Page 24 of Wicked Deeds

“Which makes sense now we know about this place.” I sipped tea, closing my eyes for a moment as the heat and sugar soothed me.

“Nothing to indicate he owned a second property, either.”

“I’m sure Mitch will find out if he did. We’ll know more soon enough.” I swallowed tea, trying to focus on the warmth. If Ajax didn’t own the house, who did? Had he had accomplices we knew nothing about? He couldn’t have been renting. Surely, his family would have terminated a rental agreement when they dealt with his estate. And the house wouldn’t still be empty. I shivered involuntarily. Who owned the damned house?

Damon seemed as though he was thinking along the same lines, something hard and distant in the depths of those blue, blue eyes. “I guess we will.”

“Yeah.” I covered his hand with mine. “We should probably try to sleep. They’ll let us know if they find anything.”

“Yep,” he agreed. “Something you should probably see first.”

“Now what?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how many more surprises I could take in one day.

“Nothing as eventful as yours, but the security team sent me a clip earlier. Madge, can you pull up a holoscreen and play the video from Rufus?”

“Of course, Damon,” Madge said.

A holoscreen appeared above the counter, showing me a security clip of the garden. Dammit. What now? As I watched, I couldn’t see anything but a section of the path and the plants around it, moving slowly with the breeze. “What am I looking at?”

“Just wait,” Damon pointed at a section of the screen. “There.”

I leaned closer. Yep. Barely visible among the bushes were two twining furry tails.

Well, crap. “Anothernixling?”

“Yes. But as far as we can tell, it’s gone.”

“You went out there?” I squeaked. Damon had no magic to defend himself.

“No. Jake and Rufus did a sweep. But no sign of your fairy kitty.”

“Notmyfairy kitty.” I leaned in to examine the image. “Who knows if it’s even the same one.”

“Not me. But I thought you’d want to know.”

I sighed, finished my tea and pushed the plate of uneaten cookie away. There wasn’t enough sugar in the world to soothe me at this point. “And now I do. We can tell the others in the morning. Not worth interrupting them for this.”

A nixling, while disturbing, was not as important as working out what the hell Ajax had been doing in that house.

“Would you mind coming back to the house before you return to the city?” Callum asked. “I have something to discuss with you.”

I stopped chugging water and wiped my mouth. We’d been sparring for twenty minutes, and I was sweating like a pig. But the workout had helped, making me forget about Ajax and demonkind and nixlings for an hour.

Two days had passed since we’d found the name badge at the house.

Turned out Callum’s instincts had been right. There had been a hidden room and the Cestis had managed to break into it.

The walls were lined with steel and iron and layers of other protections, which explained why we hadn’t noticed it when we’d entered the house. Ian and Trick and Cassandra were still working on cleansing the space completely. But there’d been no traps. No demons suddenly sucked into the world from their dimension.

Not that Cassandra had allowed me near the place yet. Mitch had been equally adamant Damon stay away. The house wasowned by a private company. One owned by a succession of equally private and mysterious corporations, culminating in one incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Damon had his lawyers and accountants working on who was behind it all, but if Ajax had been working with others, we were no closer to finding out who.

Which left me and Damon with a lot of frustration without many outlets. Turns out there are only so many times you can have ‘I’m annoyed, take my mind off it’ sex before it starts to feel weird.

Which was why I’d been relieved when Callum had called me earlier and said he was free for a training session. I’d been reading the pre-release story bible forInfinite Rise, Damon’s next launch, trying to get a feel for the game, but the details wouldn’t stick. I’d jumped gratefully at the chance to take my frustration out in a more direct way.

It had worked while we sparred. Having a Fae warrior swing a freaking big sword in my direction always focused my attention.

But now the tension came back with a rush. “Is something wrong?”

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