Page 64 of Ascension of the Pack

‘I killed V – Geneve,’ I offered.

His jaw dropped. ‘V is dead?’ He scrubbed a hand over his eyes. ‘Shit, we’re going to have a power vacuum.’

‘And C,’ I admitted. ‘Isaacs is dead as well.’

Voltaire looked at me with genuine admiration. ‘It appears that you’re actually quite good at hunting the Domini.’ A ghost of a smile crossed his face. ‘I look forward to crossing off the rest of the alphabet.’

I sighed. ‘But when we kill them, more of them will be named to replace them.’

He flashed me a grin that had more than a little fang to it. ‘Why do you think that the job of hunting the Domini was given to the vampyrs? We have all the time in the worldto cross off the letters one by one, and then do it all over again. Rinse and repeat.’

‘But that must be soul-destroying!’

He shrugged. ‘Someone must try and keep the balance.’ He gave me another smile. ‘Good job on restoring the orb. Now make sure you teach all the wolves how to use it. The last thing we need is a repeat of the 1600s.’

‘How oldareyou?’ I demanded.

‘Old enough to know better.’ He winked.

I sighed. ‘What happened in the 1600s?’ I asked, even though I knew I wasn’t going to like the answer.

‘A bunch of werewolves jumped off a cliff and tried to use their air powers to survive.’

‘And did they?’

He guffawed. ‘Did they fuck. They went splat. It’s hard to use the powers in a high-stress situation unless you’re trained for it.’ He fixed me with a look. ‘So train for it.’

Voltaire gave me the tiniest sweep of a bow and melted back into the shadows, leaving me sitting next to the corpse of a man I’d once called my friend.

Chapter 39

In the end, Greg had to go back to the car for a tarpaulin. We rolled David in it to take him home with us, then Greg called a brethren clean-up team to sort out the pagoda before it was officially open to the public.

It bothered me that he so often leaned on the brethren, and I was mindful that it was something we needed to change. Mindy was very much on my mind – and I had no idea what to do about her.

I waited until we were in the car before turning to Greg. ‘What do we do about Mindy?’

His hands tightened on the steering wheel. ‘I’ll deal with her.’

I nodded. She had been his friend, or date, or whatever it was that they’d had; it seemed fair that her fate was up to him.

The rest of the journey was conducted in a somewhat tense silence. As we climbed out of the car, I turned to Tarkers. ‘David wasn’t evil.’

He was led astray,Esme added mournfully.

‘No.’ His eyes were sympathetic. ‘Just misguided, like a lot of people who do bad things. If only he’d been educated about the dangers of the Domini, things would have turned out very differently for him.’

I nodded, clapped him on the shoulder and left to find Daniella. It was up to me to tell her the truth about David’s life and his death.

She was still in Seren and Marissa’s room. She had a weak smile on her face when I walked in but it faded rapidly as she looked at my expression. ‘No,’ she pleaded. ‘No, no, no.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I said it quickly. ‘The vampyrs killed him. I have his body. We’ll lay him to rest in Nina, then at least Scout will be able to rejoin the Great Pack.’

Daniella gave a keening wail, and Marissa and Seren bundled her in a hug. Xander, Tristan, David: the hits kept coming. If we kept this up, we’d have to build a revolving door into Nina.

Daniella wasn’t the only one who was grief-stricken; Seren’s heartache was also palpable. I don’t know howlong she and David had dated but it must have been a while if he’d been ready to propose.

‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated to the room at large, though I didn’t think they heard me.

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