Page 43 of Shadow's End

“Only just, and from the sound of things, these murders happened well before the deadline ended.” He pulled on a T-shirt, then swept his keys and wallet from the side dresser and tucked them into his jean pockets. “Ready?”

I nodded and accepted his hand, letting him pull me up. Monty met us in the hall. “I left Belle a message just in case she wakes up fuzzy.”

She’d certainly woken up fuzzy more than once, but that had never stopped her from reaching out to me to see what was happening. Monty was well aware of that, which suggested his note was probably more along the lines of a love note—he knew she adored that sort of stuff. Hell, she’d kept all the notes and poems past lovers had given her over the years—and it had been one of them I’d used in the blood spell. Trepidation stirred through me again, thick with the warning that I needed to uncover more about the spell’s consequences. Andfast.

I followed Aiden down the stairs, ducked into the reading room to get my backpack while Monty grabbed his breakfast, and then we all headed out the back. Aiden opened the truck’s passenger door and helped me in, then ran around to the driver’s side and started her up. He drove out at speed but didn’t turn on the siren until we were away from the café. Not wanting to wake Belle, I suspected.

“Where are we heading?” I asked, reaching back to snare a bit of bacon from Monty’s container. He gave me two. Either he was feeling generous, or he’d taken the warning about a pregnant woman’s plate seriously.

“Moonlight Flats.”

I bit into the bacon and frowned. “That area is close to town, isn’t it? Why would Marie and her people risk setting up another charnel house in a place like that?”

“It’s an acreage area rather than a housing estate, but we are talking about vampires here,” he said. “And old ones at that. I get the feeling they don’t think or act like us ordinary folk.”

“Speak for yourself,” Monty said. “There is nothing ordinary about me.”

I snorted softly and wished I had something other than bacon in my hand so I could toss it at him. But I wasn’t about to waste good bacon. “Yeah, but it’s also only a couple of kilometers from the compound’s boundaries, and plenty of wolves move through that area. They would have smelled death had Marie and her team been using it to store their meals.”

“Most likely.” Aiden slowed the truck fractionally, turned left, and then accelerated again. “From what Lynette said, the deaths probably all happened within the last six hours.”

“Lynette’s a wolf?” Monty asked, shoving the container between the seats so I could grab a pancake.

I shook my head. As much as I might want more, my stomach wasn’t the steadiest beast of late and I might well end up regretting eating anything else if what we discovered in this house in any way came close to the mess we’d found in the cavern.

“No,” Aiden was saying. “SES. I told her to move back to the road and ensure no one else entered until we arrived. I’ve called in Ciara, Mac, and Tala.”

Tala was his second-in-command and hailed from the Sinclair pack. Neither she nor Mac had been there at the cavern, so he was obviously sharing the trauma around.

He swung right, onto a dirt road, but didn’t slow down. Dust plumed around the truck, falling onto the windows, making it difficult to see much beyond them. Not that there appeared to be all that much aside from trees and the occasional flash of a building.

He skidded onto another, smaller road and finally slowed. Up ahead, leaning against a mailbox made out of an old milk drum that had been painted red, was a tall, thinnish woman wearing leggings, a tank top, and runners. Sweat still dripped from the ends of her brown ponytail, and her cheeks remained flushed from her run. Although it could just as easily be theheat. It might still be early in the day, but the air was already uncomfortably warm.

Aiden stopped beside her and wound down the windows. “No movement?”

“Nothing from inside, and nothing along the road. You want me to stay and help?”

Aiden shook his head. “I suspect what we’ll find inside is something the SES can’t help us with.”

She nodded, her nose wrinkling. “I forgot to mention earlier that I turned off the gas—got a big whiff of it through the window, so you’ll probably find my prints on the meter.”

“Thanks. I’ll send Jaz to get your statement later, so you can head home before the heat really hits.”

“Awesome. Talk later.”

As she turned and jogged down the road, Aiden released the brake and continued on slowly up the curving stone driveway. The house was a surprisingly modern-looking, L-shaped building with a pale green tin roof and matching metal window frames. A wide veranda ran along the building’s front, and two large windows sat on either side of the overly grand-looking front door. The window on the right had been smashed, though if the amount of glass glittering on the veranda’s concrete base was anything to go by, it had been broken by someone inside the house, not outside. A freestanding carport sat at the end of the driveway, just behind the house, and had one of those large people-mover vans parked underneath it. On the other side, only partially visible, was a large machinery shed half-filled with round hay bales.

Aiden stopped the truck at the front steps, and we all climbed out. The air was hot and still, and cicadas sang, but there was little other sound and no immediate indication that death and destruction awaited. Even the broken window didn’t tell us much, as there was no indication of what had caused thebreakage and certainly no sign of blood. I couldn’t smell it either, but that could just be because the air wasn’t moving enough to trail the scent across my nose.

But then, my nose was nowhere near as sharp as Aiden’s, and given the flaring of his nostrils and the brief flash of resignation through his expression, it was certainly there.

“I’m not sensing any form of magic,” Monty said, and glanced at me. “You?”

I shook my head. “Which is odd when you think about it. Even if this had happened hours ago, restraining and silencing multiple people takes a good amount of magic. There should be at least some remnants floating about.”

“For us normal witches,” Monty noted. “Not for someone like Marie.”

Aiden handed us both silicone gloves and some of those pull-on boot protectors. “There’s also the point that many of the bodies we found in the cavern had been bound by ropes and gags rather than magic. It’s quite possible that’s what happened here.”

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