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I shot him a sideways glance. “Wait. Her family hired you to keep her safe on her wedding day, and you ended up stealing her for yourself?” Talk about irony.

“Well, actually, it was pretty much the other way round.” He ran a hand through his spiky hair. “See, Elle got it in her head that she wanted one final fling before she committed herself to the stuck-up Hound her parents had arranged for her to marry—pretty much from the cradle.
After
she found out he’d had a fling of his own the night of his bachelor party.”

I winced. Even Ellie didn’t deserve
that.

“Only problem for her was, none of the men she had access to were stupid enough to mess with an engaged Banoub, especially not considering how rich and powerful her fiancé was. Lucky for her, I had just moved to town so pretty much knew zilch about Boston’s branch of the Cabal, and well.. . Let’s just say Elle can be damned persuasive when she wants to be.”

I bet.
He didn’t comment on my eye roll, just kept talking as we walked.

“The thing was, neither of them felt the slightest bit of love, or even lust, for each other. Still, Elle planned to honor her parents’ wishes once she felt she’d evened the score. But then she found out that to
really
even the score between them, she’d have to take out a nationwide ad to recruit a whole hell of a lot more clueless me’s.”

“You mean, he’d been cheating on her the whole time?”

He nodded. “Oh yeah. Been cheating on her the whole time they were engaged, and planned to go right on cheating afterward. But he was seriously old-school, and did
not
buy into the what’s-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander routine. When he found out that she’d retaliated sexually, he went a little crazy. Tried to beat her into telling him who her lover was—his first mistake. Elle was trained from infancy how to defend herself, seeing how volatile Cabal politics are. His second mistake was ambushing me in a dark alleyway after he realized I had entered the scene just before Elle threw her affair in his face.”

“You survived an ambush from a
Warhound?”

His green eyes were suddenly illuminated by the glare of a nearby streetlight. For a second, they seemed to flare with emerald fire, almost like—Nah. Couldn’t be.

“Not only survived, but persuaded Elle’s ex it would be far better for his health—physical and financial

—if he stayed far away from both of us.” Something fierce crossed his face, something I couldn’t quite name but recognized on a visceral level.

“So, new to the area. From Scotland, right?”

He grinned. “What, lassie, does my wee accent give me away, then?”

I laughed as he deepened his normally light brogue until I could barely understand him. “Just a little.”

“Turnabout’s fair play then, lass. How did you ‘hook up’ with Elle’s favorite cousin?”

Huh. Last time I’d been in the picture, Scott and Ellie hated each other with a passion. Wonder what had changed all that.

“Pretty much your typical ‘Hound meets Fury, Hound pisses off Fury, Fury dumps Hound’ kinda deal.”

He nudged me slightly. “Now, now. Don’t think I’ll be letting you get away with that load of bollocks.

How did the two of you meet?”

I sighed, eyes going slightly unfocused as I thought back. “Well, I’d just been promoted to Chief Magical Investigator not too long before we met, and was having a bitch of a time getting the cooperation I needed from the mundanes. Most of them were too chickenshit to follow me into the Belly when I needed backup. Half the time I had no choice but to hire mercs I trusted to help. with particularly dan -

gerous investigations, especially the apprehensions. Unfortunately, the merc I preferred to work with the most—a tough-as-nails but trustworthy Giant named Charlie—was out of the country on a job when I needed help taking out a den of Bhuta who’d been terrorizing the Belly for months before I finally figured out just what the hell was doing it.” Thinking of Charlie brought a pang, since rumors pegged him as having died in a firefight a few months earlier.

He tilted his head. “Bhuta?”

I would have liked to claim that was a hint he had to be mortal, but truth was, few arcanes but Furies knew as much about other immortals as we do. “Yeah, they’re from the Hindu pantheon and are like a mix between ghosts, zombies, and vampires. Only worse.”

“But zombies and vampires—”

“Don’t exist,” I finished for him, grinning at how much his voice reminded me of Trinity’s when I admitted the existence of demons. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. .

“Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” He finished before I could, earning an approving nod.

“Exactly. But you’re partly right. Zombies and vampires as the Western world views them do
not
exist.

But certain sorcerers and spirits can reanimate corpses for brief periods of time, which would technically be termed
zombies,
though nothing like the horror flicks you’ve seen. And the creatures mortals might choose to term
vampires
do
not
feed on blood to survive. Far more worse, they feed on the life force of others. Lucky for the mundanes, though, only the essence of arcanes will do.”

Mac actually shivered, which made me lean again toward categorizing him as arcane. “And the Bhuta?”

“Bhuta can only act at night and, also like vampires of legend, cast no shadow or reflection in the mirror. Disgustingly enough, they can actually reanimate corpses for their own purposes, the closest they come to having true physical form. In rare cases, Bhuta can grow strong enough through feeding on arcane essences to actually possess a living, breathing person—which most often results in death for the host. Not to mention whoever the Bhuta crosses paths with in that form.”

He regarded me with serious eyes. “How did you kill them?”

“That’s just it. How do you kill something that’s already dead, especially without taking out the innocent host?” I thought back to that harrowing night and shivered myself. “Charlie recommended a merc agency he trusted, one he’d freelanced for previously.”

“The Shadowhounds.”

I nodded. “Lucky for me he did, too. Warhounds are one of the few types of arcanes that can be neither fed on by Bhutakind or possessed when in human form. Their ties to Anubis grant them a certain immunity from most undead.” Made sense, seeing as how Anubis was the Egyptian lord of the underworld. “Anyway, to make a very long story short, Morgan, Scott, and Amaya took the job of keeping my ass alive while I tracked down the den, which turned out to be an abandoned building deep in the heart of the most dangerous section of the Belly.”

Mac’s lips twisted in a smile. “Imagine that.”

I rolled my eyes. “My sentiments exactly. It was their immunity to the undead along with their super sense of smell that let us find the Bhuta so quickly. They were also able to keep the spirits corralled while I took them out, one by one.”

“So how
did
you kill them?” he asked again.

Remembered Rage danced along my spine, easy to fight down since it held the ghostly touch of memory rather than new emotion. “Whereas Hounds are immune to possession by the undead, Furies can actually force spirits to enter their bodies, and then channel the Rage into the foreign spirit to exterminate it.”

Mac’s mouth dropped open, and the horror in his eyes mirrored that in my own. “And by channeling the Rage into the Bhuta, you felt every bit of agony the spirit felt until you banished it to the underworld. And risked losing control of the Rage and going Harpy, or giving the Bhuta enough control to consume your own life force. Leaving it full access to your body while you’d be gone forever.”

I just nodded, narrowing my eyes and searching his face for some sort of answer to the question still puzzling me. What
was
he, that he knew more about Furies than any non-Fury I’d ever met?

He didn’t hear my unspoken question, just stared down at the uneven cobblestones beneath our feet.

Silence stretched out for what should have been an uncomfortable length, but wasn’t. Something about being with him seemed right. Companionable. An odd feeling for me when with someone I’d known such a short time. Finally, he looked up and met my gaze.

“So you risked your life, your immortality, and your soul to save the Belly, while the mortal police just sat back and watched. And yet you still work for them now.”

He kept his tone neutral, but I sensed the emotion lurking beneath the surface. Downright bafflement.

And he wasn’t the first to react that way to the work I did for the mortals, especially considering the predicament they’d placed me in that night. Then again, it’s hard for other arcanes to understand a Fury’s natural tendency to try to keep the peace between mundane and immortalkind. None of them start out 100

percent mortal—and thus completely vulnerable—the way we do. Probably one reason that adrenaline became as addictive as crack for Furies. We felt the rush of fear and excitement so much more than other arcanes could.

“You ever heard that old mortal phrase, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right’?” At his nod, I started walking again, and he kept pace easily enough. “Hokey as it sounds, it’s true. Just because the mortals weren’t willing to go out of their way to help arcanes that night doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do my damnedest to help them whenever I can. First of all, it’s my job, no matter what they do or don’t do. And second of all, the only way things are going to improve between mortals and immortals is if those of us who know better hold ourselves to a higher standard.”

“So, you think sustained peace between the two is actually possible?”

His voice was carefully neutral again, but I got the feeling he had a lot more invested in my answer than he showed. “Not only possible, but inevitable. The only question is whether that peace will come at the price of another war neither side can afford.”

We wound up back at the front stoop to Hounds of Anubis, each staring up at the gilt storefront and pondering our own thoughts. Just when I started toward the doorway, Mac’s soft voice gave me pause.

“We go to gain a little patch of ground, that hath in it no profit but the name.”

Goose bumps pricked my flesh at his words. Whether he quoted from
Hamlet
again as an echo of the past war, or as a prediction of another, I don’t know. And, right then, I was just glad my abilities didn’t include precognition. Although, for all I knew, Mac’s abilities
did...

MAC HEADED HOME TO THE LITTLE WOMAN
after dropping me off outside Liana and Morgan’s apartment. My plan was to find out what my sleeping arrangements were going to be for the next little while. Of course, once Scott’s not-so-sweet mother opened the door and told me, I forgot all about my happy-happy, joy-joy thoughts of spreading peace between mortals and arcanekind.

Liana smiled serenely as I crossed arms over chest and narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean, there’s no extra space anywhere but Scott’s apartment?”

Her smile merely widened as she leaned against the doorway of the penthouse suite she and Morgan shared. “He said to tell you the door’s unlocked and to make yourself at home.”

My expression soured. I just bet he had. Whatever tiny amount of guilt I had felt for disturbing her so late evaporated in the face of her obvious smugness. Fortunately for us both, though, she had the good sense not to laugh in my face as I stomped back to the elevator for the ride to Scott’s floor. One added benefit to my annoyance at being manipulated was the fact that the bizarre incident with Sean and the frustration of trying to figure out what Mac was had pretty much fled my mind.

Repeated jamming of the elevator button did not, big shocker, make the car arrive any faster. By the time the doors dinged open, my boot heel had all but worn a hole in the carpeted floor and steam no doubt spewed forth from my ears. I tried a calming technique Stacia had taught me once, with mixed results.

Anger did not morph into Rage, but neither did I feel very Zen. When the doors swung open seconds later, I marched down the—this time tiled—floor, taking vicious pleasure in making much more noise than necessary. I imagined leaving a swath of enemies in my wake, which of course didn’t help with the whole calming technique. Scott’s door loomed up before me, and I twisted the doorknob, jerked the door open, and prepared to kick Scott’s ass for thinking he could just push me into doing whatever it was he want—

“Oh.” I could barely breathe past the sudden lump in my throat. Scott lounged on his sofa, modestly garbed in sweats and a tee, and with sheets, pillow, and blanket making it clear where he planned to sleep.

Which meant he Wasn’t using this as a thinly veiled attempt to get me into bed again, since his apartment had only one.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

So I decided to snarl instead. “Why the hell did you force your mother to lie to me?”

He narrowed his eyes, and even though he wasn’t in Hound form I could sense his hackles rising.

“Excuse me?”

I crossed my arms over my chest and glared. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Or do you expect me believe that you’re the only family member who has a so that guests can crash on?”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe nobody else in the family
wanted
you to sleep on their sofa?”

My mouth opened and shut a few times as my eyes started stinging suspiciously. Oh hell no, I refused to cry front of him. Even if it felt like he’d stabbed me with a hundred needles. “I should be used to Murphys not wanting me around by now.”

He scowled. “What do you mean by that?”

“Oh yeah, like you don’t know. Have you forgotten our last morning together, when you gave me a giant ol’ kiss-off?”

“Oh for the love of Anubis. Are you rewriting history now, too?
You
were the one who walked out on
me.”

“Yeah, after you screwed me literally one minute and then screwed me figuratively the next. Do you have any fucking idea how much you broke my heart when you told me your family was basically choosing fame and fortune over me, not to mention protecting the same bastard we all thought kidnapped Nessa?”