The Second Coming by SM Reine

Author:SM Reine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Iris Books

Chapter Fourteen

“Melinda isn’t an OPA employee.” Henry hung up the phone and paced back to Elise, where she sat in the condo’s living room. He had already healed the bruises of the battle. The shadows under his eyes were exhaustion. “There’s no trackers for her.”

“The OPA has trackers on its employees?” Elise asked.

“Magical ones,” he said.

With the sanctuary’s complicity, the OPA could track its people and bomb any city it wanted. What had become of Rylie’s pack? How had she grown such power, and left it to people like this Deirdre Tombs—a woman that Elise did not know? How would the Alpha use this power when Abel died? What would the next Alpha do?

And why the hell had Elise let it get like this? Because she’d wanted to ignore reality while floating in eternity with James?

Victoria was lying on Elise’s lap, her spine resting along the line of Elise’s thighs. She was still staring at nothing. Her quiet alertness should have been a welcome change from the shrieking. But the staring…the blindness…

Henry sat beside them with bandages. “Take your shirt off the rest of the way. I’ll patch your bullet wound.”

Elise was sitting with her shirt lifted above her breasts for convenient nursing. She had no modesty to protect, and she couldn’t imagine Henry was interested in the bulging, leaking boulders that still looked infected. She took her shirt off. The nyctimus had only given her a flesh wound.

He smoothed cream over the skin. “Does it hurt?”

“Not as much as mastitis,” she said.

“You’re really something, do you know that?”

“I’m much more ‘something’ than you know.” She hissed at the cool sting of the balm on her chest. It brought Henry close enough that she could smell his hair and see his unsettlingly bright irises.

“Did you find what you wanted in the files?” Henry asked.

“No,” she said.

In the records stolen from the Sun Valley shelter, Elise had found that a man named Jacques Offenbach had spent the last twenty-four hours in its short-term housing. He had checked in shortly after the bombing of Craven’s.

It was a pseudonym, she was certain. Offenbach was well-known for composing “Orpheus and the Underworld,” and was not a homeless witch passing through Reno.

James used to call himself Orpheus. He had been in the shelter.

And the Traveler had wanted Elise to have faith in him.

So yes, Elise had found what she expected in the records Henry retrieved. But she hadn’t found what she wanted.

Elise plucked another set of foam earplugs off of the coffee table. She had spent the last several minutes attempting to whittle them into custom shapes. “I have to locate Melinda again. She’ll be the easiest way to get what I need.”

“What did she show you?” Henry asked.

She attempted to insert the plugs into Victoria’s ears. They were too big. “I need Melinda,” Elise said.

Henry raked a hand through his hair. “All right. Let’s try surveillance footage from around the city. Just have to hope she hasn’t left yet.” City surveillance was no surprise after the revelation of trackers and bombers, but Elise felt it like fingers of venom in her gut.

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