Page 30 of Muzzled

She sat at the small table. “Who’s your boss?”

“Not important right now,” he said with a growl, swinging the other chair around and straddling it. “The shade. Is it aggressive?”

“Shade,” she echoed, watching the coffee as it dripped. “What’s a ‘shade’?”

“Is. It. Aggressive?”

She sprawled back in her chair and ran her hands through her hair. “You don’t think I’m losing my mind?” Sitting up again, she looked at him, her eyes watering. “Ryan, you’ve seen one too, right?”

He dropped his head into the crook of his elbow. “Please, Micah. I just need to know if it’s shown any hostile behavior. If it’s become threatening in any way.” When she didn’t respond, he glanced up at her. “Micah.”

Waving her hand at him, she shook her head and ran her thumbs under her eyes.

He shuffled his chair closer to her, swallowing in vain to remove the lump in his throat. “You aren’t losing your mind.” He sighed, reaching across the table and squeezing her hand. “What you’re seeing? It’s…” She took a deep, shuddering breath, eliminating all chance of him spewing the lie building in his mind. “You called it a ghost tonight. Do you believe in ghosts?”

Sliding her hand out from under his, she grabbed a Styrofoam coffee cup and filled it, her gaze drifting to the curtains. “I don’t remember it myself, but my mom used to tease me about the ‘Window Man’ I was afraid of as a kid. I guess I was maybe two when I started telling her about the see-through gray man who sat on the roofs of the apartment buildings in our complex. I have a few really vague memories of it, of where it sat and how it moved, but I mostly remember it from my mom’s stories about how I refused to go outside, refused to walk under awnings, refused to walk near open windows. I mean, I was a toddler, right? So I guess I called him a Window Man because I didn’t know any other words to tell her what I saw.” She dipped her pinky finger into her coffee. “It became a family joke, Micah being petrified of window washers. I remember trying to explain it better as I got older, that it was a transparent man I saw, but eventually I gave up and it just kind of faded until it was forgotten.”

“And you never saw it again until recently?”

She shrugged, pulling at a loose thread on her sleeve. “I did once in a while. But not really. More like a movement I’d catch out of the corner of my eye late at night. Nothing I would swear in court I saw or anything.”

He watched her take a sip of her coffee, his mind processing the timeline. “You’re thirty-two now?”

“Thirty-three in two months,” she muttered, refusing to look at him.

Thirty years ago.

He thought back to the Pirithous they’d taken down three decades ago, to the night they’d landed at Hades’s feet in the reception room and surrendered their quarry to their master. Zeroing in on the shade’s retreat into the underworld hell, where he’d spend eternity, Ryan tried desperately to recall its disappearance past the river into the abyss.

“He made it,” he muttered to himself, running his hands over his face. “I know he made it. I saw him pass over.”

“Who made it?”

Pulling his phone from his pocket, he shook his head. “I need to make a quick call.”

Bo answered on the fifth ring.

“We have a problem,” Ryan stated while Micah sat silently on the bed, watching him pace the room. “A big one.”

His brother yawned, and he heard the rustling of blankets before he responded. “Kill the problem and call me in the morning.”

“It’s a shade. Topside.”

Bo went quiet except for the snick of a lighter and a deep inhale. “That’s impossible. Maybe—”

“There’s no maybe about it,” he snarled, peering through the curtains. “It’s out. I don’t know how, but it is.”

After a long exhaled string of curses, Bo groaned. “Could this stupid curse get any stupider? Now we not only have to take down another bloodline, we have to catch one we already fucking hunted?” He paused to inhale. “I can be there tomorrow evening.”

Ryan glanced over at Micah, knowing he needed a hell of a lot more intel before his brothers flew in. Taking the shade down might be the long goal, but it was here for a reason, and he needed to know what that reason was before his brothers came in jaws a’snapping.

There was also the small issue of needing to come clean with Micah.

“Stay put for now, but keep your phone close. Tell Alex to be on alert, too.”

Bo was quiet for a moment before he replied. “Fine. But no stupid risks.”

“Have you ever known me to make an uncalculated move?” His brother snorted and he closed the gap in the curtains. “If Dio or Seph swings by, tell them we have a breach and I need them here ASAP. I’ll call you once I have more info.”

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