Page 87 of The Tracker's Rage

And if I was wrong, then the world had really gone mad.

Chapter 31

The next evening, everyonewas crammed in the tiny lobby at the agency. Me, Rosalina, Jake, Damien, and even Eric Lone himself.

There was a metal bucket filled with ice on top of Rosalina’s desk, and a nice bottle of champagne that Eric had provided. I had bought clear plastic cups that looked like wine glasses and a tray of hors d’oeuvres that included tiny quiche pies, cold cuts, and bite-sized crab cakes.

“We make a kickass team,” I said, picking up the bottle and raising it high.

Damien shrugged one shoulder and sat on the small sofa, gathering his cloak to one side and setting his top hat on the coffee table.

Eric joined him and sat, crossing his leg. “Fill my cup to the brim, please.”

I huffed. “Fill it yourself!”

Trying to have a celebration with this bunch was sad.

I poured myself some bubbly and paraded in front of Eric, sipping the champagne and making pleasure sounds in the back of my throat.

“Women these days,” Damien said, rolling his copper eyes.

“This is not the eighteen hundreds, grandpa.” Rosalina got her own champagne and, after tasting it, said, “good choice.”

“Grandpa?” Damien said, sounding offended. “I’m nobody’s grandpa, and, for your information, I wasn’t born in the eighteen hundreds.”

Rosalina made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “You were born around 1905 or thereabouts, so same difference.”

The mage’s eyes narrowed, and he didn’t argue, which probably meant that was a close guess.

Jake poured his own champagne, too. He knew better than anyone that expecting me to play the dutiful female was pressing all the wrong buttons. I was glad to do something for anyone as long as I didn’t feel they were taking advantage of me or being sexist. Otherwise, I turned hostile. In my opinion, everyone had to pull their own weight.

But enough of that. I wanted to celebrate that we were alive and that we’d stopped Bernadetta and Stephen’s evil scheme and there were no hybrid monsters loose in the city.

After our battle, we had all left the temple, taking the couple of werewolves who were still alive with us. Damien had patched up their worst injuries, doing a fairly good job despite the fact that he wasn’t a healer. We offered to take them to a hospital afterward, but they just wanted to get as far away from St. Louis as they could. The ordeal had left them terrified as well aspackless. It turned out that the ten werewolves had all belonged to a small pack that occupied a reduced territory outside the city limits, and they had nothing to go back to.

Afterward, we’d anonymously called the police. The massacre at the temple would raise a lot of questions from law enforcement, and they would be looking for someone to blame for all those deaths. To the law, murder was murder, and we would all end up in jail for the deaths of those vampires whether or not we had a good reason for killing them. Thankfully, Damien seemed to be an expert at removing evidence from crime scenes, and he assured us there was no way they would be able to trace the chaos back to us in any shape or form.