Page 45

He sauntered toward me, his jeans low on his hips. “Don’t tell me you didn’t love every fucking second of that.”

“Oh, I did,” I told him, looking him up and down. How lucky was I to have a body like that to come home to at night? And not just one, but four. Four of the best guys I’d ever known. “Now,youhave to go down there and tell Randy we’ll be right down.”

He shrugged like he could give two shits. “Won’t bother me.” He pulled a shirt on over his head and then tucked it into his jeans on his way out the door. He turned to both of us on his way out and winked. “See you down there.”

I grinned at Travis. “Your coven is a freaking mess.”

“Oh, they’re my coven now?”

“Only when they’re behaving badly.”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Then they’re always my coven.”

That sounded pretty accurate, actually.

Chapter Nineteen

Randy greeted Travis and I at the breakfast bar with piles of cold toast stacked on a plate.

“He’s only mad because he wasn’t invited,” Gabe called out from the living room.

I waltzed up to him and kissed him square on the mouth. “Who said he wasn’t invited?”

Travis laughed and grabbed a couple pieces of toast before joining Gabe in the living room. I pulled on Randy’s hand and we joined them.

“Well, while you guys were busy,” Randy said, tweaking an eyebrow my way. “I heard from Murphy.”

Travis paused with a slice of toast halfway to his mouth. “Is Anna okay?”

He shook his head. “No. He’s taking her to a mental hospital today. She’s significantly deteriorated since we saw her. She keeps mumbling things; her exterior is getting worse even though the doctors say nothing is wrong with her.”

“It’s got to be magic,” I told them. “She’s being sucked dry, too, but for whatever reason, it didn’t leave the negative taste the others did.”

Randy put his hands on the back of the sofa as I stared at him. “That’s not the only thing though,” he said, his shoulders hunching over. “Liam came to see them yesterday.”

I choked on my cold toast and stared up at him. “He did?”

Nodding, he took a deep breath. “Murphy said he acted perfectly fine. He told him that we, as the Order, wanted to check up on Anna and that’s what he was doing. She had already started to get worse before he got there. It sounds like they were thinking of putting her in a psych unit for the past few days, so…” He looked away. “…I don’t think he’s the reason for her deterioration.”

“Why the hell would he go visit her, though, Mate?” Gabe asked.

Travis shook his head. None of us could figure it out. There were too many variables to be considered. Even though Randy seemed relieved Anna was already in a bad place before Liam got there that still didn’t explain why he went there. None of this added up.

“Did you ask him if they happened to know where he was?”

“I couldn’t really ask too much,” Randy said. “I didn’t want to give anything away, so no, I didn’t get a thing out of them. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t lead him to think we didn’t know where Liam was or that he wasn’t under our guidance anymore. We can’t risk anyone finding out he has a familiar on him.”

“The superiors will pull the plug for sure,” Travis said.

“We’re just going to have to head out and try to find him again,” Gabe said. “Try a different locator spell. Maybe. Search for clues...”

With my heart heavy in my chest, I picked myself off the couch and went for the keys on the countertop where I’d left them the night before. “We’ve got to go, guys. Liam needs us.”

We all piled into the Jeep. On the way into Salem, I filled Gabe in on what I hadn’t found at the Reid’s place, and told him how Granny had visited me last night. He seemed troubled by the fact Granny couldn’t trace him because of the damn familiar. Every little piece of evidence seemed to be pointing directly at the idea that Liam was slowly but surely being taken over by that thing. It wasn’t fair.

Once we were on the outskirts of the city, Travis pulled the car over. Randy took out the bag he’d brought with him. He pulled out the silver laptop I recognized as Liam’s. He turned in the seat, so he could face us all. “I thought maybe if we brought something of Liam’s it would make it easier to trace where he was. Let’s just do some searching, see if we can’t find a true connection to the person Liam was before the familiar.

He closed his eyes first, and I followed suit. Where there was nothing but emptiness before, there was a little something more, but just a flicker. Wordlessly, Travis steered the Jeep back onto the road. I kept concentrating on the little glimmer of hope. Travis took to the streets, weaving in and out of intersections and around parked cars. It was hard to tell what was going on because I’d kept my eyes shut as he drove through Salem, so one of us could at least keep the connection.