Page 51 of Flock This

The situation trapped me. The person who had killed William trapped me. My extremely shitty luck had trapped me, but not Kelvin.

Despite the electric fence and the wolves.

“No,” I answered as truthfully as I could. “I’m not being kept here against my will by Kelvin. He’s trying to protect me…at least, I think he is.”

Porter made a soft, disapproving sound as he came closer until he stood just across the fence from me. “Kelvin cares about nothing but creating a place in the world for himself. He’ll crush anything to get that—and that includes you.”

I wanted to tell him he was wrong—and why I wanted to defend Kelvin I didn’t have a clue—but I couldn’t do it. Even I knew better than to trust Kelvin.

He helped me, but I knew that if it benefited Kelvin, he’d throw me to the very wolves Porter had freed.

I’d say he’d throw me to the wolves, but since Porter had freed them, that wasn’t an option anymore.

“Have you found anything new?” Porter asked.

“Nothing useful. It’s like… I want to build a house and I’ve found a bunch of screws. Sure, I need those, but I’m not much closer to having a roof over my head.” My shoulders slumped as I admitted my own failure.

“Talk it through,” Porter said. “Sometimes, if you say it aloud, you can work through and see things you otherwise hadn’t. Start from the beginning.”

“I went to the Castle for a delivery. When I got to William’s apartment, no one answered, so I went farther into his place. The delivery was a VIP, which meant it needed to be delivered that day. I found him on the bed, a hole in his chest, already dead.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then I figured my best chance was to leave the delivery and pretend like he’d still been alive when I’d gotten there. When I took the item from the delivery bay, I found the bloody stake.”

“Was the blood still wet?”

I nodded.

“Vampire blood coagulates and dries faster than humans, so if it was still wet, it couldn’t have happened more than five minutes before you arrived.”

I didn’t bother to ask how he knew that. The study of vampire blood was the sort of knowledge I just didn’t need to have. “That means he was still alive when I arrived at the apartment? That’s why the address was there. If he were dead, the address wouldn’t have shown. How could the stake have gotten into the delivery bay?”

“Who has access to the bays?”

“It should only be the Justice Department.”

“By should, you mean…?”

I shuffled my foot against the dirt. “There are ways to bypass it. It isn’t easy, but it’s possible. Taking things out of them is almost impossible, but putting things in is much easier. Each box has a record of who accessed it and when.”

“So it seems the answer might lie at the Justice Department,” Porter said. “If you’ve hit a roadblock with the vampires, you must take another path.”

I snorted. “Yeah, well, I’m on forced vacation right now, so I don’t think they’re going to let me in. You expect me to break in?”

Porter stared at me, and his expression screamed loud and clear—you have no other option.

“Fine,” I muttered. “You’re right. I have to see what I can find there. If I know who messed with the box, it should lead me to the killer.”

Porter nodded, the action causing his long hair to move in the breeze, bringing my attention to his antlers. They were somehow still as ethereal as before, as otherworldly lovely.

Which seemed rather unfair, as ever.

Weres had this animalistic aggression, Graves a dark beauty, and Natures a fae-like ethereal quality.

Me?

I got to turn into a crow—one too afraid to even fly.

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