Wounded(21)

I shrugged. “Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. He’s known me for years.” I looked down at the key John had given me.

Lucky number 13.

The room was fixed up, no reminder other than a few scratches here and there of Alex’s last visit to the place. That had been when we’d gone hunting for India.

On a whim, I Tracked her, fully expecting her to be back on the east coast where her parents were. She was fucking terrified and I fought back the bile rising in my throat. I Tracked her parents, barely able to recall their names, but I managed.

My jaw dropped and I sank onto the bed. They were both dead.

Erik crouched in front of me. “What is it?”

“Someone took a kid I salvaged months ago. Killed her parents,” I whispered, as I struggled to put it together. Why would someone take her? She was a spirit seeker, someone who called spirits to her whether she wanted to or not. Giselle had even spoken through her to get a message to me after she died.

“Could someone be going after your people? Friends and the like?” Erik didn’t have to say who the ‘someone’ might be.

I hung onto India’s threads. Who else could be taken and used against me? Only one person I could think of. I Tracked Kyle, my personal hacker, who was barely an adult himself.

Shit, he was with India. That was not a good sign. Who else could they have? I wracked my brain, but came up blank. Not that it really mattered … wait. I pulled the picture out of my pocket that Faris had given me of Simon, the young Tracker.

I Tracked him while hanging onto the two other threads, hoping I was wrong. Nope, I wasn’t. Kyle, Simon, and India were all together. What the fuck was going on?

“Someone is baiting a trap for me with at least three kids I know,” I said. Again, the ‘someone’ we knew was not Orion, but who he was using to make this happen was anyone’s guess.

“So are you going to call on Faris, or are you going after the kids?”

Something in Erik’s voice brought my eyes up to his. “You know the answer, don’t you?”

He smiled and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees. He stared at the floor while he spoke to me. “You and your mom are the same in this. Heart of a lion, you’d take on anything to protect a child, even more so for one you know and care for. So yes, I do know what you’re going to do.”

I put my hands over the back of my head and stretched. “It’s a trap, and more likely than not, a bad one.”

Erik reached over and put a finger under my chin. “Your life as a Tracker, and now a Slayer-in-training, have brought you to this. What does your heart say?”

I let out a slow breath. My heart said what it always did. Protect and save those who couldn’t save themselves. Yet there was a bigger picture now, one I couldn’t ignore. “How will this help stop Orion, though?”

“It might not. But you have to live with the decision for the rest of your life. Can you do that, knowing you gave up on three young kids?”

“They could still die,” I said.

Pamela sat on the other side of me. “But you could save them too.”

Alex lay on the floor at my feet and stared up at me with his liquid golden eyes. “Rylee saved me. Saved Pamela. Saved Erik.”

What they were saying was true, only there was an exception here. Would I give up the safety of the world to save three children, one I didn’t even know?

I stood and wobbled to the bathroom. “Call on Faris. See if you can get him to respond to you, Alex.”

I didn’t turn around as Alex howled Faris’s name because I already suspected we were on our own. It had been too long since Faris had fed from Alex, and that was the only connection we had. If the feeding had been recent, Faris would have a strong connection to Alex and would be able to find us. Doran had fed from me, but he didn’t have Faris’s ability to travel through the veil, so that wouldn’t do us any good, either. This time, there would be no quick and easy way to get to London; we were going to have to fly up the coast as far north as we could and then island hop to the European continent.

I shut the door behind me and leaned against it. A sudden urge to vomit gripped me and I fell to my knees, losing what little food I had in my belly. I heaved until nothing but bile and water burned my throat and tongue. Yeah, that was unpleasant.

“Rylee, are you okay?” Pamela knocked on the door as she asked.

“Yeah. Just give me a minute.” I scooted back from the toilet and lay on the cold floor, grateful for the fact it was indeed cold. My skin flushed with heat and I couldn’t get out of my jacket and weapon sheaths fast enough. Shirt and tank top followed my jacket until I was nothing but bare skin on the floor. I let out a sigh of relief and flung one hand over my eyes.