“Asa,” Vanessa said softly, the only one to address him. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Vanessa.” He kept his gaze on his feet. “Always a pleasure.”
“It could have been,” RJ quipped, “if you had called her back. She’s been pining after you for months.”
A delicate flush turned her pale cheeks rosy, and she found her shoes of sudden interest too.
Me?
I considered using my athame to peel her boots like apples then feed them to her, soles first.
“Aww hell,” Clay breathed. “Vanessa, you might want to step back. RJ, shut the ever-loving fuck up.”
Interestingly, Timothy got the memo I was the immediate threat over Asa. He hit his knees, quick, then slid into a bow that resulted with his forehead pressing against the floor. He murmured a prayer or the next best thing, and he didn’t budge. He barely breathed. The others watched him with tight frowns.
“Asa is fascinated by Rue.” Clay put it out there. “You might not want to give Rue an excuse to kill you.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” I assured Vanessa blandly. “Keep looking at him, and you might wish I had.”
The shift of the mood in the room tingled along my skin as Asa lifted his head fully for the first time since our guests arrived. A smile twitched in his cheek, and he rubbed a hand over his mouth, failing to hide it.
“Let’s all cool down.” Melissa fell in beside Clay. “Haven’t enough agents lost their lives?”
The truth of that sobered me, and I retracted my claws, even if the urge to rake them down Vanessa’s all-too-beautiful face still twitched in my fingertips. Which were tinted red with sauce. A reminder how easy it was to reach in and pluck a tastier off-menu item from her chest. I should have felt ashamed, but I was too irritated with myself for how I was behaving.
Asa wasn’t the last fry in the bag or the last slice of cake in the fridge or the last cookie in the jar.
He also wasn’t food, but that was beside the point. I wasn’t fighting with anyone over him.
Moving slowly, as if afraid I might startle, Asa approached me. He stood beside me, our sides flush, and I pushed out an exhale as the coil of anger toward Vanessa relaxed into the chill vibe I had been struggling to manage on my own.
“Now that we’ve got that out of the way.” Clay clapped his hands, and everyone jumped at the shock of noise. “Melissa, you said you guys are here to help with the zombie problem?”
“Zombies?” Her eyes widened to cartoon proportions. “There are zombies?”
“If you didn’t know about them,” Asa said, twining our fingers, “why are you here?”
And how did she know agents had died working this case, if she had no idea what killed them?
The Kellies would have briefed her, had they sent her, to prepare her team for battling the undead.
“The director told us a black witch was causing problems up this way. That you had seized a grimoire.” A wrinkle creased her forehead. “We were ordered to collect it and transport it to the compound while you hunted down the witch.”
Except we hadn’t told anyone about the grimoire.
Crap, crap, crap.
We had found our second black witch, or she had found us, but what about the others?
Would her team stand with her or against her? Did they know the truth? Or were they following orders? Had we identified our rogue coven and its leader? The questions kept churning, turning my thoughts this way and that, attempting to make sense of all the peculiarities of this case. Hard to do with an audience.
One probably sent to kill Asa, disable Clay, capture me, then ferret out the grimoire and locate Colby.
A subtle tension pinched Clay’s shoulders, proof the wheels of his brain were spinning hard and fast too, but he turned the twitch into a sweeping gesture toward the table.
“Oh good.” Clay winked at her. “We’re just about to sit down to dinner. Care to join us?”
A slow smile crept across Melissa’s face, and she reached for her wand. “What gave me away?”