Page 56 of Blood Sacrifice

His growl made me clamp my thighs together. “I’m not having a good day.”

“You’re having a better day than the man in the alley,” I replied.

“He should have learnt not to touch what didn’t belong to him,” Salvator snapped, his hands landing on my hips, his head pressed to the back of mine as he stood behind me.

There was no point in arguing with him because his possessive words and growly tone made my heart beat faster and my legs turn to jelly. He would never not be an alpha wolf, so I had to accept every part of him just the way he was.

“You do realise we just started a war?” Jethro stopped in front of us, trailing another body by the feet.

“I thought we were already in the middle of one,” Salvator replied.

Jethro wiped his forehead with his forearm. “Yeah, I’m only beginning to realise that we were just dancing on achessboard all these years, being moved around to allow someone else to operate in the shadows.”

“We’ll need to be quick bringing Tarrack in,” Salvator said. “Whoever is orchestrating this is going to realise we are no longer under their control.”

Dominic had left to meet with his coven, but one of his colleagues had been given the assignment of bringing Tarrack in the same way Jethro had been. We tended to use operatives who couldn’t be viewed by seers, so they didn’t have time to intervene. By now, Tarrack would be in a containment cell awaiting examination.

Paulo slowly stood and walked over to us. He didn’t look steady on his feet. “What are we doing with all the bodies?”

“We don’t have a clean-up area this far out,” Salvator replied.

“There’s one of the company vans not far from here. I remember thinking it was odd that it was in this town as I drove in,” Paulo replied.

“Tell me where it is,” Jethro demanded. “We’ll get these bodies out of here and clean up as best possible.”

There was a deflecting spell currently on this area, which was giving us greatly needed time, but it wouldn’t hold much longer to keep the nosy humans away.

“I’ll go with you and try and clear this headache,” Paulo grumbled.

“It’ll take days to get rid of that,” Jethro replied, slapping him on the shoulder as the two men walked away. “It felt as if I’d received a magical colonoscopy that examined all my insides and readjusted my intestines.”

Paulo shot him a horrified look as the other lycan laughed at his own terrible joke.

“What does a lost child of the sun mean?” Salvator asked in a low voice when we were alone.

My stomach tied itself in knots because I’d read that term in a grimoire a long time ago. “I’m not sure,” I replied. “I need to do some research, as I remember it being in an old text I own, but I vaguely remember it referring to a type of magic.”

He glanced at the street and the remnants of the dead. “We normally use clean-up crews to get rid of the blood,” he said as if talking to himself. “The humans are going to freak out.”

I waved my arm as if to disperse his fears. “I’ll summon a storm to wash the blood away,” I replied, retrieving my phone to contact Maia. If anyone would be able to track information down, then she would, as she had been cataloguing old texts for years and converting them into a digital format that was accessible to everyone.

I shivered, the hairs rising on the back of my neck as if someone had walked over my grave. It felt as if death himself had arrived to personally collect the souls of the dead.

Chapter Eighteen

Salvator

Dirty deeds tended to be done in the dark of night, when eyes couldn’t see the face of evil. I stopped for a moment, my ears twitching as I listening for anyone following me. My wolf delighted to finally be in control, our four-legged form stronger and faster to make my way through this forest.

All I could hear was my rapid heartbeat, the overwhelming scent of night flowers surrounding me. Jethro, Paulo, and Tarrack were safe and currently plotting the demise of whoever was spellbinding wolves, backdoors already created in our mainframe by fake users created by Tarrack when the system was first formed. That mainframe was his playing ground and I doubted anyone would be able to track his movements in there.

A vague memory had returned to me of visiting this place in the rainforest, the floral scent associated with the wolf who blew up my house. I hadn’t remembered it until Luna removed the spell from me, so I wanted to know why I had been sent here and my memories removed.

All I had to guide me were vague memories and the position of the moon in the sky. A shiver ran down my spine, and I slowed my pace, sniffing the trees to search for a trap. The faint trace of magic coated the trees and foliage as if this placehad a protection spell that had fused into every element of the landscape.

“Most protection spells repel those who mean harm,”Luna’s voice said in my head.

She currently lay on a bed in a safehouse in a meditative state, connected to me by our bond, and viewing my mission through my senses.

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