Page 45 of Jagged Souls

“When we’re finished with Antonio, I’m going to kill you,” I vow.

He winks. “You’ll have to fight your mom for that honor.”

I breathe out through gritted teeth. Glancing around me, I wonder if I’d be better off on my own, but we’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. Trees stretch in every direction, and the clean air and colder temperature tells me we’re on top of some mountain. It’ll take me hours to get down, even longer to drive. She’ll be dead in that time, so I force myself to speak. “I can feel her dying.”

He snorts. “Doubtful. Antonio won’t kill her this quickly, and if she was doing it herself, she’d be finished by now. So sit.” He gestures at a tree beside me. In the blink of an eye, he’s where he just pointed, perching on the branch near the trunk. The fucker is even kicking his feet. The urge to set this whole forest on fire is doused only by the knowledge that he’d just phase away.

“Come on up,” he coos. “There’s room for two.”

“I’m not climbing the fucking tree,” I snap. “I answered your question. Now phase –”

“It feel any different?”

“What?”

“The bond.”

I still, realizing it feels the same as when we first arrived here. It’s weaker than in St. Augustine, but it isn’t weak. It’s stable.

“The stronger a bond feels,” Aleric explains, “the farther away you are. Connected souls don’t like being far apart, so they practically scream at you until you get back together. Annoying, right?”

“How do you know all this?” Blood bonds are exclusive to witch partnerships.

A chill races through me as I recall Mother mentioning Caden left because of something she did. Did she fucking blood bond with his ass–

“I read it in a book,” he says. “Your father –” He pauses. “Your fake father was pathetically ‘in love’” –he air quotes– “with Sau. He wouldn’t have cursed her. So tell me how he really died.”

“He found something out about her, left for nearly two decades, then came back and killed himself cursing her. If you want the next answer, fucking phase.”

He stares at me for a moment, eying me up like prey. Then he’s gone. I curse as I reach for my phone. Before my fingertips enter my pocket, he appears in front of me.

“Done,” Aleric says. “But I phased twice to come back, so now you owe me two –”

I pull out my phone to call Khalid.

He laughs as he transports us to another part of the woods. “No cell service here,” he says cheerfully.

“Aleric,” I warn. Vlad, his second-in-command, might not want to lead the Blood Fangs, but he’s about to not have a fucking choice.

“Tell me what really happened,” he says, “and I’ll hold all my other questions until after we find Micha.”

My jaw tightens, but I shove my phone back into my pocket. “Caden killed himself cursing her, probably because he figured out I was fucking yours. And if you don’t think my father was capable of doing that, that’s because you didn’t fucking know him. Now phase me that way.” I point to my right.

“Oh, I knew him pretty well. He’s quite a talker after a hard fuck.” He grins as he studies my face. “Now you have questions too. Good. I won’t have to hunt you down to have our chat.” Grabbing my arm, he phases us out of the woods.

He stays true to his word. The only questions he asks are how strong the bond feels so he knows how far to go. We jump another half-dozen times, narrowing down where she is, but vampires can’t phase anywhere they haven’t been and memorized.

The closest we can get is still too fucking far away. I’m left with a search area that’s hundreds of square miles wide, somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia, well inside Death Hunt territory. We can’t linger for more than a few seconds at a time either, lest a werewolf catches our scent.

When we land back home, I’m fucking furious. At Aleric. At Antonio. At Mother.

At anyone and everyone in this world other than her.

But most of all, I’m furious with myself. I didn’t leave enough guards on her because of my paranoia. After Talon betrayed us, I haven’t been able to trust even my brothers. And I wasn’t smart enough to realize what Antonio had planned. I promised her I would protect her.

I promised her.

But all I’ve done is failed her and our little girl.