CHAPTER FIVE
1047 Words
Kent
I was at the tree line in four minutes.
Rook was already there when I arrived, standing at the eastern boundary with two of the riders flanking him, all three of them looking at the same point in the tree cover where the ward had registered the breach. It was different from the night before. Last night the ward had parted willingly, the way it does for Marked blood that belongs. This was a tear, a forced entry.
"Scout class," Rook said, without looking at me.
"How long ago?"
"Twenty minutes. Maybe less."
I looked at the tree line. The shadows were ordinary now, still and quiet in the morning light, but the ward hummed against my awareness like a bruise being pressed. Something had come through it that had no business being here, and whatever it was, it hadn't come alone. Scouts were never alone, they were sent and they reported back. The question was whether this one had managed to do that before we found it.
"Find it," I said. "Bring it in if you can."
Rook looked at me then. "And if we can't?"
"Then finish it and bring me what's left."
I went back to the bar.
Grace was in the main room when I walked in, standing by the window with her arms crossed and her coffee going cold on the table beside her. She'd seen something at the tree line with Jinx, which meant she already knew something was wrong, and the look on her face when I came through the door was the look of someone who had decided to be angry because anger was easier than fear.
"What was that," she said. "What was standing there looking at me."
"A wraith. Scout class." I went behind the bar and poured a glass of water and set it in front of her. "It breached my ward sometime this morning."
"What does that mean, scout." She really didn't seem to know anything about the supernatural although she was one. There was nothing human about her, not with blood that glowed.
"It means someone sent it to confirm your location." I looked at her. "Someone already knew the rough area. Now they know the exact address."
She stared at me. "You're telling me it followed me here."
"I'm telling you it was sent. There's a difference." I paused. "Scouts don't follow. They're deployed after the initial track is done by something else. Something else followed you through the night." She shivered.
"I don't," she started, then stopped. She picked up the water and put it down again without drinking it. "I don't know what any of that means. Scout. Ward. What you're describing isn't something that exists."
"Go to the window," I said.
She looked at me.
"Go to the east window and watch the tree line. I want you to see something."
She went, because whatever else Grace Wilder was, I have learned she was not someone who could resist being shown she was wrong about something. I signalled two of my riders and watched from across the room as she stood at the glass and they moved out through the side door toward the eastern border.
I knew the exact moment she saw them transform. Her hand came up and pressed flat against the window glass and she went completely rigid. I watched her watching them run the tree line in a form that was nothing close to human, and I waited.
She turned around slowly.
"Okay," she said. Her voice was shaky. "Okay."
"Okay you believe me, or okay you need a minute."
"Both." She came back to the bar and sat down heavily on a stool. "Both of those things."
“You're not human, all of you,” she said to herself quietly, like she was trying and failing to believe it.
“Human eyes don't glow, Grace,”
She said nothing to that.
We sat in silence for a while after that. I gave her the time because she'd earned it and because what she'd just seen required a few minutes of quiet reconstruction before it was useful to push further. Seeing a hellbound transform was something many Marked didn't see in their lifetime because hellbound preferred to stay in their human form. Our real form was not something that could be described, it belonged with the night and the shadows and Grace had just seen two, so it was understandable she needed a minute.
Rook came through the side door forty minutes later. He looked at Grace first, then at me, and the look said several things at once, none of them good.
"Found it," he said. "East border, half a mile in. Already dead. Something burned it out from the inside before we got there." He paused. "It left something on the way out."
He tilted his head and one of the younger riders came forward, and I read what had been carved into the skin of his forearm in letters that were already healing over but still perfectly legible.
RETURN THE GIRL OR WE TAKE THE TOWN.
The room went quiet. I read it twice, not because I needed to, but because I wanted my expression settled before I looked up. When I did, Grace was reading it too, and the colour had left her face entirely.
I looked at her. "Tell me who you are."
She met my eyes. "You already know. Grace Wilder. I was a biochemist at—"
"Don't," I said quietly.
She stopped.
"Someone carved a message into one of my riders, for you." I said. "So I'm going to ask you one more time, and I need you to understand that the wrong answer is the last lie you tell in my town." I held her gaze. "Who are you."
The silence stretched out long enough that I could hear the riders breathing behind me.
"Wrong answer," I said.
I let that sit for a moment. Then I looked at her, really looked, at the vial shaped outline in her jacket pocket and the way her veins had caught the light last night in a way that had nothing to do with the bar's lighting.
"You're not leaving," I said. "Not until you tell me the truth."
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