Fatal Sight (Harbingers Of Death Book 2) by LeAnn Mason (universal ebook reader txt) 📗

to blame for Jessica’s death. That didn’t mean he had to like her. Like he’d said, he got enough push-back from Raven and Ember. Aria was too much for him — she refused to follow orders, she was naive. Unless she changed a lot, she was a hazard.

“I know she won’t come back,” Seke whispered.

“So, maybe you go to her.”

“What?” Seke snapped his head up, wide eyes taking in the hellhound before him and the seemingly insane suggestion.

Cole shrugged. “You’re worried about her, right? So, go visit her, wherever she is, reassure yourself that she’s okay… that she’s moved on. And maybe then you can get the closure you need to move on too.”

Seke’s mouth dropped open, but he seemed to be considering the idea.

Pushing to a stand, he dropped a thick hand on Seke’s shoulder. “Think about it. Nothing long — we got missions to do. We’ll be here waiting for you. But go. Visit her. See that she’s fine. And then, we get back to work.”

Without looking back, Cole took his leave of the library, a place he didn’t venture often, hoping Ember and Raven had left him a beer or two.

He knew firsthand that unrequited love took a tight hold of your heart… until a new party joined the situation. Having spent just a few months with Aria, Cole knew that she wouldn’t run into Seke’s arms, grateful for his arrival, asking to be rescued and brought home. She’d have a new captain, a new team. Hell, maybe even a new guy. She was a handful, but she was pretty hot… in a grungy kinda way.

It wouldn’t be pretty, but Seke would see he wasn’t wanted, wasn’t needed, and they could all forget the haunting screams of that damn overloud banshee.

11

“Ugh. Even after a week, several of the days spent on rundown buses reeking of body odor, booze, and that distinct and overpowering scent that was ‘old person’, my skin still crawled when I thought about how low I’d stooped. I shook out the shivers of revulsion, and my boots hit the cracked pavement as I stepped down from the rusted metal step of the latest rolling tin can that some called a bus.

The memory of something I’d been reading about druids when Seke had come to dismiss me had surged to the fore of my mind the first night I’d spent in the bus station, thankfully. I’d stared at the destination board for a while, then wandered away, uncertain about where to go first once the ticket stand opened in the morning. The anxiousness had dredged anything helpful from my knowledge and pinged on something I hadn’t even realized had been a clue: an illustration of a druid with a caption that said she was depicted near a hot spring. One place came to mind in the country.

However, the direction was pretty far from where I’d been, which wasn’t helpful.

“Move,” a college guy griped in annoyance as he pushed past me.

Thrown back into reality by the rough shove, I realized I hadn’t moved away from the bus doors and had obviously been impeding the guy’s exit.

The cold air bit at my cheeks, tossing my long silver hair into knots that would pull painfully at my scalp when I attempted to finger-comb the strands back into sleekness. I cringed just thinking about the task. It was much brisker here in the north than it had been along the southeastern coast with the HDWU.

The north wasn’t my favorite place. We’d moved to some cold places in my youth, which served to hide us well — everyone wearing the same bundled layers of black and gray. But I was much more suited to warmth at heart.

The shiver might have also been due to the prominent smell of urine that wafted from a grimy trashcan near one of the many benches where patrons could wait for their respective escape vehicle.

Because, let’s face it, one only used the bus if it was the only feasible option.

Remember, when making your getaway, do so with the smallest of footprints. Leave little trace. None if possible. Pay in cash, use an alias, and don’t stand out.

Dad’s lesson was the main reason I still used the bus transit system and probably why a Seke lesson hadn’t bounded forward in my mind as they had lately. All you needed was cash, and not even much of that, to gain entry onto the diesel-spewing behemoths. Add a hoodie to hide my obvious hair and headphones to keep people from attempting to talk with me, and I could virtually disappear. I didn’t need to travel that way anymore now that I was unlikely to find myself at a loss at a murder scene again, but old habits were hard to break. And though I definitely had more money than I’d ever had on hand before, because apparently the HD was a paying gig, I’d need to make it last.

After all, I didn’t have a job anymore. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t expect the druid to do the binding for free. I mean, no one did anything for free anymore, though I wasn’t sure what the cost would be… if it would even be monetary. Who knew what supernatural druids found value in? Eyes of newt? My firstborn? Seke had been skeptical that druids could even make a power bind. But there was only one way to find out.

I hiked the small duffel higher on my shoulder as I soldiered through the sparsely occupied station. A tingle in my bladder reminded me that I should probably take a moment to relieve myself before heading away from the bathrooms.

A sardonic chuckle escaped as I remembered my last foray into a public bathroom while I tried to escape the HDPU, who’d been completely new and insane to me at the time. That seemed like so long ago, and I half-expected to hear Jessica’s sultry twang admonish my feeble attempts to flee. But she