Chapter 20 - Bloodblades And Bodies
Flint stood by the water, fifty yards upstream from the BBOC store and the launch where their water tours started, and stared upriver at the sea of cops, photographers, and crime scene technicians that had been swarming his property since early that morning.
It had all started with a panicked call from Bryce that woke Flint up from a vivid dream about him and Goldie, tangled together as river water rushed over their naked bodies. He’d practically growled into the phone, “This better be important, B.”
Flint sat straight up in bed with his brother’s words. “You gotta come to the BBOC, bro. I found a body in the river.”
Instantly wide awake, Flint demanded more information. “You what? How? When?”
Bryce’s voice was shaken but sure. “I was taking some of the extra rafts up to the boathouse to clean them up for storage, like you said, and he was caught on one of the pilings. I think he’d been in the water a while, man. It was gnarly. I already called Dario, but you need to come, too.”
Not that there had been any question of that, but the way Bryce said it gave Flint pause. “Why?”
But Bryce had hedged, sounding more nervous than Flint had ever heard him. “Just get here, man. Fast as you can.”
Flint had come, thinking the whole way that he was bound to see Jameson there as well as Dario, maybe other members of The Cause, and that he still hadn’t told them what he knew about Goldie and the woman who it turned out was her sister. It had been almost forty-eight hours and for some damn reason he was still keeping mum about the possibility of Darby being another switch.
Now it was late afternoon. He’d sent Bryce home hours ago, after the police were done questioning him. Poor kid was wicked shook up. Unlike Flint, Bryce couldn’t remember ever seeing or touching a dead body before. Not that it got more pleasant with repetition.
The police and all that came with them were slowly being packed up, put away, and cleared out. The young man’s body had been taken away hours ago, filter nets set up downstream to capture debris that might wash off as he was moved, although from what Flint heard he’d been in the water so long that surely any evidence of value was gone. And anyway, the ones who mattered already knew what had killed the kid.
He saw Dario and Jameson walking down the hill towards him, Aven coming in from the side to meet them. It was time to stop fucking around and tell his brothers-in-arms in the most important war in history that they might have another weapon on their side.
Jameson looked up as Flint got closer, his eyes intense. “You see the wound that kid had?”
Flint nodded tightly. All vampires must fucking die. “Bloodblade.”
That had been what Bryce wanted so urgently for Flint to see, and he had, his mind a chaotic hurricane of emotion as he’d stared at the waterlogged corpse. Aside from its location, the wound was identical to how the one on Flint’s neck had looked for years after the attack, before Hernando’s healer friend had done his work on it. Blackened around the edges as if the flesh had been burned, the skin puckered and ugly. Bloodblade wounds like that, ones that would have been dicey at best with a normal weapon, were absolutely fatal. Flint was the only shifter any of them knew who’d survived more than a knick with a vampire’s blood-weapon.
Now they were all there, all the males Flint considered part of the core group: Jameson, Dario, Aven, Bryce.
Bryce’s voice shook in anger as he spoke. “They’re in our fucking forest, bro. Those fucking bloodsuckers won’t get away with this shit.”
Flint was glad Bryce was finally getting angry. He’d need to be, to get through the war that was on its way. But at the same time Flint’s idea of going off on his own, leaving Goldie, Bryce, and everyone else involved in The Cause to the mercy of whatever the bloodfuckers had planned, suddenly seemed like his worst possible move.
Dario gave them more information, details only the police had. “Brittany’s dad’s been ignoring his kids since his wife disappeared. It’s no wonder he didn’t know where Brittany and her boyfriend were.” He trailed off before squinting at the shifters standing with him, as if they had the answers.
Jameson nodded. “Let’s find her. Aven?”
Looking out at the treetops as if he were already soaring over them, the eagle shifter nodded.
Jameson turned back to Flint. “Tell me about Goldie. What’s going on with her?”
(protect her.) Yep. She’d asked him not to tell about Darby, and although The Cause was everything… Goldie still meant more to him. He swallowed hard at the hot emotion flooding his chest at the thought. Crap. He was in so much trouble if she rejected them all and took off. A new thought hit him. What if she accepted The Cause and rejected him? The yawning of a potentially fatal crack to his emotional dam loomed over him. He turned away from it. Nothing to be gained by running away from pain. Besides, she liked him, right? “Nothing. Same old. Still trying to convince her.”
Dario tilted his head, one eyebrow raised. “What about her roommate? I think she’s hiding something. Maybe I should do a background check.”
Shit. Was this a sign or something? No. Just Dario being Dario. You can’t take the cop out of the shifter. Goldie was more important than anything so he would protect anything she held dear, including her sister. “She’s clean. Did her background check for the diner myself.” Whoa, now he was all in. Not just a lie of omission but a deliberate lie, an in-your-face lie. He’d never done such a thing before, was not used to lying to his fellow shifters.
Aven’s head swiveled sharply, catching Flint’s eye. Shit. He’d forgotten the raptor was there. Fucking feathered freaks could tell when someone was lying. He was busted now, for sure.
Dario nodded, watching him closely. “Okay. If no red flags popped up for you we can afford to leave it for now. I’ll dig deeper on her after I clear my desk.” He rubbed the back of his neck as he scanned the crews packing up forensic gear, and tossed another easy smile at their group. “Which oughta be in about five years.”
He and Jameson walked back into the thick of the law enforcement sea, leaving Aven and Flint behind. Flint cleared his throat and got ready to explain, but Aven cut him off with a sideways look from his sharp eyes. “Funny thing about raptors, we care a hell of a lot more about why someone did something than we do about what they did. People do some fucked-up shit for good reasons.”
Flint stayed silent, jamming his hands in his pockets. Was Aven trying to tell him that he understood why Flint had lied?
Aven stared out over the treetops again, and Flint wondered what it must be like to be up there, to be able to see the world from such a wide perspective. The raptor tapped his teeth in a staccato rhythm as his eyes skated over the mountainside. “There’s a way to convince her. One that she can’t deny. Just gotta find the thing that lights her up.”
With that statement Aven stalked off, and Flint watched the raptor give Jameson a two-finger salute before grabbing his plastic pod of belongings and heading towards the forest. Dollars to donuts he was going to strip, shift, and get to work looking for that waitress before the light was gone.
Meanwhile, Flint was left trying to work out just what Aven meant. The thing that lights her up? What the hell-?
If he’d had a lightbulb over his head it would have lit up at that moment. Of course. Goldie didn’t have a Resonant, the special weapon that fit perfectly with a switch’s elemental material, which in Breath Coven’s case was metal. If he could find or make the one weapon in the world that sang to her heart the way Cora had said hers did, the weapon she wanted to have next to her every night as she slept, then maybe he could convince Goldie to join The Cause.
And if he could just convince himself that was all this was about, he’d be a fuckton better off. Because Flint’s bear was growling. There were no words, but to Flint, the intent was clear.
Fuck all your plans. Find Goldie’s Resonant. That’s how you can best help her and The Cause right now.