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Chapter 8

I DROVE THROUGH the city, guiding the vehicle around odd obstacles Atlanta threw in our way Curran relaxed in the passenger seat, his eyes distant

"What are you thinking about?" I asked

"Their house," he said "When I get my hands on his kidnapper, I’ll break his neck"

"I keep thinking about Eduardo’s stalker," I said "George said Eduardo had rented the house six weeks ago, about a week after her talk with Mahon You said the stalker didn’t s to make as muchjobs There wasn’t much interaction with the outside world, just the Guild and George"

"The stalker must be connected to the Guild," Curran said "So"

"Yes We need to get a couy is soet a record?"

"We can’t" I leaned back in the seat "The log only goes back a few days Knowing the Clerk, he closed the books before he left and filed everything To get at the cos He won’t do it"

"Why not?"

"Because technically it would be illegal without a warrant, because the Guild could be sued if Eduardo’s kidnapping is connected to it, and because he is a Grade A asshole who enjoys using what little power he has If there is no profit in it for him, he won’t even twitch his pinkie If we had the Clerk, I could talk his, because the Clerk had the ultimate responsibility for them and because the safety of a Guild one Mark won’t do us any favors, and Bob and his creon’t either"

I had briefly contes, but I wasn’t sure where Mark had moved them to, since they weren’t in the Clerk’s counter safe And the Guild was never e off this heist while a dozen et the Clerk back," Curran said

"You would have to get theh money to keep him on in the first place and I’m not sure the Guild committee would even want him back They are all set to raid the pension fund and call it quits"

Curran’s eyes grew distant again "I’ll take care of it"

The sun had set by the time I turned onto our street and I saw our house, its s lit up by the bluish glow of feylanterns inside The silver in the bars shielding its s glowed slightly, reacting with ht, as if coated in fluorescent paint, low of the security door

I had spent the firstup wards all around our five-acre plot, and as I turned into our driveway, the reassuring h the defensive spell slid over me, as if the house patted my hair

My stomach hurt fro pain My sides hurt, too I was tired, starving, and filthy, and I smelled like three-day-old roadkill The spider ichor had dried to a cementlike substance in my hair I would’ve killed for a shower

Across the street, Heather Savell finished speaking with Mrs Walton and started toward us Curran locked his teeth I had no doubt that, in her head, Heather was preparing a speech on behalf of our neighborhood’s nonexistent HOA She had already kindly pointed out to us that e instead of putting them on the side of the house and that we had a two-foot-wide bald patch in our lahere the workers had dug up the ground to get to a burst pipe

I had very low tolerance for people who tried to tell me what to do Curran had even less He’d lived in a cabin in the woods until he elve Then loups killed his fa in the forest, until Mahon found him Two years later Curran became the Beast Lord When he spoke, everyone in the Keep went silent When he entered a rooht to hier than thirty seconds Living aular people wasn’t in his fra to put him into a charitable frame of mind The fact that Heather had sprinkled cayenne pepper on her lawn didn’t endear her to him either Not that he would bite Heather’s head off, but I could see hi it in there for a bit