Page 14 of For Love and Blood and Fury

“Then how do you know she’s not dead?” Zuri couldn’t keep her voice down. Couldn’t stop the pounding in her chest and the crippling ache in her belly.

The vampires around her stirred, and Zuri felt them closing in even though they hadn’t stood.

“We would know,” Librada explained, patience thinning. “We would feel the loss.”

“So why can’t you sense where she is?” Zuri’s mind was racing in so many directions. Being the only point of interest for a cluster of bloodsuckers wasn’t helping calm her mind. She had the focus of a horror film victim trying to get the damn key in the door.

Librada’s demeanor was an iron door slamming shut. “We do not discuss intimate?—”

“Whatever.” Zuri cleared away the conversation, her desperation to get the hell out of there mounting. “I know your sense of smell is outrageous. That’s not some secret. Couldn’t you track her?”

“We think she ran,” Sofia, standing next to Librada, said under a crush of heartbreak. “We think she masked her scent from us and left to seek retribution on her own.”

Zuri shook her head. Elena loved her pack. She wouldn’t leave without them. Didn’t they know that?

“We’ve tried everything and we will continue at sundown,” Lib said by way of dismissal.

“You haven’t tried everything.” Reaching for her anger because fear was too hard to process, Zuri lifted her chin. “You haven’t tried me.”

Zuri turned away, resolute in her purpose and rushing through the noise of the bar. She pushed open the door, stepping back into the humid afternoon. Was Elena’s clan really waiting for sundown to scour the city? She couldn’t imagine sitting still in the face of that news.

Could she even trust them to tell her the truth? For all Zuri knew, Elena’s spawn could have turned her murderous impulses on their own mother and were playing at bereavement. Anything was possible and Zuri wasn’t about to put her faith in any vampires who weren’t Elena.

As she strode towards her car, she cursed under her breath. She couldn’t believe she was doing this. Couldn’t believe she was letting Elena drag her back into her chaotic vampire bullshit.

Sliding into her driver’s seat, she slammed the car door shut. When she tried to take a deep breath, a shiver of unease slipped down her spine. A prickle of awareness, like eyes boring into her back. She glanced in the rearview mirror. Nothing but the stressed out valets hoping she’d get her ugly duckling away from the status symbol cars.

Zuri gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white, and forced herself to take a deep breath. She couldn’t let paranoia get the best of her. Not now. She had to focus on finding Elena.

But as she started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot, the feeling of unseen eyes lingered, a chilling reminder she was stepping back into a world where danger lurked around every corner.

Fucking Elena. You better not be dead, or I’m going to kill you.

Chapter Nine

“I don’t knowwhat’s worse,” the nurse sitting next to Marisol in the nurse’s station said before taking a bite of his homemade sandwich. “When we’re so busy I don’t have time to eat”—he checked his watch—“or when I’ve gone through all my food an hour into my shift.”

Marisol nodded, but she was barely listening. Her second night in the ER was so quiet it was amplifying all the racing thoughts in her head. She found the pendant under her scrubs and pressed it to her chest.

The metal was warm from her body heat, but the worn surface was still comforting. If she closed her eyes, she could see the day her grandmother had given it to her. For the first time in Marisol’s life, she saw her grandmother take off the pendant. She clipped it around Marisol’s neck on the morning of her twelfth birthday. It had been her grandmother’s most prized possession, a gift she’d received from her own mother. A scrap of silver and gold handed down for countless generations.

It was only as an adult that Marisol had wondered why her grandmother hadn’t gifted it to her own daughter—Marisol’s mother. But they almost never talked about her.

Maybe her mother hadn’t wanted the family heirloom. Maybe she had thrown it back in her grandmother’s face, just like she’d tossed Marisol at her as soon as she was born then disappeared.

Marisol’s mind drifted to her grandmother’s kitchen table. How she missed that place and the person she’d loved most in the world.

In her favorite memory, the sun streamed in through the enormous window above the sink, illuminating her grandmother’s small frame from behind. She’d been using a spoon to scoop the gel out of an aloe leaf. In a wooden mortar, she’d already mixed fragrant herbs and honey.

People came from everywhere for her grandmother’s home remedies. Acuranderalike every woman in her family had been, her grandmother had a cure for everything.

Marisol pushed to the edges of her memory. Tried to remember what her grandmother had said about their family. There was a great-aunt who’d delivered every baby in her small village outside of Santiago. The woman had been a midwife well into her nineties and never lost a single woman or child on her kitchen table. According to her grandmother, families traveled from all over the island for her care.

But midwives and nurses and folk healers had been around forever. That wasn’t remarkable. It didn’t make them… witches. That was absurd.

“Did you fall asleep with your eyes open?” her coworker asked, snapping Marisol out of her thoughts. “Don’t worry, it happens to me all the time. Not usually this early in my shift.” He smiled. “But it takes my body forever to get used to working nights. Want some jerky?”

“As tempting as sodium nitrate sounds”—she winked—“I’m still a vegetarian.”

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