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She was wrong.
“I thought I’d let you know that, after some consideration, I think we’re going to have to pull the plug on the Grayson job. I’m just not seeing the results I was hoping for.”
Tabby couldn’t believe what he had just said. “What— why?”
“I’ve been thinking about it since your last report. Don’t you think Woodbridge needs you more?”
“Because of what went down with the shifter?” She sank down on the couch. “I got lucky that I managed to survive that one. You know I deal with Nightwalkers.”
“And there was a Nightwalker threat roaming those woods where you were, too,” Boone reminded her. “Whether that was a coincidence or not, you successfully eliminate two dangerous Para targets in one night.
“It’s been almost two weeks in Grayson and you’ve only found three targets to eliminate in that time. The numbers are not on our side, Tabitha. Woodbridge might be a more pressing concern, all things considered.”
Tabby kept her mouth shut; for one of the first times ever, she wasn’t quite sure what she should say. On the one hand, she still wasn’t convinced that Bowers was all that much of a threat on his own. Magic was definitely involved when it came to the poor shifter—and that caught her attention. Boone’s, too. Three of the most powerful paranormal races—witches, shifters, and vamps—were all out in full force last night in Woodbridge.
But, on the other hand, Tabby felt like she needed to stick it out in Grayson. It had its own secrets, its own Para threats.
She also knew that, if she admitted that she wasn’t hunting the wannabe slayer in Grayson any longer, her uncle would definitely pull the plug on this job.
And what would happen with her promise to help Adam?
Because, yeah… her promise to help her sexy Nightwalker get the elixir was her only reason why she wanted to stick around him.
Uh-huh.
Sure, Tab.
In the silence that followed her uncle’s pronouncement, Tabby heard a muffled voice—a male voice—sound in the background, coming through her phone. That was… different. Her uncle guarded his office and his home like it was his sanctuary. As his beloved sister’s daughter… as his ward… Tabby was always an exception.
“What was that, Daniels?” Boone murmured.
As the muffled voice started up again, Tabby rolled her eyes.
Eddie.
She should’ve known.
Regardless of what happened between her and Adam, as soon as she finished up in Grayson, she was going to have to put her foot down about that. She’d been too coy. Too non-confrontational when it counted. That wasn’t quite like her, either, but Boone wasn’t the only one who had a soft spot for their relationship. She didn’t want to disappoint her uncle—well, any more than she already did—but she also wasn’t going to be pushed into some kind of partnership with Eddie Daniels because it was “for the greater good” or some other bullshit.
“What’s he doing there?” she asked.
“Since you made it perfectly clear that you’d scout the mixed city on your own,” Boone began, barely censuring his obvious disapproval, “Eddie is doing some legwork from our HQ between hunts. It never made sense to me that a
city firmly in the middle of pack territory wouldn’t have at least some interference. It did last year. We wondered what changed.”
That made sense. Tabby agreed with her uncle so far. Even she thought it was weird.
Back in late November, when Grayson was suddenly a hotspot for a rash of Nightwalker murders, Boone sent out another slayer when the cops seemed to falter. Then Melinda caught wind that the Grayson PD had partnered up with a member of the Eastern Pack to eliminate the Nightwalker threat. Since one of the most followed tenets of the Slayer’s Code was secrecy, Melinda backed off the hunt while the humans and the shifters went after Julian Koenig and his crew.
But that’s what was different about this time. From the whispers and the rumors and the intel that Boone gathered before he assigned Tabby to come back to Grayson, it wasn’t a vamp vs. everyone else sitch going down. Nope. It was fang on fang violence that really caught her uncle’s attention.
There was a Nightwalker out there hunting other Nightwalkers. That’s why Boone sent her on this particular job. Because, he said when he first gave her the case file, a murderous Nightwalker was a murderous Nightwalker. One kill would lead to another, the bloodlust building. It was only a matter of time before he drained a human or killed a shifter.
Now that she’d actually gotten to know the Nightwalker she suspected to be behind the slayings, she was suddenly reminded of something she used to argue with her uncle about back when she was an unruly teen.
Just because slayers kill, that didn’t make them killers. And while she was willing to accept that she got too close to the target already, she was convinced the same thing held true when it came to Adam.
When she accepted this hunt—jeez, was it only a couple of weeks ago?—she’d wondered what the Nightwalker’s motives were. Why was he only going after his own kind? Was it a territory issue? A need to subdue others of his race? Was it the challenge?
