Rahil pulled his hand back from the case, but then he reached again, settling his fingers atop Mercer’s instead. “You had every right to be angry.”
“I wasn’t.” Mercer’s voice broke. “I wasn’t angry. I was afraid.”
Rahil squeezed gently. “It’s all right to be afraid, too.” His gaze went to the mold, but Mercer couldn’t look at it, which meant he was staring at Rahil’s eyes instead, watching a shine of liquid build along the vampire’s lower lids. Rahil’s throat bobbed. “I know what it’s like to feel so—”
As he started talking, something banged against the front of the shed. Rahil flinched away at the same moment that Mercer jumped up, his heart rate rocketing. He could feel the blood already rushing to his head, a slight tilt coming into the world as his vision tunneled. His hands shook, but he balled them into fists, waiting.
Waiting.
Nothing else moved.
Slowly, Rahil started creeping toward the barn door, ignoring Mercer’s hisses for him to stop. Feeling his own life and his daughter’s and now Rahil’s stupid, beautiful existence all flash before his eyes, Mercer cautiously followed.
Rahil opened the door a crack, then a little more. “Were you expecting a delivery?” He asked, revealing an empty yard but for a shoebox-sized package outside the shed’s entrance.
Mercer’s blood ran cold. “No. Never to the shed.”
As he stepped closer, he could find no address, only his full name: Mercer Jacques Bloncourt.
Rahil lifted a brow at him, right there and yet so far away. The world seemed to tumble outward, and suddenly Rahil’s hand was on Mercer’s arm, gripping him tightly. “Are you okay, Merc?”
He shook his head. “Open it.”
Mercer’s stomach twisted, the panic sinking its claws deep into him as his brain fired unwanted images: knit beanies, locks of braided hair, ice chests with small, feminine fingers. But as Rahil broke open the folded top flaps, the crusted blood inside the cardboard box was from something entirely different. Written in sharpie beneath was the phraselove, William.
Its small body had been stabbed through by a little wooden stake, leathery wings pinned to the bottom of the package and its mouth forced open by a ball of red tissue paper shoved down its throat, revealing the dead bat’s tiny teeth.
Rahil dropped the box with a shout. It was Mercer’s turn to grab him, their eyes meeting like they both knew what the other was thinking.
“Has he been—”
“Only emails.” Emails, and now a dead bat. Did he know—how could he? He couldn’t.
Only Mercer and his daughter knew the details of Leah’s death, the blood clogging the back of her throat as her teeth turned to points.
Mercer felt faint all the same, his head so light that despite Rahil’s grip on him he had to lower himself to his knees with the aid of the shed door. He tried to reel in his anxiety, to focus on the fact that Lydia was safe, and he was safe, and even Rahil, whom Douglas surely would see killed if he knew the vampire was in the vicinity, was also safe. But Mercer’s gaze kept going back to the box. It lay crooked, the bat limp against the pins like a crucified corpse.
His mind cycled through the last thing he’d said to Anthony Hilker before the scientist left. “Do you know a William Douglas?” Mercer had asked. “He claimed to be friends with some of my previous holy silver clients.”
“Billy?” Anthony’s nose had wrinkled. “I know him. Old high school classmate—we went on a few dates after reconnecting online, but he’s… He’s too much like me. We would not have survived each other.” The way his expression had hardened was terrifying even in memory. “Be careful with him.”
Becarefulwith this man who’d killed and brutalized a living creature to send a message—and the message was clear: William Douglas was going to kill vampires. And if he didn’t have Mercer’s help with that, there could be consequences.
Mercer couldn’t breathe suddenly. He could feel the consequences already: his shed in flame, his house broken into, Kat’s limp body, Lydia’s blood across the carpet—
No, no, none of that had happened. But it could. It might. He was the only thing standing between the present and a hundred terrible versions of that future.
His world spun, and the one sound that came through was Rahil’s gentle voice, telling him he was safe. Safe, ironically, with a vampire.
11
RAHIL
In some ways, Mercer’s anxiety was a blessing, because it meant Rahil had something to focus on—something that wasn’t the dead bat, or the way Merc’s wife had been killed, or how Rahil could just as soon be that vampire the smith hated so badly, if the life his own fangs had taken had been a little less unexpected, or his part in it more egregious. He patted Mercer’s shoulder, reminding him he was safe, and reminding himself in the same breath. But just as quickly as Merc had fallen into his stiff state of shallow breathing, he seemed to pull himself back out of it, shaking his head as he apologized, all his attention on his phone as he reset his traps and locked up the shed.
“Will you be all right?” Merc barely looked at him, his gaze still distant.
“Fine,” Rahil answered, because he always was, one way or another.
