Page 120 of The Tracker's Revenge

“Sounds risky being a worm,” Eric said. “What if you got swallowed by a bird? Could you have risen from its shit?”

Damien’s jaw twitched. “No. And I wouldn’t have wanted to either. Anyway, once I had enough human sense in me, I found my way to Toni. You know the rest.”

In the end, we had Blaze/Damien to thank for so much. The book that gave us the answer to breaking Jake’s blood covenant with the Blackridges, saving my life by lending me a bit of his energy as I lay dying after Mekare’s attack, and, most importantly, finding me in her clutches.

In his cat brain, he had figured out that Mekare and Stephen were after the cure and not the dagger. And not only that, he’d also guessed the reason. It turned out, the geniuses had poisoned the Dark Donna, surreptitiously slipping her rhabo when her guard was down. It had taken one dose, and the vamp was hooked. Doomed. They had betrayed her, sentenced her to a painful death to be rid of her.

In the beginning, the vamp had been the mastermind of the entire plot. Their initial deal had been to cause unrest by selling rhabo. This was meant to anger vampire leaders and create a rift between them and werewolves. Bernadetta’s scheme was to destroy her competition and, in the void left after the conflict, position herself as the most powerful Skew in St. Louis.

Stephen had been in charge of the drug operation while Mekare’s job had been to free the Unholy Vessel using her magic. As I’d been told, Bernadetta Fiore had uncovered the dreadful item after decades of searching for it, but it had been locked under a powerful spell and had needed strong magic to liberate it.

However, the Donna’s plot had backfired. Big time. Her allies had poisoned her and then pursued me, determined to destroy the only cure and all possibility of the vamp ever surviving their backstabbing assault. They had royally pissed her off, and Bernadetta Fiore was too powerful an enemy to disregard and let live, even in the throes of a ravishing disease.

If we had only listened to Bertram in Liliana’s house, this disaster might’ve been avoided.

“We need to talk,”he’d said, but we hadn’t listened. We’d assumed he’d been there with the hybrid, and we ran.

At length, to Mekare, both Bernadetta and Stephen had been a couple of pawns to her ultimate plan, whatever that was. I imagined she wanted power, but who knew for certain.

What we knew was that Blaze/Damien had led Jake and Eric to Bernadetta and, with her help, they had figured out our enemies’ hiding place. Bernadetta had been searching for the traitors and, discovering that they’d kidnapped me, gave her what she needed to find them. She had a tracker at her services who could tell her the whereabouts of anyone the vampiress had ever desired.

It was a shock to learn that the Donna had a thing for me—or maybe it was for my blood, I wasn’t sure—but I figured that was a good thing, or they would’ve never found me.

All the revelations made my head spin. All week, I’d been in a state of constant stress, and there was still so much more weighing on my mind.

It wasn’t enough that we’d delivered the news of Stephen’s death to Ulfen. That Walter’s body had been desecrated and never found. That I’d been summoned to Wolfskeep for another Pack Rule meeting. That I still needed to track Gonira for Prince Kalyll. That Damien had promised to give Bernadetta the cure in exchange for helping them find me, and I was yet to tell him where it was hidden. That Mekare Graves had been a false client, her check had bounced, and the agency was in shambles. That Craig Blackridge wanted to move the wedding date, and Jake and I had a blood covenant to break. Or that there was a crazy Midnight Witch with a hybrid-making relic in her possession.

No. None of that was enough.

Or in fact, none of that really mattered. Because what was really more than enough was that Rosalina was missing, and I could not deal with anything else until I found her.

Because I would find her. I would not rest until she was back, safe and sound, until I made it up to her for dragging her into a world of danger.