“Too right you are, old boy,” the gentleman said cheerfully to the severed head.
“You and your associates will grace my dungeons until such time as I feel you have paid your debt for me. Then I will let you out and I will allow you to start paying on the interest. See what a splendid fellow I am?” he asked and wrinkled his nose as the strong smell of urine filled the air.
“Payne, please take the gentleman who just urinated and his clan members and make sure they have nice accommodations downstairs. Oh and you can take this as well.” He passed Payne the bloody head.
He stepped on the hyena who had admitted to using the boy in his plans as he tried to crawl away.
“Not you. You have earned a reprieve. You see, your idea was positively Machiavellian. You gambled on them not being able to murder a twelve-year-old boy. I loved it! For the most part, your species is quite dull, so the tiny ray of intelligence you have shown is rare and I want to cultivate it. I am not sending you to the dungeon. I am letting you go free so that you may find a way for your clan to make up these disappointments to me. I wouldn’t try to run if I were you. It would end badly, for you I mean.”
The hyena stared up at him in horror.
“Payne, this one is to be set free. He has a lot of thinking to do.”
The gentleman watched as the last hyena was escorted out of his office. He stripped off his jacket and set it to one side. Payne would clean it later. He stared out the window to the wide-open landscape.
From what the hyenas had been able to stammer out, the shifters would know about Shifted Death by now, which meant if his sources were accurate, then Gabriel would know as well. He gave a smile. That meant that Gabriel would soon start sniffing around the other covens trying to locate the source of knowledge about the processes needed to make the shifters’ drug. The hidden council controlling the drug ring would want to eliminate the threat that Gabriel would pose. The gentleman smiled.
He had a feeling that the next couple weeks would be very entertaining, possibly more entertaining than the hyena screams coming from his dungeon. Possibly.
THE END