Across the room, Graeson sat in a far corner staring out a broken window into the marsh. A paper plate piled high with food rested on his knees, but he hadn’t eaten a bite. The others pretended not to notice, but I stared, hoping the weight of my gaze would turn his head and we could talk about where to go from here. But his attention belonged to the swaying grasses, not to me.

Slurping noises brought my attention back to Dell, whose face was smeared with hot sauce. A wing bone stuck to her bottom lip, and she chewed one end the way a farmer might grind a wheat stem between his teeth.

The makeshift table wobbled when I nudged my plate across it. “I need to clear my head.”

The bone fell onto her lap. “But the food will be gone when we get back.”

“That’s okay.” Careful not to jar the others at the table, I stood and inched past them. “I’m not hungry.”

“Well, I am.” She grabbed a handful of napkins and wiped her face. Most of the sauce had dried and stuck to her chin. “Come on, Camille. Ten minutes. Just long enough for me to go for fourths. I’ll never make it to fifths with this crowd.”

The itch beneath my skin intensified the longer I stood there with the wargs staring at me. The pack bond at work no doubt. Gossiping about the kidnapee where she couldn’t hear them. How polite. The female warg tucked her plate to her chest and released a warning growl. Before the nearest man could stop me, I snagged an entire untouched bucket of chicken, thrust it into Dell’s arms and started walking.

“Hey,” he protested.

“Haden.” One word from Graeson ended the quarrel before it began.

I withered Haden with a glance and then hit the porch as though the pack were nipping at my heels. Or worse, its beta. The muggy air stank of old house and wet dog. The wolves had been in the water again, scenting the sandbars for fresh signs the kelpie had passed through. When the kelpie’s scent trail had vanished at the edge of the parking lot, the Garzas suspected magical intervention, but there was no handy Fury to blame this time.

The longer we chased Charybdis the more convinced I became he and the kelpie were two separate entities working toward a common goal. Catching two killers was a daunting prospect since I had only ever registered one magical signature at the crime scenes. We had blamed the erasure spell in Alabama on the Fury, but maybe we were wrong. Maybe it was Charybdis scrubbing his presence from the kelpie’s kill sites so the conclave focused on the killer responsible for the wet work.