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Klay folded his arms on the table. “Tick-tock,” he drawled. “Time’s a wasting.” His eyes went to the books spread across the table before she had a chance to cover them up.

Crap.

When he lifted his gaze to her face, there was a shadow in his eyes that wasn’t related to the Sight. “This wasn’t part of our agreement.”

“Can you really blame me?” she hissed. “Or are you that cold-hearted?”

The look he gave her felt like a dagger being thrown at her head.

And then his eyes flashed to the phone in her hands. “If you call him,” Klay said coldly, “the imperator will hear about it.”

Her upper lip curled back over her teeth. “And do you always do as daddy says?”

Like the crack of a whip, Klay’s magic lashed into her mind.

She bolted upright in her seat, phone clattering to the table. There was a mental claw squeezing her brain, piercing it with the feeling of tiny daggers digging in. She tried to break free, but she couldn’t move.

Slowly, Klay rose to his feet, eyes shining black as he continued to hold her there, turning her into a sentient statue.

Around frozen lips, she managed to stammer, “Let go of me.” But that claw only squeezed harder, and blood trickled out of both nostrils.

A cold smile spread across Klay’s face.

“Let go of me,” she said again. “If you kill me, you’ll ruin your father’s plans.”

That horrible magic relented, and she sagged in her seat. She looked about the library, but no one had seen what he’d done to her. The place was nearly deserted, the only other students in the area too busy clacking away on laptops to take note of what was happening around them.

Klay flattened his hands on the table and leaned forward, bringing his head down to her level. “Let your next move be a smart one, Loren. Wouldn’t want your Devil to die, would you?”

Her labored breathing turned to gasps, and the floor spun beneath the soles of her shoes. “I hate you.”

Those eyes, so empty of any emotion except anger and disgust, went to the books spread out before her again. “You’ll never find anything. Stupid girl.”

“How do you know?” she sneered, casting a line to reel him in. The blood trickling from her nostrils glided over her lip. She knuckled it away and wiped it on her academy cardigan. “Every spell has a counter spell. It’s only fact.”

“Maybe. But it would have to be a spell that you were under in order for that to work.” Hah! He’d just given her more information than he’d likely meant to.

She was careful to keep every trace of the victory she was feeling from showing on her face. But the more she thought about it, the less it felt like a victory.

Klay had just revealed that it wasn’t a spell freezing her tongue. But if it wasn’t a spell, then what was it? And how could she break it?

Klay pushed away from the table. “One day down, nine remaining. Make good use of them, would you?”

He was gone before she could say anything else.

—

A dead vampire in Werewolf Territory was as bad as it sounded, and not because of how gruesome the body looked.

Yellow tape surrounded the area where the Magical Protections Unit had discovered the body. They were just down the road from Black Mirror Pond and Campsite, south of Eastside Academy and west of Black Mirror Hills. The area was fairly deserted at this time of year, but there was a handful of people staying in motor vehicles and spell-protected tents. All of those people were currently being questioned by law enforcement. Pens scratched on paper as detectives and officers wrote down everything they learned from the campers, their faces lit up by red and blue light.

“You know what this means,” Finn said quietly to Darien, where they stood on the outskirts of the crime scene, leaning back against the hood of Darien’s car. Finn’s eyes met his. “It means, if someone in Drakon cares enough to look into this, we could have a war on our hands.”

Nothing like this had happened in centuries. The vampires and wolves who were a part of the major vampire houses and wolf packs in Angelthene kept well away from each other’s land, the pact preventing them from so much as mingling. Now that a dead vampire had turned up on werewolf soil, Logan and the other wolves in his Guardian pack would have a huge problem on their hands.

Logan, who was not answering his phone.

“You need to find out who did this,” Darien said. “Before it escalates.” Before it turned into a fight for revenge that couldn’t be stopped by apologies or excuses.