Bones walked over to her, his aura crackling with barely controlled rage.

“When you sicced your ghostly little fiends on me the first time, I wanted to rip your head off. Doing it again tonight makes me really want to, but being forced to watch as they tore into my wife?”

He reached out, caressing her neck with a deceptively gentle touch.

“That makes me want to kill you so much, I can scarcely think of anything else,” he finished in a lethal whisper.

Then his hand closed around her throat, tightening until cracking noises were the only sound in the room. Marie’s hazelnut eyes began to fill with red, and the Remnants started to shift restlessly.

“Bones,” I said sharply. “Don’t.”

If we wanted to save Katie, we needed Marie. If we killed her, we were hastening a potential war with ghouls, and while we might manage to evade the Law Guardians, with Marie’s network of ghosts, anyone she wanted to find, she would, and sooner rather than later.

“We came to make you an offer,” I went on. “One that will be mutually beneficial.”

With Bones’s fist tightened so much that his fingers touched, she couldn’t laugh, but her mouth stretched in a pained smile.

“She can’t talk unless you let her go,” I said in a sterner voice.

He released her with obvious reluctance though his power remained coiled around her neck. Not tight; loose, like a snake deciding whether or not it was hungry.

Marie waited until her neck healed back to its normal shape before she spoke.

“What is your offer?”

“We’ll give you the people responsible for creating a cross-species child: Richard Trove and Jason Madigan. You can execute them to solidify your position as queen of the ghouls. In return, we want you to swear by your blood that you will call off your people and meet all our previous demands about the little girl and ourselves.”

Some of the hostility drained from her expression.

“I know she is your child, Reaper, but you must understand that nothing except her death will stop our races from warring.”

The words weren’t a surprise; the emotions they stirred were. Fangs that had receded jumped out as I fought a strong urge to rip her throat open for daring to say such a thing.

“That’s why you’re going to tell everyone that you already killed her,” I responded in a voice far calmer than I felt.

Disbelief creased her smooth, café latte skin.

“If the truth were discovered, my people would tear me apart!”

Bones’s smile was a mixture of ice and steel.

“Hence your motivation to keep your word should your honor prove vulnerable.”

Marie glowered at him for a moment. Then she let out a deep sigh.

“Even if I wished to, what you ask is impossible.”