Next to a staircase.
I blink at the gloomy stairs leading up to a second floor that doesn’t exist. Or shouldn’t exist, anyway.
Malix grimaces. “Yeah, so, turns out this place is a lot fucking bigger than it looks. We got lost when we left the kitchen.”
“Magic,” Frost offers with a shrug.
Kian glares around the darkened hallway. His anger is terrifying, radiating from him with a dominance that leaves no room for interpretation. He won’t be happy until Erik’s blood is on his hands for sending the shadows after him and his brothers.
To be honest, I’m not opposed. That crazy fucking witch wanted me as payment. To carve my skin off? To eat me? To fuck me against my will? I don’t know.
But he’s never going to get the chance to do any of that shit now.
“He’s here,” Kian says sharply. “Find him.”
The four of us split up to search—Frost and Malix going upstairs, while Kian and I handle the downstairs. I start opening doors and looking behind curtains in a dining room, then find myself in a strange kind of “grand parlor” like this place is an English manor house and not a metal shack in the desert. Erik fooled us real nice with the one shitty little living room we saw. He lives like a damn king.
I pass out of the parlor and back into the hallway near the stairs. I’m considering where I’ll go next, when I glimpse something dark slinking through the shadows toward the back of the house. A flash of shadow against the barest hint of moonlight. My first thought is, oh shit, a living shadow.
But my next thought is, that asshole is trying to escape.
I sprint down the hall as quietly as possible, then lunge through the darkness, praying I’m not about to slam into furniture. The shadow lets out a sharp, girlish scream, and Erik the witch collapses beneath me.
I follow him down to the floor, where his head bounces off the linoleum, then wrap my hands around his neck in an attempt to subdue him.
He screams again, and magic pours from him. In an instant, the smoke is wrapped around my face and neck in an odd mimicry of what happened with Frost back at the motel, and I can’t see anything. The smoke tightens, cutting off my airway, my sight, everything.
Erik’s bony form bucks beneath me. His elbow, or something equally as sharp, slams into the side of my head. My head whirls and I slump to the side, struggling to get past the blinding pain and the suffocating magic. The witch shoves at me, and I shove back, trying to pin him down more securely, but he manages to break free from under me.
A snarl cuts through the room.
I duck as something large whooshes past me, leaving the scent of woodsmoke and whiskey in his wake. Kian. I claw at the black magic around my face to no avail, but then Erik screams over the sound of running feet, and the binding vanishes so abruptly I fall onto my ass.
I scramble to my feet and hurry out the open back door.
Erik’s gangly form sprints through the back yard with Kian’s nightmarish demon wolf right behind him. Magic smokes and wavers, then lashes out when Erik turns around and points at Kian. But the wolf is undeterred—he leaps aside, then speeds up while the witch is distracted casting his spells.
Kian leaps through the air and lands square on the witch’s back. They tumble to the ground, where the large wolf latches onto the witch’s neck and rolls him to his back.
Then sits on him.
I skid to a stop next to them, breathing hard. Frost and Malix jog toward us from the shack, clearly drawn by the screaming.
Kian has his monstrous jaws clamped around Erik’s skinny neck so far it looks as if he’s about to swallow him.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Erik screams in a tight, high voice. “I didn’t mean it! I shouldn’t have done it! I take it back!”
Malix looms over the prone man and crosses his arms over his massive chest. “What’re you sorry for, shithead? Turning us over to Felicity?”
“Yes! She offered… I’m sorry!”
I kick him in the thigh. “She offered what?”
I have no idea who Felicity is, but my lack of knowledge doesn’t hinder his ability to tell us the truth.
“You!”
“I’m not hers to give you,” I bite out.