Cole ignored Wu and his accusations, his meltwater gaze fixated on me. “Are you all right?”
The black stubble covering his scalp had been trimmed recently, and his face was freshly shaven. As usual, his square jaw bulged as he ground his teeth against words he would never speak but that seemed forever on the tip of his tongue. The zigzag pattern of his nose, each kink a reminder of the violent life he led, no longer startled me. Neither did the missing tip of his left ear. They were simply sums that made up the whole of Cole Heaton.
I had to moisten my tongue before I could speak. “Fine.”
“Who’s your friend?” Thom tracked Wu with sharp interest, his narrowed eyes glinting bright emerald, the turn of his head causing a hank of dark blond hair to tickle the golden skin on his wide forehead. All ropey muscle and lightning reflexes, the man looked more like a cheetah than the boxy tomcat lurking under his skin. “He smells… delicious.”
Leave it to Thom to make things weird. Well, okay, weirder.
“Everyone, this is Adam Wu.” I gestured around the gathering. “Adam Wu, this is everyone.”
A frown gathered in the tight folds between Miller’s eyebrows, and he rested his hand on Thom’s shoulder to halt his silent prowl forward. Thom hissed at the restraint but quit his stalking behavior.
“We need to talk,” Cole rumbled to me. “In private.”
“Sure.” He had avoided me like a biblical plague since the night I cost him one of his people, and one of mine too. “We can go around back to the picnic bench.” I wasn’t sure I could handle being in an enclosed space with him, not after the way we’d left things. “It’s in the shade, so it won’t be as hot.”
“Stay put,” he ordered Miller and Thom. “Keep an eye on Wu.”
“They aren’t yours to command,” Wu reminded him. “Neither am I.”
Leaving them to finish their pissing match, I circled the house and headed toward the lone oak overhanging a picnic bench in desperate need of sanding and refinishing. I was too fidgety to sit, so I leaned against the tree trunk and waited on Cole to join me.
“The house looks good,” he said into the tense silence. “You didn’t have to do this alone. You could have asked for our help.”
“Miller and Thom are the only ones who have reached out since that night.” I shrugged like the snub didn’t hurt, like going back to playing human hadn’t made me feel like my skin was stretched too tight over my bones now that I knew the truth. “I figured that must mean the rest of you wanted things to go back to how they were before.”
“There is no going back.” His long gait swallowed the distance between us, and he braced one wide palm on the bark over my head. The snap closure on the thick leather band concealing the metal under his skin glinted in the sunlight. “You don’t get to pretend you don’t know what you are anymore.” He leaned in close. “War is here. Famine will be soon. You can’t hide from your birthright.”
“I’m not.” I had been… adjusting. Absorbing. Making peace with the fact my entire identity was a lie. Seven days to stitch the rips in my psyche back together sounded more than fair to me. “I’ve been here, at home, this whole time. You could have visited. If you didn’t want to see me, you could have called. If you didn’t want to hear me, you could have texted.” I met his gaze and held it even when his cold fury gave me chills. “Who’s really hiding here, Cole?”
A growl pumped through his chest, and he didn’t bother smoothing its ragged edges. We were past all that. “We are your coterie, your strength. You don’t get to abandon us again.”
“So that’s what this is about.” The rough bark tugged on my hair as I angled my face toward him. “You’re not just mad at me for avoiding you, you thought I would ditch you again.” Cole had explained how the coterie waited years for me to find them, but I hadn’t known to look. “I wanted time alone to get my head on straight, okay, I’ll cop to that, but when you didn’t call, I assumed you were angry over…”
The deal I’d made with Kapoor. Over Portia. Over Maggie. Everything.
“I’m not mad.” The lie flattened his lips into a harsh line. “I don’t have the luxury of anger.”
“Keep telling yourself that, big guy.” I blasted out a frustrated sigh. “Why are you really here?”
“Thom and I are working a case up in Ludlow.” He straightened from his lean and lowered his arm. “We found something you ought to see.”
“I have to work in a few hours, and I can’t go tomorrow. That’s when the crew arrives to install the new bay window.” I tucked a sticky curl behind my ear. “How about the next day?”
“How about now?” He glanced over his shoulder toward the driveway. “I brought it with me.”
I followed his gaze. “Is this something Wu should see?”
“Who is he to you?” Cole sharpened each word until the next question cut deep. “Why is he here?”
“Kapoor sent him to check up on me.” I wet my lips. “He’s my new partner.”
Cole folded his fingers into his palms, clenching his hands into meaty fists at his sides. “I see.”
Out of my depth, I sidestepped his quiet anger and returned to the driveway to find the Mexican standoff still in progress. I winked at Miller then grinned at Thom on my way to the rear of the SUV emblazoned with the familiar White Horse logo of a muscular white warhorse stamping its left front hoof. Wu, whose presence I had chosen to ignore, sidled up to me at the exact same moment Cole arrived, and they locked glares over my head.
“Cole,” I prompted him. “You said you have something to show me?”
“Brace yourself.” He opened the hatch and reached for a lumpy towel. “This is the third one of these we’ve found.” He peeled back the fabric to reveal the mummified remains of a cat. I might have believed the corpse was decades old except for its modern collar with the owner’s Twitter handle engraved on its tag. “Natural mummification takes forty plus days depending on environmental conditions. This is the work of forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Two of the animals were chipped, so the identifications are positive, and the timelines are solid.”
I got a bad feeling about where he was headed. “Any ideas what caused this?”
“An ubaste is my guess,” Wu cut in.
I swung my head toward him. “A who-what-now?”
Cole answered for him. “An ubaste is a low-level charun that feeds on the life force of small animals.”
“That’s good, right?” Stark relief swirled through me. “That means it’s no danger to humans.”
Wu pinched a fold of the cat’s brittle skin between his fingers, and the desiccated flesh crumbled. “Humans are animals.”
“Not you too.” I popped his hand before he ruined more evidence. “You’re with the NSB. Doesn’t that mean you value human life?”
“No.” He dusted his hands. “All it means is I value my life.”
A twinge of conscience almost had me apologizing to him, for what I wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t my fault he was here. He had made his choice to cozy up to the NSB the same as me, and now both of us had to live with our decisions.
“You’re saying this thing is a danger to small people.” I checked with Cole. “As in, children.”
Grim certainty darkened his mood. “Yes.”
“What can we do about it?” We couldn’t let it run free.
“We hunt it.” Cole bared his teeth in a feral smile he aimed at Wu. “That’s what the NSB expects, right?”
“Charun who can’t be rehabilitated must be killed.” Wu didn’t sugarcoat his truth. “That includes you, him, and the rest of your coterie.”