Embers (Dark in You 4)

Knox arched a disbelieving brow. “She bought that I was a hybrid?”

“No, she thought you’d lied to the imps about what you were. That pissed her off. When I asked why she cared so much about what breed you were, she said that she suspected you were the fourth Horseman and that you would come for her; she wanted to be prepared. I said I didn’t think you were the Horseman; that if you wanted to overtake the Primes, you could do it easily and you wouldn’t need any help. She seemed to think about that for a minute, but then she said she’d heard from a ‘reliable source’ that you could be him.”

Knox exchanged a brief look with Harper. Either Alethea had been feeding Sherryl excuses or the Horseman had worked to convince Alethea that she’d soon be a target. It could even have been a bit of both. “I’m guessing you asked who that source was.” He would have done, in her position. “What did she tell you?”

“Only that it was

someone whose word she trusted.”

Trusted? Knox’s brows knitted. Alethea had never been the trusting type. “When was the last time you heard from her?”

“I contacted her telepathically a few days before the imps’ tea party to tell her about it,” said Sherryl. “She thanked me for the info, asked how I was doing, and how things were going with Ciaran. You know, girl stuff.”

Keeping up the best friend act while also checking that Sherryl and Ciaran were still an item, Knox thought. “Did she ever talk to you about her own boyfriend?”

“She said she didn’t have one. But one time, when I went to her home, she acted weird and wouldn’t let me inside—told me she was tired. I saw a man’s long, navy blue cashmere coat hanging on her hallway coatrack. Cirque du Soleil tickets were sticking out of the pocket—they only caught my attention because my friend is going to the show and she’d showed me her own tickets. And I smelled tobacco coming from inside.”

Knox licked over his front teeth, trying to remember if he’d ever seen Jonas, Thatcher, or Dario either smoking or wearing a cashmere coat. “When exactly was this?”

“I don’t know. A month before she moved out, maybe.”

“Does Thatcher know you were passing on info to Alethea?”

“If he does, I didn’t tell him.” Sherryl’s eyes filled with yet more tears. “When I saw the clip on YouTube, I was hoping to God that it wasn’t real. But when I tried to contact her telepathically, there was nothing. And I knew she was really dead.”

“I wouldn’t grieve too hard,” said Harper, yanking the stick out of the familiar’s shoulder. “She used you. But, if it’s any consolation, you’ll be joining her soon enough.”

“What?” Sherryl sounded genuinely baffled.

Harper leaned forward. “Your self-centered actions made my family vulnerable. They led to an attack on my son and the attempting kidnapping of my cousin. Don’t play dumb. Heidi is Ciaran’s little sister. You would have heard that someone attempted to snatch her and—since it’s highly likely that you passed on info about how Heidi often went to the playground after school—it must have clicked in your head that Alethea had something to do with it.”

Sherryl shook her head madly. “I went to her home and asked her! She promised it was just a coincidence!”

“And you can smell lies, so you would have known if she was telling the truth. She wasn’t, was she?”

Sherryl looked away.

“Yeah, you knew she was involved. But you hadn’t cared. It didn’t matter to you that a little girl was almost kidnapped. Didn’t matter that what lay in store for her wouldn’t have been good. Hell, you even risked it happening again when you did nothing. You could have told Ciaran. Jolene. Me. Any number of people. Instead, you kept on feeding her info, didn’t you?”

“I fed her lies, sure. That’s all.”

Harper shook her head. “I don’t believe that. You told her about the tea party.”

“It didn’t seem like a big deal. No one would attempt an attack in a house full of people—especially when those people are Wallis imps.”

“Someone did. And that someone was sent by Alethea’s reliable source. But they wouldn’t have known to go there if it hadn’t been for you,” Harper spat, pointing the blazing stick at her. “In fact, if you’d just come to us months ago with what you knew, this all could have been avoided. But you didn’t. I doubt you ever even considered it. My son was attacked, Sherryl, and you profited from it.” Her demon shot to the surface and hissed. “Anyone who was even the slightest bit involved in what happened to the child will pay in blood, including you,” it told her.

Hate gathered behind Sherryl’s eyes until they practically shone with it. “And I should be afraid of a sphinx that doesn’t even have fucking wings? I should care about the fate of a kid that’s probably just as much of a freak as its mother? You should have been the one who died in that video. Or better still, your brat should have been the one crying and screaming while his flesh blistered and melted. At least I have the comfort of knowing all three of you will be dead soon. The Horseman, whoever the fuck he is, will come for you.”

The demon’s smile was rather serene. “I know,” it said. “And he’ll die too.” With that, the demon jammed the flaming stick into the bitch’s eye.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Knox stared down at the charred, bloodied, battered body in front of him. Sherryl Malloy had taken a long time to die. Both Harper and her demon had put the familiar through a shitload of well-deserved pain—a pain that might have ended sooner if Malloy hadn’t screamed her hope that Asher died a dreadful, agonizing death at the hands of the Horseman. Maybe she’d thought that such words would drive Harper into delivering a killing blow. They hadn’t. His mate had remained completely controlled.

Harper had warned him that she could be scary. Warned him time and time again that a sphinx in ‘berserker mode’ was a dangerous creature. But he hadn’t been able to imagine his mate ever truly losing her shit in a spectacular fashion. Now he understood that a sphinx’s version of ‘berserker mode’ didn’t involve an explosion of rage. No, their rage remained relatively contained, but they showed no mercy whatsofuckingever.

Harper had been almost robotic in the way she’d systematically subjected Malloy to several rounds of excruciating torture. A lesser man might have been freaked out by it. Her demon had surfaced occasionally to join in on the fun, but Harper had taken the lead. Sensing that she’d needed it, Knox had stood back and left her to it.