Page 133 of Nemesis

“Come on.” I hoist him up, undoing the chain from the hook. He weighs a ton, but I get him over my shoulder.

It feels too similar to how his attacker carried him.

Except I don’t have the ability to throw him in a trunk—we’ve got to escape to the woods. My nose wrinkles. He smells of sweat and the sour stench of fear.

Who knows what happened here?

I carry him back up and stop at the mouth of the stairs. The man is still there, dead and out of sight. I glance up, and a camera with a blinking red light catches my eye.

I flip it off and continue. Double time, now, jogging out of the warehouse and forcing my legs to drill into the ground faster. Up the hill, into the trees.

We stop twice more to evade patrols, but they don’t seem to know what’s happened. They’re not on high alert, they don’t even have radios to check in with each other.

My unease is sharp and hard to ignore.

I move more cautiously back to my vehicle. It’s parked near the waterfalls—not where I met the sheriff but farther up, tucked out of public sight on a near-invisible service road.

I set Reese down on the backseat, positioning him so he’s horizontal. The time to check him for injuries will come soon, but the pressing urge to get out of here is a gut instinct I cannot shed.

So I do.

On the road, I dial Artemis’s number. Another gift from the sheriff.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” I say. “I have him.”

She exhales. “Thank you, Kade. Can you bring him?—”

“My house,” I interrupt.

She’s quiet.

I wait it out as we bump along the gravel ruts. I readjust my rearview mirror to see Reese, wincing when his head bounces on the seat. He’s fully limp but still breathing. That’s the important part.

“Okay,” she finally says. “See you there.”

I hang up and hit the gas. My vehicle groans in protest, and my tires skid on the loose rocks around a corner.

There’s no one chasing me, but I drive like an asshole down through South Falls anyway. The warehouse district is quiet, the roads nearly empty. I take my time winding back up to the main road that will take me to the heart of Sterling Falls, and then continue past the university north.

To the house I’ve been calling home.

All the while, Reese doesn’t so much as fucking stir.

37ARTEMIS

“I don’t like this,”Saint says.

We’re sitting on the beach behind Kade’s house. Our other option was breaking a window to get in, but I vetoed that. Instead, I looped around the side of the house and planted my ass in the sand.

I dig my bare feet in, searching for warmer sand.

The moon hangs huge above us, the smattering of stars nearly washed out in comparison. I hug my legs and rest my chin on my knee.

“I know you don’t like it,” I mumble. “You’ve said it already.”

He almost drowned here. That’s what I heard anyway. Because while Nyx was dying and Saint was going through his first abrupt stage of grief, I was with my brother in the center of town. Miles away.

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