Forget About Midnight (Alexa O'Brien, Huntress #9)

It took several tries before I could suck enough air into my lungs to force words out. Being a vampire didn’t eliminate pain, though I was appreciative of the speedy healing. “Motherfucker.”


I met Kale’s gaze across the distance where he stood with a ball of silver fire blazing in his palm. With a slight shake of my head, I pushed to my feet. We couldn’t take on Shya and win. Our only choice was to let it go. Vengeance against Shya would come, but it would have to be some other way.

“You should leave now.” Shya tugged at the cuffs of his suit, as if throwing me around had rumpled it again.

“Me?” I gaped at him. “You’re the uninvited party. You can’t kick me out of my own murder scene.”

Shya surveyed the room with a strange little half smile that reflected some inner thought he wasn’t about to share. “Had you planned on staying until the FPA shows up? I assume Briggs will resume tracking you once your vampire is done with him.”

I clutched the edge of the island counter behind me. A piece of the faux stone broke off beneath the pressure of my grip. “Wait, what?”

“Arys is playing with Agent Briggs tonight. At this very moment he’s luring a team of Briggs’s men into a massacre in the River Valley. I’m sure it will be spectacular.”

I tried to feel something like shock or surprise. But it was Arys, and I felt no surprise at all that he would do something so dire. He was taking on Briggs as a ploy to throw the Feds off my trail. He was doing it to protect me.

Turning away from the sight of Shya’s eagerly expectant stare, Kale’s neutral calm, and the mess of blood and bodies, I leaned on the island and drummed my fingers atop the bottle-littered surface. I just needed a moment to gather my thoughts and to blink back the blood tears that filled my eyes.

The yearning that seized me was sudden and unbearable, bordering on painful. It was an emotional pain though, rooted in the very essence of who I was. I choked back the ragged groan that stuck in my throat. My energy would betray me if I didn’t numb out the agony of longing for Arys.

“So why do you want me to leave?” I spun back to face Shya, careful to avoid eye contact with Kale. “What are you up to?”

“You don’t really want to know.” Shya’s expression was purposefully vacant. He was toying with me.

The way he was looking at the carnage gave me an uneasy feeling. I sighed and checked to make sure I had everything that I’d come in with. “You’re right. I don’t. But tell me anyway.”

Shya appeared to consider. Then with a short nod and a raised brow, he said, “Lucky for you, I have many uses for the death energy lingering in this house. I’m going to reap all that I can as soon as you go on your merry way. I may even clean up your mess. Or I may just leave it for Briggs. I haven’t decided yet.”

It was strangely fascinating to me that both Shya and Briggs worked to conceal supernatural activity from human eyes. A demon and a man shouldn’t have the same agenda. Although I suspected that their motivations were different.

Briefly I considered arguing. It wasn’t worth it. Shya was exhausting merely because he always had a retort or a countermove. And he never ran out of things to say.

Stifling an exasperated sigh, I made my way toward the door. This night had gone from a little mad to downright batshit crazy. I was so done with it.

Kale went ahead of me to scope out the exterior. If Briggs was dealing with Arys then he was not going to be a problem for us tonight. I trusted Shya would not allow the police to discover such a scene. It was important to him to keep the creatures of the night a myth, a Hollywood trope dredged up from old folklore. Either way, I was beyond caring. Human authorities were the least of my current worries.

“Hey, Shya,” I paused, wrestling with the question that rose up from the place where I stored my personal fears. “The Dragon Claw… is it useless to me now? Do you want it back?”

Asking the demon any question that I wanted a truthful answer to was more than a little stupid. Still, I needed to know. The Dragon Claw had been created to kill vampires. It didn’t even need to pierce the heart. It lay inside its velvet-lined box in the trunk of my car, untouched. I had been too wary to touch it since I turned.

“Of course not,” he snapped, looking to the ceiling as if unable to comprehend my idiocy. “It was created for you, with your DNA. If a slight slip of the blade is what’s got you worried, then let me assure you that it would take much more than that to kill you. That dagger knows you. I designed it that way.”

He could have been lying, but my gut told me he spoke the truth. Shya didn’t really want me dead. It would rob him of the chance to torment me.

“It’s all clear,” Kale announced from the front step.

I followed him out, leaving Shya to reap some kind of mystical benefit from my slaughter. That right there gave me pause, made me reconsider my reckless actions.