Bryce forced herself to breathe, practically inhaling the peppermint vapors from the diffuser. “There’s a client coming—”

He banged on the gallery door, sealing her fate. “We’re leaving.”

Bryce’s entire body was taut to the point of near-trembling as she and Hunt approached the magi-screens blocking the alley a few blocks away from the Old Square Gate.

She tried to breathe through it, tried all the techniques she’d read and heard about regarding reining in her dread, that sickening plunging feeling in her stomach. None of them worked.

Angels and Fae and shifters milled about the alley, some on radios or phones.

“A jogger found the remains,” Hunt said as people parted to let him pass. “They think it happened sometime last night.” He added carefully, “The 33rd’s still working on getting an ID, but from the clothes, it looks like an acolyte from Luna’s Temple. Isaiah is already asking the temple priestesses who might be missing.”

All sounds turned into a blaring drone. She didn’t entirely remember the walk over.

Hunt edged around the magi-screen blocking the crime scene from view, took one look at what lay there, and swore. He whirled toward her, as if realizing what he was dragging her back into, but too late.

Blood had splashed across the bricks of the building, pooled on the cracked stones of the alley floor, splattered on the sides of the dumpster. And beside that dumpster, as if someone had chucked them out of a bucket, sat clumps of red pulp. A torn robe lay beside the carnage.

The droning turned into a roar. Her body pulled farther away.

Danika howling with laughter, Connor winking at her, Bronson and Zach and Zelda and Nathalie and Thorne all in hysterics—

Then nothing but red pulp. All of them, all they had been, all she had been with them, became nothing more than piles of red pulp.

Gone, gone, gone—

A hand gripped her shoulder. But not Athalar’s. No, Hunt remained where he was, face now hard as stone.

She flinched as Ruhn said at her ear, “You don’t need to see this.”

This was another murder. Another body. Another year.

A medwitch even knelt before the body, a wand buzzing with firstlight in her hands, trying to piece the corpse—the girl—back together.

Ruhn tugged her away, toward the screen and open air beyond—

The movement shook her loose. Snapped the droning in her ears.

She yanked her body free from his grip, not caring if anyone else saw, not caring that he, as head of the Fae Aux units, had the right to be here. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

Ruhn’s mouth tightened. But he looked over her shoulder to Hunt. “You’re an asshole.”