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Not a mental image either of us needs. “Because I don’t want that to happen, I called my archives expert. Figured I could get info on Artemis as well as this feral pig panic thing.”
“Your expert tell you anything useful?”
I rub at the stress ache that has kept my head pounding all day. “Only that the Nymph was mostly right about what she remembered from the history holograms. Other deities used bows and arrows. Some from Greek mythology, others from different parts of the word. A few in Africa, a Norse god, one in China, another warrior goddess in India. Plus, all the Amazons.”
“Our silver arrowhead doesn’t narrow it as much as we’d like?”
“Not at all. Those are just the deities or mythological legends that practice archery. Who knows how many followers of other religions or just crazy weapons enthusiasts have carved weird shit into silver arrows and called them sacred?”
“She tell you anything else? About the chaos not being caused by Poppy the peaceful pig.”
I don’t comment on the fact that she’s defending a shifter in her own snarky way. “Maenads can start orgies and ecstasy-driven insanity, but not panic. That comes from the Greek god Pan, a satyr half-man, half-goat who screwed everything he could catch.”
“Past tense?” she asks. “Since when does someone talk about an immortal that way?”
“He’s the only god on record to have been reported as dead.”
“So we have a copycat of a dead god on top of serial killers? How could those be connected?”
“No idea,” I admit, not adding the other gods of fear and panic that all ran together in my head. “But if we figure out the link, maybe we solve the case.” Which would get my captain and the upper brass to stop threatening my badge long enough that I could try to work through things with Sadie.
“Still think this is linked to my murder and my family’s? To whoever had those weird wings made of bone?”
“Yeah, I do. I’ve hunted every witness I could find that the marshals hadn’t interviewed yet. Every crime scene has no sign of tracks, no footprints, no way in or out. Each had a dumped body that someone had to fly in—except for your family’s home which came first in time.”
“You think the killers started with us?”
I nod because I can’t stand to say another word that puts such a haunted look in her gaze.
She walks away, wiping the dirt from her hands.
As a kid, I once brought her a pair of gardening gloves. She said thank you politely in her sweetest southern lady voice, but she never wore them. Later, she told me she needed to feel the soil sink beneath her skin so the ground and the plants could speak to her. A human with such talents to connect with the earth? How’d the Fates grant someone like her to a fuckup like me?
A more heartbreaking thought hits me. What if I’m wrong? What if the connection to all these murders is me?
“I would never have willingly brought the attention of anyone violent to you and your family,” I promise her. “Or your Fury sister. Or Poppy the…” I bite off pig and go with the more formal “shifter sow.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “Or Lowell. Or anyone else. You wouldn’t hurt us. According to Stone, no alpha would harm the innocent. It’s not in your nature.”
My nature. She only knows part of my nature. The man. The wolf. Not the fox—that sneaky bastard who like my alpha father would have no problem killing just for the thrill, making chaos simply because he could, and lying to serve himself. Lies haven’t helped me any. Maybe it’s time I try the truth. “I wasn’t meant to be the next alpha of the Nashville pack. Lowell was.”
“Because your father disowned you as punishment for you choosing the wolf marshals over the pack.” She recites the excuse that Lowell and my family told everyone. Her pretty emerald gaze flashes, and I wonder if she’s mad on my behalf. It’d be nice, but I can’t read the multitude of colors coming off her well enough to know what she’s thinking—not with the mating bond incomplete.
I need her to pick me as her mate, and I can’t ask her for that until I’m willing to be completely honest with her. “Lowell and I didn’t share the same father, Sadie.”
The fierce anger drops from her. “What?”
“It’s a secret that we kept to protect our mother, but at home? It didn’t matter. I served as the whipping boy for whatever pissed the alpha off. He couldn’t risk leaving our mom and cutting off his connections to her family since they’re practically wolf royalty. But he could take his rage out on me.”
She stalks toward me, her gaze sparking. “For something that wasn’t your fault.”
“He didn’t care. He knew he couldn’t leave marks on her, and he didn’t want to start a war with my real father.”
“You were just a kid.”
“I was a bastard and a threat to his rule. If he couldn’t keep his own woman in line, how could he run a pack?”
“Why didn’t your real dad intervene to protect you?” she asks.
