MIKAH

This whole little favor was really turning into a nightmare.

The human woman—Tabitha—stood behind us, her eyes wide, her lips open in a gasp. “What the hell do you mean, werewolf or vampire?” she demanded again.

I had to think fast. This mission had felt impossible back when it had been centered on getting Xavier into the Fae world, especially once we got the memo that he was bringing half the Redwood pack along for the adventure. Now, as if leaving a group of terrified humans back in the waiting room wasn’t stressful enough, we had one trailing us and asking impossible questions.

I glanced at Gabe, who looked more annoyed than anything else. Not surprising, since he didn’t seem to give a shit about avoiding collateral damage. He would have killed this woman in half a second without thinking twice about it. He probably would have been more concerned about staining his clothes with more blood than by the loss of a human life.

I couldn’t believe he’d called me a killer. I’d spent years—decades—trying to avoid truly becoming a monster. I’d protected people like Tabitha and those humans in the waiting room. And I didn’t just try to protect helpless creatures lower on the food chain. I tried to be a pacifist. I tried to avoid violence whenever possible, to avoid killing however I could, even at my own expense. Even when a fucking demon had a knife to my throat, I hadn’t killed him in retribution. Gabe, on the other hand, seemed to have no problem turning his own demon fight into a bloodbath.

I was nothing like him, and I was an idiot for ever thinking that he and I could find a shred of commonality on this mission. He was an erratic, dangerous werewolf who thought his mindless brutality was justified—one of the worst kinds of monsters out there. And I couldn’t let myself forget that. Once this mission was over, any truce we’d come to would be null and void.

I looked at the human woman in front of us. So fragile. One reckless move from either Gabe or myself, and her life would have been snuffed out. If there was any chance of salvaging this situation—and protecting Tabitha—the responsibility would clearly fall to me.

“Um, ‘vampire’ and ‘werewolf’ are just figures of speech. You know, he’s a hotheaded dog. I’m…um…” I glanced at Gabe for help.

“A stick in the mud who sucks all the fun out of everything?” he suggested helpfully.

She frowned at this explanation. “Whatever, fine. Don’t tell me. I don’t really care who or what you are. I’m here to rescue my sister, and no one is going to stop me.”

Gabe snorted. “Right. There’s way more going on here than you realize. This is far too dangerous for a little girl like you, so if you value your life—”

Tabitha rose on her toes so she could get closer to Gabe’s face. She fell a couple of inches short, but the effort was admirable. “If I wasn’t going to let those two brutes stop me, I’m sure as hell not letting you stop me either!”

“Go back to the waiting room while I’m still being nice.” Gabe’s eyes flashed dangerously, and his fingers twitched. Was he about to lose control just because a young woman was trying to push him around? I shook my head. Werewolves—when they weren’t indiscriminately killing everything in sight, they were fighting for dominance.

“Make me,” Tabitha spat.

He nodded. “We have ways of doing that.” He looked at me, his eyes urging me to step in and convince this wisp of a woman to stand down.

I rolled my eyes and then looked at Tabitha. “We just want you to stay safe.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “You don’t care about me. And that’s fine, because all I care about is my sister. I’ve seen some really weird stuff in this place, including you two, and the music on the dance floor was giving me a headache.” She glanced around the hallway and then looked at me again, lowering her voice. “I know this place is doing something strange to my senses, and I don’t want my sister to be here anymore. I need to find her.”

Gabe’s head jerked in my direction, his expression clearly saying, “Please don’t tell me you’re going along with this.”

The last thing I wanted to do was babysit a reckless human. Unlike the others back in the waiting room, Tabitha didn’t have the sense to be afraid of us—or the demons that had brought her in. She’d be yet another liability. And our mission had never been easy to begin with.

But I also knew—and judging from Gabe’s expression, he must have known it, too—that the same defect that prevented this human from fearing us would keep her from staying put with the rest of the herd. She was a wild card, and she could either make things more complicated for us, or she could make our mission a total catastrophe. At least if she stayed with us, we might have a chance of controlling some of those variables.

“You can come with us,” I said, my voice deadly soft. Beside me, Gabe groaned. “But you have to stay quiet while we search. Got it?”

“What about my sister?” she demanded.

“We’ll figure it out along the way,” I said.

She must have realized this was the best offer she was going to get, because she nodded, and we continued down the hallway.

We reached a heavy metal door that was obviously different from the other—both in design and construction. We’d been in this night club long enough to realize that there had to be something important behind it.

I reached for the handle, my fingers wrapping around the knob, and a jolt of pain ran up my arm. I yanked my hand back with a hiss. “Ouch!”

Gabe rolled his eyes. “You’re such a wimp.” He tried the handle and jerked back with a yelp. He started sucking on his burned thumb, and I raised an eyebrow at him.

“There must be some kind of protection on the door,” I said.

Gabe scoffed. “You think? How will we get through?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know. I could have tried to use my vampire vision to look through the enchantment, to see if perhaps there was a weak spot that we could use to break the spell on the door…

Tabitha reached forward before either of us could stop her and wrapped her hand around the knob.

I jumped forward. “No! Don’t!”

She turned the knob, and the door swung open. She shrugged. “That wasn’t so hard.”

I blinked. She didn’t seem hurt or affected by the enchantment. But how was that possible?

“What the hell?” Gabe asked. “How did you not get hurt by the mag—” He stopped himself before he said the whole word “magic” and subsequently would have re-revealed the existence of the entire supernatural world to the human.

Smooth move, dog, I thought to myself.

Tabitha rolled her eyes. “Are you guys coming or not?” She walked through the doorway without waiting for us to reply.

Gabe glanced at me as we stepped forward to follow. “She might actually be useful if Fae magic can’t touch her,” he said, keeping his voice low so she couldn’t hear.

I nodded. “And it looks like she’s coming with us whether we want her to or not.”

Beyond the door, a long staircase led upward. I frowned and glanced at Gabe. Weren’t we already on the top floor? Or at least near it? What kind of crazy magic was this club rigged with? Its dimensions didn’t seem to make any sense.

Tabitha took the first step up the staircase, but I caught her shoulder and stepped in front of her. “Be quiet,” I told her and Gabe.

We made our way up the stairs with Tabitha sandwiched between us. She might not have liked us, Gabe was probably annoyed to have her tagging along, and honestly I wasn’t the biggest fan of all the complications she brought, but at least if she wasn’t in the lead, she wouldn’t get snatched up or killed by the first threat we encountered.

At the top of the stairs, there was another heavy, ornate door, and we could hear voices shouting on the other side.

Tabitha reached for the doorknob first since she seemed to be immune to whatever enchantment had been on the door downstairs, but I caught her hand.

“Dude, stop grabbing me!” she hissed.

I held up a finger for her to wait so that we could listen to the voices on the other side of the door before we just barged in.

A voice shouted, “What do you mean there’s a security breach? We cannot delay! We promised more human workers for the Fae mines, and if we don’t deliver tonight, then you know what will happen.”

We stood in silence, processing the information we’d just overheard. Tabitha was probably confused by the mention of the Fae, but I was focused on something else. Human workers for the mine.

Shit. The club was trafficking humans for slave labor. And the voice had mentioned something else: a security breach.

If the head of this whole operation already suspected people were snooping around, we were going to have a hell of time breaking back out let along breaking a whole pack of werewolves in.