Done serving the dishes, Linus straightened. “I’m perfectly capable of—”
“Sweetie.” Bo turned a kind smile on him. “You’re about to marry my alpha’s best friend. Grier is pack, and that makes you pack. Pack never walks alone.” She dusted egg crumble off his sleeve. “And Lethe would kick my ass if something happened to you this close to the wedding.”
Rather than injure Bo’s feelings, he conceded to an escort. “All right.”
Ty shot up, a hop in his step, and bounded over to Linus.
“Where are we going?” He bit into a rolled-up pancake with a sausage link center. “Are you going to scythe someone when we get there?”
“Woolworth House,” he said, amused. “And not if I can help it.”
The ice in his core grew thicker each time he took a life, and only Grier’s belief he was a good man had kept him from giving in to the cold that pulsed in time with his heart.
“Cool.” He stole a muffin off a friend’s plate then shot out the door, pausing to yell, “Later, losers.”
A half-dozen boys his age hurled parting obscenities back while stomping their feet to make it sound as if they were in pursuit. Ty should have known better than to run. Not because it would trigger their prey drive, but because no self-respecting gwyllgi would abandon a plate of food.
Linus exited the den and began the short walk back to Woolly.
“So.” Ty fell in step with him. “How many people have you killed?”
The question, even when delivered with youthful guile, caused his skin to crawl. “How many have you killed?”
The boy ruffled his floppy hair with a nervous hand. “Rabbits or…?”
“People.”
“None.” He stumbled over his feet. “I wouldn’t…” He caught his balance before he fell. “I mean…” He fumbled to correct himself. “I would to protect the pack but…”
“You wouldn’t feel good about it later.”
“No,” Ty said slowly. “I guess you don’t either?”
“There would be something fundamentally wrong with me if I did.”
“I get it.” He jingled the chain anchoring his wallet to his jeans. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
The body count Linus had amassed while acting as the Potentate of Atlanta was a burden he alone would bear. Not even Grier knew his tally, an act of cowardice he wasn’t brave enough to rectify. “Do you have any other questions?”
Eyes bright, he jumped right in. “How did you land a girl as hot as Grier?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and he meant it.
“Oh.” Ty deflated. “I thought maybe you cast a spell on her.”
“Love isn’t real if it’s forced.”
“Theoretically, though.” He forged ahead. “It’s possible?”
“Most things are possible,” Linus allowed. “A thing is only impossible until you’ve done it.”
“You’re a pretty wise dude.” Ty nodded with respect. “I bet that’s why Grier chose you.”
A flurry of activity on the lawn at Woolworth House distracted Linus from the teen’s interrogation.
“Wait here.” He indicated a bench set well away from the property line. “Keep watch, but don’t come any closer until I give you the all clear.”
The cleaners worked fast, but you could never be too careful when it came to gwyllgis and bronze.
“Sure thing.” He stretched out the length of the concrete. “Mind if I play a game on my phone?”
“Go ahead.”
With his well-intended escort otherwise occupied, Linus went in search of Gilly. He found her swabbing the steps leading into the rear garden, evidence of their hasty departure.
Frozen at the age of thirty, with her wide blue eyes and sleek blonde hair, she could have passed for a college student on the campus at Strophalos University, where he was once a professor. But she was human, or at least she started out that way.
A changeling who escaped her adoptive fae parents, Gilly fled back to her human birth family at the age of ten to discover she had been replaced with an identical copy. She waited until after dark, crept back into the house, and drowned the thing in the tub, believing it to be a bundle of twigs or handful of ribbons enchanted to look like her. Except the spell didn’t break. The duplicate hadn’t been real, but it hadn’t been fake either. It had been a sick fae child its parents wanted gone before their clan noticed its weakness and killed it. It died anyway.
“Hate to pull you out of bed,” she said, rising at his approach, “but I knew you would want to see this.”
“What have you found?”
She waved him into the house after her. “You saw the origin, correct?”
“A bouquet of flowers.”
“There was more.” She brought him to the counter and indicated a plastic evidence baggie. “This was in the bottom of the vase.”
Crimson liquid sloshed inside the hollow glass bangle when he lifted it. “An avowal.”
Danill Volkov had given Grier one identical to it, down to the ornate clasp, but this was a clever forgery, not the original. Linus had broken that one to use the blood inside as ink for the tattoo that protected her against vampiric compulsion.
“You get how rare these are? How valuable?” She couldn’t bring herself to touch it. “Who would hide it in a vase?”
“Someone who wanted to send a message but knew their gift would be turned away at the door.”
“You’re getting married soon.” She began piecing it together. “There are bouquets all over the house.” Eight others had been disassembled in the same way. “Probably safe to assume that if a necromancer or human opened the door, they wouldn’t have spotted anything wrong with the flowers.”
Two or three bouquets had arrived with fine glitter dusting the petals, so no. Only a gwyllgi would have noticed, especially since the concentration required Lethe to press her nose against the petals before experiencing a reaction.
“Without the bronze powder,” he said, thinking it through, “the avowal wouldn’t have been found until the flowers wilted, and the vases were dumped and cleaned for storage.”
“Then your gwyllgi friends weren’t the intended target, just a necessary catalyst.”
Linus set the bangle down before he crushed it in his fist and ruined a damning piece of evidence. “Who delivered these flowers?”
“Flower Power.” She rolled her eyes. “Check the bottom of the vase.”
A tie-dye swirl in red, yellow, and orange made it hard to focus on the white logo hidden within. “That’s on River Street, right?”
“Near one of the candy kitchens, the one with the caramel apples as big as your fist.”
“I’ll speak with the owner, see if they can tell us who made the purchase.”
The shop name rang familiar, but he couldn’t put a finger on why he should know it.
“Your fiancée is the Potentate of Savannah. Are you sure she shouldn’t be handling this?”
The avowal drew his eye again. “No.”
Danill Volkov’s obsession with her put her and everyone around her at risk. For that reason, despite how the power writhing under his skin howled at him to protect her at any cost, he wouldn’t hide this development from her.