Courts and Cabals 2 by G.S. D'Moore (warren buffett book recommendations TXT) 📗

to it. The scent of blood and violence was thick, but Dupree hadn’t been a part of that. He tracked it toward the front entrance, where more police were huddled with event organizers. One of them reeked like Dupree and Underwood.

“You, vamp,” Vernon called. He wasn’t as respectful as he could have been, but he’d nearly been killed by a machine gun-toting vamp packing silverbane not too long ago. Let’s just say no vamps got a Christmas card from him this year.

The tall, leggy woman snarled and turned to face him. Her fangs vanished behind her lips when she saw the UN badge hanging from around his neck.

“How can I help you?” it was replaced with a reluctant smile.

“Do you recognize these two people?” he pulled out his tablet and showed her pictures of Dupree and Underwood.

“No,” she answered.

He scrutinized the single syllable; smelled for an increase of perspiration, listened to her heartbeat, zeroed in on her pupil dilation; all the tricks shifters used to sort the truth from lies. She was telling the truth.

“Who were you with today?” he wasn’t giving up because of her response.

“A lot of people,” she glared at him, “but most of my time was spent with two VIPs.”

“Do you have pictures of them?” he felt a grin split his face when she nodded and took him to a laptop.

The two people didn’t look anything like Dupree and Underwood, but it was a place to start. “Get those to me,” he provided an email, and two minutes later he had the photos. Even though she was maybe two hundred feet away, Vernon used his tablet to call Becky.

“Yes?” she picked up with a raised eyebrow.

“I’m forwarding you two pictures. Dupree and Underwood were here. They must have had a Fae glamour them, but I found someone who smells like she took a bath in them,” there was a huff from the vamp behind him, but he ignored her. “Use these pictures as a starting point. Find them.”

“Sure thing, boss,” she hung up.

He turned to the vamp. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll have more questions soon.”

The vamp gulped but nodded. Victory was close enough he could taste it. He was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet as he continued investigating the scene.

“Soon,” he whispered in the depths of his mind where the hunter lay. “Soon, you’ll answer for that shit in New York.”

He was looking forward to being alone in a room with Dupree.

***

“You stupid, mongoloid motherfucker,” there was a crack as Aveena’s hand broke the sound barrier.

Out in the middle of the desert, it just made a few lizards scramble for cover, and a nearby coyote run for the hills. It also meant she was free to beat the shit out of the people who failed her.

A second crack echoed as her backhand hit Rock squarely in the jaw. The big troll was picked up off his feet and launched into an impressive specimen of his namesake. His landing crushed the big boulder into pebbles, and the troll groaned as he extracted himself from the debris. He grimaced as he rubbed his broken jaw, but remained silent.

“You were supposed to call me,” Aveena rounded on Saffron, who was doing her best impression of a dog rolling over and showing its belly in submission.

“We didn’t know,” she mewled, as she prostrated herself before the noble Fae. “I would have called you in once I was sure, but . . .”

“You were defeated by a mudslinger,” the selkie, Anna Seatwig, lounged on a cactus boulder and basked in the glory of her enemy’s failure.

Saffron took a moment to glare at the selkie, before going completely submissive at Aveena’s approach. “You’re right, we should have warned you. We were wrong,” she bowed her head like she expected Aveena to take it from her.

Aveena was tempted. The rage she felt at the clusterfuck was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. Even Chloe’s death didn’t rise to this level. Her people had failed her, and even worse, done so very publicly. Fae attack porn convention was going to circulate in every newsroom in the western United States by sundown.

 Worst of all, she was nearly out of time. When word of the brawl hit police scanners, she was forced to evacuate the Flamingo. The cops had nabbed the two mercenaries, so she left it to the South African to sanitize the room and rendezvous at their fallback position. She’d stepped and arrived here to wait for her underlings.

“We . . .” the troll’s monotone only set her off again as he tried to explained himself. Before he knew it, she had him face down in the rubble, her foot pressing him into the earth, and both arms torqued behind his back.

This time he screamed. His back was a blackened mess of blisters and dead skin. As she applied pressure, skin began to slosh off in sickening globs. The sight nearly made her puke all over Rock, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing his injuries were making her stomach do somersaults.

“Just a little pull, pop, and . . .” she let the violent imagery of ripping off the troll’s arms quench the thirst for blood inside her. Instead of destroying the idiot, so he would have to return to the Faerie Realm to fully heal, she merely dislocated both his shoulders with a loud pop.

His roar of agony echoed across the desert, but it made her feel better. She wiped the sand from her hands, the pus-soaked, infected dead flesh from her boot, and patted down her outfit to make sure she was presentable.

Saffron had moved from complete prostration to her knees. “What can we do to make this up to you, my Lady?” she asked.

“Kill the mercenaries,” she answered immediately. It told her