Black Truth, White Lies (Black Hat Bureau 3)

“You and I stood at the same crossroads, and we made the same choice. To show mercy. To care.” As I said it, wiggly pieces clicked together in my head that explained my turmoil. “You have another choice ahead of you. Will you continue making the hard calls? The right ones? Or was that one good act all you had in you?”

“I’ve already issued my challenge.” He peered up at me. “There’s no going back.”

“Why did you challenge him in the first place?”

“I needed Delma, my sister, to get comfortable.” He rubbed his side. “She quit hunting our siblings when she heard I challenged Astaroth. She knew he would kill me, and our siblings wouldn’t survive without my protection. She sat back and waited, and I used that time to spirit them away. She will kill me for making a fool of her, if Astaroth doesn’t do the job for her.”

“Then there was never any going back, was there?”

“No.” He frowned. “I guess there wasn’t.”

“I’m going to send a friend down here with a poultice and some painkillers. You heal and think.” I had an idea and ran with it. “Asa will give you until we solve this case to decide your own fate.”

“And then?”

Absently plaiting the daemon’s hair, I rolled a shoulder. “Then we’ll see.”

“Thank you.” He twisted up his face. “I think.”

Using the braid as a lead rope, I guided the daemon back toward the house. “You can shift now.”

A rush of flames coasted over his body, leaving me empty-handed as Asa emerged with his hair loose, an always welcome sight, and shirtless. Out of the two, I wasn’t sure which was my favorite post-shift quirk.

“That was sneaky.” I tended to forget he was half fae—easy to do when his daemon half was so much more obvious—but then he pulled a trick out of thin air, and I remembered. “You let me help him.”

His daemon allowed me to negotiate without any fuss in exchange for finger-combing his hair. Asa, on the other hand, had fewer options available to him. Protocol demanded more from him.

“I can’t promise I won’t have to kill him.”

“I understand.” I glanced back to see Aedan resting with his eyes closed. “How did you know?”

Until I set eyes on Aedan, I hadn’t grasped the push-pull in my gut was a tug of war with my conscience.

“Your scent.” His eyes were bright and sharp. “You were upset, and the confusion made you angry.”

“Your nose is that good?” I cocked an eyebrow. “You can catalog my emotions based on smell?”

“I had to learn you first.” He smiled at me. “Otherwise, it’s too much sensory feedback to be useful.”

Did that mean he could guess each time I conjured inappropriate thoughts about him, his lips, his taste? What if the holdup was actually…me? Was my confusion too confusing for him to unknot in the tangle of my uncertainty? Even if I didn’t know what to do with him, I wanted him. But I also wanted him to figure it out without forcing me to order my jumbled thoughts into a cohesive whole I had to verbalize for him.

Emotions were hard. Gah. No wonder my ancestors had eaten their feelings.

Back at the house, I crammed oatmeal raisin cookies into a plastic bag then tucked them in a gift basket I had lying around from when I brought work home with me. A chicken salad sandwich, along with a bag of chips and two sodas, completed the meal. Then I added in the poultice and a pain tincture.

“Hey.” Clay, who followed me into the kitchen, grabbed for the sandwich. “I was going to eat that.”

“It’s going to a worthier cause.” I elbowed him aside. “I’m about to start dinner anyway.”

We had time to kill before we sneaked back into town to try our luck hunting the reindeer killer.

“Who’s the lucky recipient of your delicious charity?”

“Aedan.”

“Hate to break it to you, but he doesn’t need snacks where he’s going.”

“He’s in the creek.” I added a few more treats. “Actually, would you mind bringing this to him?”