Page 40 of A Token of Blood and Betrayal (Kennedy Rain #4)

The fallout from my covert exit from The Rain wasn’t what I’d expected when I returned.

Instead of angry lectures, I was given cold silence.

Garion wouldn’t look at me. Phedre and Thordis spoke in hushed whispers and looked at me too much.

Other staff members ended their conversations abruptly If I walked by.

The only person who really interacted with me was Sullens.

We sat down in my living room for that meetup we’d planned to sort through emails. Even then, he spoke the bare minimum.

I stared at the three piles of paper on the coffee table between us.

The largest one was for the maybes and need more information vampires and the eight werewolves brave or desperate enough to subvert Lehr’s demands.

The pile for definitely yes and definitely no paranorms were the exact same number of printed pages: four.

I sighed. Why couldn’t something be easy for once?

“We’ll have to call their references,” I said. Most had given us two like I’d asked. A few gave us twice that number, and a handful of others had more than ten.

“I will start.” He grabbed the center stack. “Anything more?”

Our relationship had regressed to how it had been in the beginning.

Him giving me only short, curt responses.

Me, wondering what I could do to punch through his stern expression and belittling gaze.

But one significant difference between then and now was that I was willing to set aside my resentment and try harder to connect with him.

I wasn’t wrong for leaving to confront Lehr. They weren’t wrong for wanting me to stay safe and sheltered, but this stalemate strategy of everyone pretending there wasn’t a big, fat elephant in the room wouldn’t get us anywhere.

“I threatened Lehr,” I said.

The way Sullens’s wide eyes shot my direction was almost comical.

“I told him I’d ban any name he sanctioned.”

“I’m sure that went well.” He straightened the stack of papers.

“I also told him I’d support another alpha taking over his territory if he didn’t start playing by my rules.”

Surprise flashed through his eyes. “You do have a death wish then.”

“I don’t,” I replied. “I also don’t want to endanger anyone else. If I’d taken someone with me, it would have looked like a threat. Lehr doesn’t find anything threatening about a single human.”

“Yet you continue to test his patience. You should not have gone.”

“Lehr needs to see me as someone with authority, not someone who’s too weak or too scared to stand on her own.”

“So you make yourself prey. Brilliant.”

I grabbed the two tiny remaining stacks of paper. Held them up. “For this to happen, I have to stand on my own. I have to face the threats.”

His mouth opened. He closed it without speaking and just stared at me. I held his gaze, hoping my words got through to him. Over time, we’d gone from conflict to cooperation. I definitely preferred the latter relationship.

He huffed out a breath. “Why are you telling me this?”

“To apologize. And to set an expectation for the future. Sometimes I’m going to do things you disagree with. I’ll do some things that aren’t safe.”

“You set that expectation months ago.”

I smiled. “Then my leaving shouldn’t have been a surprise.”

His lips tightened into a sour twist.

“We were watching your windows and the lobby,” he admitted. “How did you get past us?”

I leaned back against the couch cushions, the knot in my stomach loosening some. “I’m keeping a few secrets still.”

He snorted. “Of course you are.”

We decided Sullens would start calling references while I reached out to Jenny, the alpha of the Cincinnati pack whom I’d met when Blake and I drove there in search of Astrid.

I’d also get in touch with Deagan, assuming he was alive and well.

I hadn’t seen him since his dark house. Jared hadn’t called for an update though, so I assumed Deagan was with him.

I’d considered consulting with Jared directly, but I trusted Deagan more than him.

Deagan owed me, and I had a feeling he’d share his opinions much more openly than his master.

He’d written meticulous notes on the paranorms he’d encountered during his long life.

I’d bet he had hundreds of other names floating around in his head too.

I picked up my phone to call him but didn’t tap on his name.

I looked toward my bedroom—my old bedroom.

I hadn’t yet had a chance to sit down and go through Deagan’s dossier more thoroughly.

I should start there. In addition to possibly having entries on some of the individuals in the emails, he might have information on Canyon, on Lehr, or on any number of other paranorms I should know.

I set my phone aside, then walked down the short hallway to the almost-empty bedroom. Melissa, Astrid, and their helpers had stacked a few boxes in the corner. I spotted Mom’s jewelry box on top of one of them, and a wave of trepidation rolled through my stomach.

Was nulling the token the right thing to do?

If it hurt Garion, I didn’t know how I’d deal with it.

If it didn’t work at all, I didn’t know how I’d deal with Canyon.

Murder? Despite everything I’d been through and all that I’d done, that felt like the wrong choice.

Some not-so-small part of me believed I should be able to work something out with the fey king.

I just needed to understand him first. Find some common ground.

But that had always been one of my weaknesses, believing I could reason with unreasonable people.

That’s why I’d risked helping the unsanctioned years ago.

I’d figured if I was caught, I could show Lehr and Arcuro, show my parents, that helping the paranorms hadn’t hurt anything or anyone, that I’d already done it so many times without negative consequences. I thought they’d understand.

I’d been so incredibly naive. But not anymore. Now I knew human logic and compassion wouldn’t convince the paranorms to change their ways. I had to stand on my own. Take action without their support.

Feeling slightly more confident, I knelt beneath the bedroom window.

The carpet looked the same there as it did everywhere else, but I’d already pulled it up once today when I’d smuggled Deagan’s dossier upstairs.

I’d created the perfect hidey-hole underneath it after Jasmine was murdered outside my door.

She’d left behind a bloodstain I couldn’t scrub away.

I’d pulled up the hall carpet and found hardwood floors beneath it.

Nice hardwood floors that only needed a little sanding and restaining to be a huge improvement over the old carpet.

Then I’d come to my room, pulled up a corner to confirm it, too, had hardwood floors.

Prying up a few boards had seemed perfectly logical because I’d wanted a secure place to store the treaty.

Yes, I’d later realized storing things in The Rain’s safe was probably, er, safer, but ever since Shelli pretended to be my mom and texted me the safe’s combination, I couldn’t bring myself to use it.

I grabbed the heavy journal from the hole, leaving behind Garion’s token, which I’d placed in a small box. I’d return for it in a few hours. Then, at midnight, I’d learn if the spell was the solution to both my problems and Garion’s.

Less than an hour later, I sat on the couch and tried to rub away a headache. My brain had blocked out the memory of how difficult the dossier was to read. Deagan’s handwriting shrank over time, probably because he realized how many encounters he’d record and how verbose he was.

I was supposed to be looking for the paranorms Sullens and I had sorted into the maybe pile, but almost immediately I found myself searching for other names.

I’d found an additional entry for Satine.

It was from a few years before she killed the other Heir and was written almost entirely in French.

I’d grabbed my phone to translate it, but when the first paragraph ended up recounting a night Deagan had spent with her in far too much detail, I moved along.

I didn’t find anything on Garion or djinn, nothing on specific spells, and hardly any mention of witches, who were almost always dismissed as insignificant unless they were in a strong coven.

Eventually, I did stumble over a few entries on fey, none of whom I’d heard of before, but I might want to come back to them in the future.

That’s when I realized I’d have to flip through the book all over again if I didn’t come up with a way to track the names and their pages.

Would Deagan freak out if I highlighted the names?

This was an ancient text, historical enough to be in a museum if it hadn’t revealed the existence of the paranormal world. It felt wrong to mark up the pages.

Sticky notes. That was the best solution.

I walked to the kitchen to rummage through the junk drawer. The very crammed-packed drawer. That was my fault, not my parents’. I’d been throwing tiny item after tiny item into it because I didn’t know what else to do with them. I needed to make time to get organized.

Someone knocked on the door. Before I could check the peephole, Astrid called out, “It’s your bestest best friend. Open up!”

After I unlocked the door, Astrid sauntered in carrying a small beaded bag.

“I need thirteen drops of your blood.”

“Um. I’ve been running a little low on that lately.”

Immediately she grimaced. “Right. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. We’ll do this another time.”

“This is for the spell?”

“Yeah. It won’t work without my blood and yours.”

I think she might have mentioned that before.

I couldn’t remember, but she had said our families were close even before The Rain’s first walls were erected.

Astrid’s ancestors had originally performed the null spell, and mine had been present and (mostly) protected by the treaty’s magic ever since.

It made sense to need blood from both of us.

“You already have the coven here,” I said. “I don’t want to waste their time.”

“They helped with that.” She nodded toward my bandaged arm. “So it’s not a complete waste. And it’s cool with them. Really.” She set the beaded bag on the counter. “They’re grateful to have the protection of a coven that requires so little of their time.”

“I still don’t understand that.”

“That’s because you’re not a witch,” she sagely pointed out.

I snorted. Couldn’t argue with that. “Let’s just do it. I don’t want to give Canyon more time to figure out I have the token.”

She studied me. “Are you sure? It’s been, what? Five days since you found it?”

“I’m one hundred percent sure.” I’d drown in anxiety if I didn’t get this behind me.

“Okay then. I need your finger.”

Astrid set out the thirteen witch-glass vials she’d harassed out of Owen. We went over the ritual again, decided that I’d bring the token myself and that Melissa would drive to the location with me as protection.

That’s what made it real. In a few hours, the coven would cast the null spell on Garion’s token, and I’d find out if this plan had been ignorantly risky or if it had been brilliantly clever.

After she left, I sat down with Deagan’s books and a pad of sticky notes.

I couldn’t focus though. My foot kept jumping nervously, and I kept getting distracted.

I switched to a different activity—replying to the vampires who Sullens and I had already cleared.

It only took ten minutes to respond to the four emails, but I’d checked the clock a dozen times in between every cut and paste.

I couldn’t sit anymore. I needed to do something, so I used my phone to pull up the feeds from our security cameras.

My new head of security reported that less than half of them came back online after the power was restored.

They were a waste of money if they didn’t all work.

Plus the way things were going, I needed every inch of my property’s perimeter covered.

A quick scan of an email from the installation company gave me a few ideas to try. I went on a search for a breaker box. Flipping switches seemed like a decent way to get out my nervous energy.

The first box I found caused more cameras to turn off and had no impact on the ones that were already not working. It made no sense. The cameras connected to the electric panel were the farthest away from it.

Maybe it wasn’t exactly a power issue. Maybe I just needed to press a restart button on the actual camera.

Christian might know what to do. He’d helped with the install. I pulled out my phone to text him but stopped halfway through the message. I hadn’t seen him since the compound, where he’d made it clear he had things he needed to do at his gym. In his life.

I slid the phone back into my pocket. I’d already consumed so much of his time and focus. I had no right to ask for more.

A part of me worried he wouldn’t be willing to give more.

Maybe I’d see him when the coven tried the spell.

I closed the breaker box. Turned.

And found myself staring at Blake.