. Also, yes. Your manners. You were raised better than this."

Behind me, a hundred and six people did not move.

That's the part that scared me. There was a pack standing on that lawn with their dead in the grass and their Alpha's son bleeding upstairs, but not one of them tried to attack her. Wolves know what they can take on. Every single one of them had done that math in the two seconds after she appeared, and every single one had come up short.

"You're on my land, Danika." Alex's voice came out of the dark behind my shoulder.

"I am, yes." The dismissal was like a slap in the face for the shifter.

"You didn't ask." Alex pretended like he didn't notice the slight.

"I did not, no." Danika tilted her head about a quarter of an inch, which is as close as that woman gets to acknowledging a person. "Your fence is in pieces, Mr. Greywood, if you have not noticed. Your wards are purely decorative. Why should I ask anything of you? I could have arrived in your kitchen if I so pleased."

"You should've tried it." He stepped up level with me. Six and a half feet of him, claw marks in his own shoulders, and a voice like a door coming off its hinges. "You want to know what's on my land, witch? My boy's blood. On the grass. Right there. Because something came through wards that had held for a hundred years. It came straight for the one window in that house where a child slept. And you think it smart to stand there and threaten me?"

"I think it was aimed." Something moved behind Danika's eyes but she blinked it away before I could decipher it. "That window. Deliberately."

"Say that again."

"I said it was aimed." She looked back at the house, at the lit windows, at the smashed floodlight over the barn. "You are going to want to hear what I have to say about that, and you are going to want to hear it standing down. Both of you."

"Not a chance," I told her. "You want to say that you had nothing to do with this? Please, do not insult my intelligence."

And then, because I have never once in my life known when to shut my mouth, I added, "And you can tell your Council that if they want something from me, they can drag themselves out here and ask me. Instead of sending an old lady to run their errands."

Sissily made a small noise beside me. It might have been a laugh. It might have been terror. With her they always sounded similar to me.

Danika on the other hand smiled.

It was terrifying to watch.

That was the first thing that should have warned me. My grandmother does a lot of things with her face, all of them calculated, but the one thing she never does is smile at me when I give her an attitude.

"You want to fight me, girl," she observed.

"Yes, I actually do." I swallowed the fear crawling up my throat and was very proud when my voice came out even. "But most of all, I want you off this property."