“Listen to me.” Slowly, I approached them, leaving my family in the backyard, near the pulsing heart of our strongest wards. “Thanks to Emily, we know the fae’s routine. We know where and when to find her. Let’s wait for morning. Working together we have a better chance of succeeding. We need her alive and unharmed to find out where the killer’s gone.”

“We’ve heard enough.” Bessemer bent to Aisha’s ear. Her mouth tightened and eyes shot daggers at Imogen, but she took Emily and left. “The time for talking has passed. Blood answers for blood.” Shaking his fist at the moon, he boomed, “Tonight we hunt!”

Bone-chilling howls lit up the night, the wolves’ songs a haunting melody that played while they dispersed.

“Hide behind your wards,” Bessemer taunted. “I’ve a taste for fae blood, and I’m not particular where it comes from.”

“I can’t let you kill her.” I could no more return to my chair and watch the meteor shower with an ear cocked for the sound of Harlow’s screams than he could go home and wait for the dawn. “She’s a good kid.”

At least she had been before Charybdis sank his hooks into her.

She’s human, I almost said in a bid for mercy. But Bessemer was past hearing, and he wouldn’t believe me anyway. It might encourage him, in fact, the hope I was telling the truth and his prey was so much weaker than the rest of us.

Or…she had been. With Charybdis amplifying her powers, nothing was certain.

Not knowing was the worst part.

“Marie was a good kid too.” Tight as a rope stretched thin, his voice strummed with determination. “There are a lot of children here, and I won’t lose another one.” His nostrils flared, and he hesitated when he might have turned. “Where is Cord?”

A pang rocked me. “I don’t know.”

“Convenient that he vanished before the call to hunt was issued,” he noted. “Which side would he choose, do you think?”

“The side he felt was in the right.” His personal sense of honor would permit him to do nothing less.

“The man, perhaps. The wolf? He will answer to me,” he promised. “Make your peace with that.”

Would he? Was that an alpha’s power or an egotist’s expectation? This was the first time the wolf had left my side in days. At this point Graeson was more man than wolf in temperament and, most times, in action. Did that mean he could resist the song of his kin? The lure to run alongside others of his kind? The promise of hot blood to rinse out his mouth? I wasn’t sure. I hoped his will, his memory of Harlow, remained stronger than that.

Isaac crossed to me and slung his arm around my shoulder, grinning coldly at Bessemer. “Happy hunting.”