Page 12 of A Token of Blood and Betrayal (Kennedy Rain #4)

Blood gushed from Shelli’s throat. The warm, thick liquid coated my hands. My clothes. Horror kept a scream trapped inside my lungs, but it wasn’t horror because of what I had done. It was because a sick, sinister smile was painted across my face.

My scream found a way out. My eyes shot open wide as I lurched upright, only to find something dark and suffocating coming for me. I fought, grabbing and yanking. The intruder let go, and a blanket slapped my face.

“Hey.” Christian raised his hands in the universal I’m not the bad guy sign. “It’s me.”

My heart rate reached a crescendo before it began to slow. I balled the blanket up on my lap. “What are you doing?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said. “You looked cold.”

“I…” My gaze swept across my living room.

I’d come up here after talking to Nora. I’d sat down to research djinn and fey around three, but the clock on the wall said it was almost nine a.m. now.

My laptop was upside down near my feet, and the frozen meal I’d microwaved sat on the coffee table, looking cold and extremely unappetizing.

I’d passed out over five hours ago.

I shoved aside my “dinner” to make room for my laptop and jabbed on the keys to wake it up.

“What’s wrong?” Christian asked.

What kind of person was I, falling asleep when someone’s freedom was on the line?

“Kennedy?” Christian sat beside me, leaving half a couch cushion between us.

“I was sleeping when I should have been working.” My laptop was taking forever to wake up. Continuing to poke at it wouldn’t make it go faster, so I clenched my hand into a fist to fight the temptation. Bad idea. Now I just wanted to punch something.

Christian placed a strong, steady hand on top of mine and waited until I met his gaze. “Why did Nora say I should talk to you?”

His touch and the reassurance in his voice should have comforted me. Instead an uneasy emotion moved into my chest. “What did she tell you?”

“She didn’t give me a chance to ask questions.” His eyes were a deeper blue than usual in the light from my awakening laptop.

That’s what was bothering me, the thought of Nora spilling Garion’s secrets. It wasn’t a fair suspicion though. Nora wasn’t one to gossip, and Christian didn’t know why she’d sent him. I was just being paranoid.

I chewed on my bottom lip. I wanted to limit the number of people who learned about Garion, and I hadn’t considered telling Christian because he was human—he likely knew as much about djinn as I did.

On the other hand, he was levelheaded and reliable.

He deserved my trust just as much as Nora did, especially after everything I’d dragged him into recently.

Wouldn’t this be dragging him into more shit?

My laptop pinged, signaling it had finally connected to the internet. I stared at the screen, trying to decide what was best for him.

“You remember your bargain with Canyon,” he said.

My gaze darted back to Christian. His blue eyes were calm, patient, and… wary? Like he was bracing himself for my response?

I stood suddenly, needing to move. “Yeah. I remember.”

The thin, worn-out carpet beneath my bare feet felt rough as I paced across the small living room.

I stopped when I reached the window, took a steadying breath, then turned around.

"Canyon wants me to bring him a token my mom hid in her jewelry box. I found it last night. It belongs to Garion.” I wet my lips, hesitating, and then added, "Garion is djinn.”

I waited for Christian’s reaction, but there wasn’t one.

No widening of his eyes or tilt of his head.

No question or surprise in his expression.

In fact, if he hadn’t frozen so completely, I might have thought he already knew about Garion.

But I’d seen him nonreact like this before.

It was like he placed himself in a fossilized shell, unexisting for a moment while he absorbed and sorted and rearranged facts and truths in his mind.

“I need to figure out how to outsmart a fey,” I continued. “I came up here to make a plan and…”

Christian grimaced, sank into the couch cushions, then tilted his head back until he was staring at the ceiling.

“What?” I asked.

His chest rose as he filled his lungs with air, then he sat upright again and met my eyes. “Kennedy, your plans aren’t plans. They’re challenges you throw at the universe to see if it bites back.”

I stared at him a good three seconds. Then I laughed and punched his arm. “That’s not fair.”

His echoing smile cut through the tension in the room. I could breathe easier, and the dark storm cloud that seemed to be forever attached to me faded until it was almost gone.

“Luck is the only reason you’ve survived any of your plans these past few months,” he said, his eyes still a bright blue.

“It was carefully planned luck, thank you very much.” It felt good to smile, to temporarily release my anxiety.

At the same time, these easy moments scared me.

Every time I let my guard down, every time I thought things might finally be getting better—less dangerous and more routine—the world decided to blindside me.

“Any ideas yet?” Christian asked.

I shook my head. “Nora says I have to kill Canyon. Garion says I have to give Canyon the token. I convinced Garion to give me time to think of something, but the best idea I’ve had is to give Canyon the token, then immediately steal it back.”

Christian snorted. “Sounds easy.”

“Piece of cake,” I said, my voice flat. I plopped back down on my spot on the couch and stared at my laptop.

The last article I’d read had been about fey bargains, and the only possibly useful information it contained was that once a bargain was called due, the debtor had until dawn to fulfill it.

I had no reason to believe that claim was any more accurate than the ridiculous ideas posted to other sites.

Nearly every search I tried took me to very inaccurate mythology and more than a few fantasy novels.

If there were any answers online, they were buried in so much superfluous information they were impossible to find.

Likely, that was intentional. The vampires and werewolves had teams of people whose jobs were to mislead the public.

I guess I’d either thought the fey wouldn’t do the same thing or that I was smart enough to find the truth despite the smoke screen. Clearly I’d overestimated my Google-fu.

“You’ll come up with something,” Christian said. Then, very deliberately, he met my gaze. “If you get good sleep and you eat.”

“I am.” My protest was an automatic response, nowhere close to the truth, and of course he saw straight through it.

“The first thing you said when I asked what was wrong was that you shouldn’t have fallen asleep. And this?” He picked up the frozen dinner I’d left on the coffee table. “Even if it counted as nutrition, you only ate a corner.”

I could only give him a guilty half smile. His mouth thinned before he grabbed the not-so-frozen meal, walked to the kitchen, and dumped it into the trash bin. Then he began opening cabinets.

I turned back to my laptop. The Mail icon at the bottom of my screen caught my eye.

Frowning, I clicked on it. I had thirty-six new emails.

I’d never been an inbox-zero type of person, but I did occasionally mark everything as read.

That’s what I’d done when I sat down to research the fey and djinn.

Thirty-six was a high number of emails in just a few hours.

I skimmed the subject lines. Then reskimmed them.

What the hell?

“Something wrong?” Christian asked, opening the fridge.

“No?” I’d expected two or three emails from paranormals asking to book a room. Jared must have had an extremely effective communication strategy. Or there were far more vampires in the world than I’d thought and Arcuro had kept them away.

I did some rough math in my head. We hosted anywhere from twenty to thirty vampires a month despite having rooms enough for twice that number.

Multiply that by twelve, and on the high end, around three hundred vampires stayed at The Rain each year.

Many of those were repeats though. Arcuro deliberately kept the lists small to give himself more influence and power.

To make his invitations rare and coveted.

Asshole.

“It looks like something’s wrong,” Christian said.

Staring at my screen, I sucked my bottom lip between my teeth. “Not wrong, exactly. It’s, um, another one of my plans.”

He stiffened.

“I had Jared spread the word for paranorms to submit an email with their info and background if they want to stay at The Rain.”

He shut the fridge with a sharp thunk. “You did?”

“Yeah.” I braced myself for his reaction. It came in the form of a slow, spreading grin that made his eyes crinkle and my shoulders drop in relief.

“That is a good plan,” he said.

I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “You think so?”

“A great plan,” he amended, leaving the kitchen area. “And you need to vet them, right?”

“Yeah.” Except I didn’t have time to vet them yet.

“I’ll help. I can contact some of the vampires I know, and you have the staff who can give their opinions too. But first.” He stopped beside the couch, eyes cutting down to me. “You need to eat. You can read through the emails while I grab some food.”

“You really don’t have to—” I broke off when he scowled, and right on cue my stomach growled.

“Fine,” I grumbled.

After Christian left, I headed to my bedroom. Most of my personal belongings were still there. I even took a few minutes to throw on some makeup to hide the circles under my eyes, which seemed to be getting darker by the day. Still, only a few minutes passed before someone knocked on the door.

I shut off the sink and walked back to the living room. “You can just come in—”

I choked off my words when the door opened. It wasn’t Christian standing in the hallway. It was Melissa.

“Hi!” she said, bouncing inside.

Her overt cheerfulness made me tense. “Christian’s not here.”