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CHAPTER ONE
Twenty-one hours left until Calixta expected me to deliver the director in exchange for reducing Aedan’s sentence from a lifetime spent in her court as a slave to her whims, to ten years in service as her heir. Four hours ago, I would have been ecstatic to learn Calixta hadn’t picked apart my threadbare plan to liberate my cousin. But three hours ago, my short-lived triumph came unraveled as my heart was ripped from my chest and stomped into pulp on the glittering sand before the mocking sea devoured it in lapping waves.
Clay had betrayed me.
He hadn’t meant to, hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t had a choice, but he had done it all the same.
And when he disappeared with the director, my only leverage with Calixta, he had taken Colby with him.
Hold on, my little moth girl. Be brave and strong as only you can. I’m coming for you.
The steady beat of my heart was proof she was still alive, but for how long was anyone’s guess.
The director had been in a bad way before the fight that blew the roof off his cabin in Lake Okeechobee.
If he drained aloinnir, it would restore him to perfect health.
If he drainedColby, it would kill her and me both.
The only thing keeping her alive, I knew down to my marrow, was the golem who wouldn’t recall why he had a moth in his pocket. A child he couldn’t protect if his master discovered her and ordered him to…
“The Kellies.”
The leather strap of the quartz pendant I had been dowsing with above a sun-faded paper map slid from my fingers to thump onto the card table. I had been hunched over it for a solid hour, willing the stone to show me the path to Colby through our familiar bond. I could have thrown a dart and had better luck.
Without magic, the tether between us was a dead end. I couldn’t rely on it to locate her. I had to find another way.
“Hmm?” I blinked away the state lines superimposed on the backs of my eyelids. “Oh. Isiforos. Hey.”
Saltwater dripped from his hair, and his eyes were bloodshot. Shivers wracked him, chattering his teeth.
A thread of tension had strung taut between us since the moment he let Clay walk out with the director. I couldn’t blame him for recognizing Clay’s authority, but we had yet to pinpoint who put the director on the phone with Clay. Whoever facilitated the exchange had allowed the director to seize control of Clay.
The missing guard, who never returned from his lunch break, was my guess. Just another loyalist I would be plucking out of the Bureau’s ranks like weeds for years to come. But the urge to cast blame or wallow in guilt made things awkward between Isiforos and me. I regretted it, but I didn’t know how to fix it.
“You didn’t wear a wetsuit?” I grabbed a towel and draped it across his shoulders. “Are you insane?”
As soon as he realized what he had done, what he had cost me, he drove to ground zero from where the director had been hidden. He parked his SUV, walked past my tent, unable to meetmy eyes. He rode the lift down, walked into the ocean to join the divers collecting debris, and I hadn’t seen him since.
“The Kellies.” He smacked the map with his damp palms and sent the table wobbling. “I found them.”
Most of the missing had been recovered from the sea, so it had only been a matter of time. “Good.”
“No. Not good. Fuckinggreat.” He jabbed a dripping finger in my face. “They’re alive, Rue.Alive.”
“Alive?” I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of good news. “Arthur Kelly and Kelly Angelo?”
With their help, we could get the Bureau back on its feet. We could organize the agents and assign cases instead of letting them sit on their hands until I figured out how to coordinate efforts between agencies, packs, covens, etc., and our myriad outposts. We could get back to work.
“I’ve never actually met them.” His excitement fractured in the face of my reluctant belief. “I didn’t have the clearance for it.” His gaze slid to the dirt at my feet. “Those are the names they gave.” He raked a hand through his hair, scooping it away from his face. “A vampire and a gargoyle.”
As much as I wanted to believe the tides were shifting in our favor, I wasn’t ready to trust our luck yet.
“Start at the beginning.” I needed a second to process what this could mean for us. “Tell me everything.”
“I doubled the size of the team when we switched our focus from rescue to salvage. The extra hands let us work faster to clear the rubble, so our newest team was dispatched to a new quadrant a few hours ago.” They must have hit the water on Isiforos’s orders the second Calixta and her retinue exited the area. “Their team leader informed me they heard rhythmic tapping from within the rock. The team listened until one of his guys determined it was Morse code. Once he heard the patterna few times, he was able to decipher it. The same message was repeated after a ten-minute interval.”
As I grasped for something real, I found the leather cord in my hand. “What was the message?”
