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I spent the rest of the day digging into the council members who came to the fights and we dropped worms on. Not just personally, but there were still some shifter species that we didn’t have all of the locations of their pack houses or whatever they called them. Not every group lived like that, but the councils still had all of their registered addresses.
Not that I thought every shifter was registered with their council. No, it would be stupid to think that, and I wasn’t stupid.
But they needed the strength of a group if they were going to hold and control a demon, so I wasn’t worried about a random deer shifter living in a city. The chances of them holding a demon there were probably less than one in a billion.
Maybe not even that.
The angels had been ahugehelp since we’d started getting locations. They didn’t need cloaking magic, and while they couldn’t use portals without us, they could move across distance fast. David had tried to explain it to me, but it wasn’t an easy concept to wrap my mind around since I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t like they ran super fast or something, it was more… Like warping?
They sort of zipped to a spot they could see. Not teleport but… I honestly didn’t know. The way he described it was he could basically jump to anywhere he could visually see and repeatedly. So if we dropped him off a few miles from a location with a portal, he could zip there and back and let us know if any demons were there in no time.
And they had been. All of them had been doing it for days. We knew more and more places that had demons, and honestly it was terrifying but also exciting that we could get them all out.
As long as we were careful. If we went in on some, others would kill their demons not to get caught with them once they saw us making a move. No matter what we did, we were going to lose some demons, and that made figuring it out even more difficult.
Granted, now we knew who to punish when we did, but we had to be very,verycareful.
Or I could be a complete asshole and try something over the top.
Yeah, I went with the second option.
The first Wednesday of the month, the panther council met at night to go over certain agenda items more than holding court and stuff. So I crashed the meeting.
At least I let the other VPs know first, and most of them went in with me.
“We’re tired of your games,” the head of the council told me when I walked in. “You aren’t invited and—”
“Eighty-seven of your packs are holding over three hundred of our people,” I cut in. “Do you want to discuss this like adults and figure out a way that doesn’t have this ending with a lot of dead panthers, or do you want us to go in and get them?”
“And don’t bother trying to warn anyone,” Elijah added. “We’re jamming your communications, and we will be until this is resolved. We’re not risking your order is to kill the demons they’re holding.”
“If they do, our response will be to kill all of you,” Natalia purred before clucking her tongue. “Oh, don’t be so affronted. You’re idiots for not having seen this coming. We’ve warned you. We’ve asked for you to do what the vampires did. You didn’t and turned up your noses at us.”
“And how would you react if we’d done that?” Ally asked, her tone making it clear that we knew. “You were raging against us because we firedoneof your employees for not signing a fucking addendum. If we were holding over three hundred of your people, you’d start a war. You couldn’t win it, but you’d start it.”
“Don’t even bother lying,” I drawled when some seemed to scoff. “So this is how it’s going to go. You’re—”
“Wait, I thought we were talking like adults?” Ally hedged.
“Yes, we are,” I chuckled darkly, gesturing between the demons. “If they don’t agree, they’re dead.” I smirked at the panthers. “And we’ll know if you’re lying. You can’t be stupid enough to think you can pull one over on us, or do I need to kill one of you as an example?”
No, I didn’t. That actually surprised me. They fully believed me. Maybe their panthers sensed all of the rage and violence pouring off of us.
After a bit of back and forth, they all agreed to personally get on the phone with every group leader that was holding demons and order the panthers to hand over the demons unharmed or the punishment would be much,muchworse. They had argued against their being any sort of punishment and having to pay for their sins, and I lost my temper.
“Fine, then you as their leaders will pay it,” I had snapped. “You will be held in the same way as those demons had. For as many years as they were. How long do you think that will be for over three hundred demons? How many do you think were raped and beaten? You can take as much as us lowly demons, right?”
I had moved when they hesitated, picking up the head of the council and slamming him into the wall.
“I would enjoy breaking you, cat. Give me reason, and I will make it my mission to do it before doing the same to your fucking family.”
That was when they broke. They weren’t willing to protect their people from the “threat” we were. It was disgusting for two very big reasons.
One, we weren’t a threat, but trying for justice.
Two, if we were, they should have been willing to do whatever it took to protect their people or they shouldn’t be the people in charge.
Either way, we’d won. We loomed over them as they made the calls and promised them we already knew the situation and they would die if they hurt our people anymore. Apparently, the leaders believed them because we didn’t lose one demon when we’d gone to get them. Some of them had been in bad shape, but it wasn’t something new, and all the panthers had stood down to do what we wanted.
