Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
That piece of information hadn’t been released anywhere. Neither the fact that all three victims had been found dressed in red, nor that the dresses had obviously been made at speed, the seams ragged and the cut far from professional. He might believe them beautiful, but even Eleri knew no woman would choose to put those creations on her body.
“Now, move,” he ordered. “You have thirty seconds to get that drink down you or she’s dead.” He hung up.
And Eleri was out of time.
Throwing her phone under the desk, she just managed to push the emergency assist button built into the back. Invisible unless you knew it was there, it would send up a red flag with the Quatro Cartel, along with a GPS location. She wished she’d reset it to Adam’s phone, but they’d had no time…would’ve had even less if she’d left this morning.
Even if that failed, Dahlia would realize something was up when Eleri stopped forwarding her the IDs of the vehicle owners, would no doubt send a falcon to check. Eleri had to do whatever she could to give them a trail to follow in the few short seconds she had left.
Lifting her hand to her mouth as she ran, hoping the movement would be hidden in the motion of her flight—or that the Sandman was too distracted by excitement to notice, she bit down on the thin skin on the inside of her wrist hard enough to draw serious blood, then dropped her hand back by her side. Someone in WindHaven could track by scent—they’d traced Malia to the parking lot.
This was Eleri’s chance to give them a stronger trail to follow.
The numbness inside her that had stopped her from feeling Adam’s touch in all its primal intensity also insulated her from physical pain.
Her suit jacket slid neatly over the wound, covering it from view.
Whatever she was about to drink would no doubt affect her ability to make conscious decisions, but her blood would continue to drip. Whether in a vehicle or elsewhere, it’d leave a trace.
The silver flask was exactly where he’d said it’d be.
Silver flask.
She had it, his identity. But it made no sense. And she had no way to let anyone know because her brain was shutting down, whatever drug she’d just ingested acting fast.
Her knees went out from under her, her mind a blank.
• • •
Adam zeroed in toward the purple signal flare that had just gone up.
That color was reserved for him and to be used only in emergencies. Landing on the Canyon plateau at rapid speed, he shifted—to find Kavi standing there with a comm in hand.
“Call from some guy named Bram,” the nurse said. “Says Eleri sent out an SOS. Dahlia’s already on her way to the station—I was helping scan the road surveillance footage and Eleri stopped responding to our messages right before this call came in.”
Heart thundering, Adam grabbed the comm. “Bram, where’s Eleri?”
“Her phone sent out the alert from the Enforcement station in Raintree. No response to PsyNet attempts at contact. Her shields look normal, but as a J, she has heavy-duty ones that won’t show any external damage until it’s too late.” No attempt at calm in that voice. “Adam, she’s never sent out an SOS in all the years I’ve known her.”
“I’ll call you from the station.” A glance at the ID screen and he’d memorized Bram’s call code before he shifted and took off at brutal speed.
Beaufort was just jogging into the station when he landed. The detective took Adam’s shift in stride. “Adam, what—”
But Adam was already inside. Even as the senior detective threw him a pair of sweatpants from a gym bag, he’d already spotted Dahlia at the far end of the station, near the back door. “D!”
“Eleri bled here,” she said, because unlike him, Dahlia had a dazzling sense of smell.
It wasn’t because she was a gyrfalcon. Neither peregrines nor gyrfalcons had a great sense of smell, but while Dahlia’s father was a gyrfalcon, her mother was a vulture. Most changelings with parents from different species shifted into one, with little to no crossover, but Dahlia had inherited her mother’s acute sense of smell alongside her father’s raptor form.
It made her one hell of an asset.
“He’s got her.” Teeth gritted, Adam pulled on the pants because he knew his nakedness would distract any humans or Psy in the vicinity. Beaufort was having difficulty even looking at Dahlia. “How far can you track her?”
The answer was—not far. “Droplet here,” she said after taking a few steps outside. “Nothing else. He put her in a vehicle.” She looked up.
“Go! Eleri and Malia, hunt for both their scents.”
Shifting in front of him, Dahlia took off on a powerful gust of wind, a stunning bird of snowy white with gray and white top feathers who would be a ghost if she hunted in the snow. Her scent receptors were some of the best in the sky, but she had to have a pungent smell to track from above. The traces left by Jacques’s shooter hadn’t been enough, had dissipated on the wind by the time of her arrival.