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“No, he kills them if they’re not lust demons as he thinks they’re the only ones he could control. They’re not easy to find before they turn,” he said, shaking with fear at all of the rage pouring off of us.
Good. He should be scared.
We opened a temp portal and brought them to corporate. I headed up to deal with the adults while the others brought the coven leader and Synda to the basement where we had cells for… When we needed cells.
“What did you get off of her?” Rita asked, worry in her eyes, but then darted a glance to the vampires.
Right, they needed this explained to them. I let out a slow breath and decided to focus on Gavin since Aidan trusted him. “Think of it as being drunk or high when you were human. You say the first thing that pops into your mind and then immediately think ‘I shouldn’t have said that’ or something. It’s your self-control—impulse control even that understands societal rules.”
“He brainwashed her, and you can sense the opposite is what you’re saying?” he surmised.
“He is as smart and the best person to lead the council as O’Malley said,” Elijah muttered.
I nodded in agreement. “Yes, it’s like that. Her desires were immediately repressed and she spoke the answer.”
“It’s a bit like dealing with those dolls who had the string in them decades ago,” Rita added. “You could get maybe a dozen responses and they don’t fit the moment. We feel that.”
I nodded again. “Yes, that’s actually a much better analogy. Her brain didn’t fire to think through what was being said. It was knee-jerk to answer, and her desires were not to disappoint him. She barely registered what I was trying to do…” I let out a shaky breath and focused on Rita. “We need to have Ally sit with her. I don’t know we can save her.”
Rita blinked back tears. “That bad?”
“She’s completely devoid of—it was like talking to an abused child but yeah, like a doll. That’s dangerous in the body of a demon over a hundred. And he never let her explore her powers. She has no idea what to do besides Hulk smash shit to protect him.”
“Fucking monster,” she seethed.
“Yes, and two of the underage girls he had are US citizens,” Elijah muttered, focused on his phone. “And still technically human. We’ll have to loop in ISLE.” He waved off the protests of the vampires. “They need to know this is something that people are doing. This guy had aprocess. Is an angel doing it and selling his kids?”
“It could get a lot of us busted on a lot more than one coven leader,” Joshua agreed. “We don’t need to tell all the agents.”
I sighed, knowing that meant me. “I’ll talk to Director Stevens personally. He still wants to talk to me about Sloan and more.”
“How is she doing?” a different vampire asked. “We are happy with the progress being made, but she hasn’t been in touch or answered our requests for—”
“Leave her alone,” I snapped, more venom in my voice than I meant to show. I let out a slow breath. “She’syoungand never wanted to be in the spotlight. O’Malley’s attention has made her—she’s not in a good place, and she’s been through too much already. None of you should be contacting her directly. I don’t call your fucking aides.”
“We structured it originally so Gavin could call Sloan and they would coordinate,” Elijah added. “Not anyone on the council just contact her. Aides have been trying to get in touch with her. What the hell is wrong with you all that you can’t even keep a phone number quiet and she’ll have to change it? That was anemergencyline that our people needed. It was given to you because this was an emergency.”
They did not give a single shit about any of that and were simply annoyed their chance at the one they wanted as theirs was gone.
Fuckers. Seriously, what a bunch of fuckers.
Andthey wanted us to handle the cleanup of the coven. I wasn’t the only one who looked at them like they were fucking nuts.
“Fine,” I agreed before the others could argue. I shrugged. If we got to do the cleanup then we got the information and leads on other bad things.
Plus, I was going to take as much down from that coven as I could. I knew the vampire council wanted us to do it so they could leave it all on our laps, but… Fine. Seriously, let them be another example if the guy was connected.
But what did the vampire council really do besides fuck up then?
“We are suspending the councilman who did such unsavory things to Sloan,” Gavin informed me as Elijah pulled up the maps of covens.
We knew that was as much as we were going to get plus the “compensation” already given, but honestly it was shit. He used power on Sloan and our other demons for hours to fuck with us.
“I took them back to their estate to grab the information we wanted,” Rita told me as we all got settled in.
“Who ordered food?” I asked.
“I did,” Joshua answered.
