Page 69 of The Devil's Mercy

An image of one of the severed heads that had been a part of his case chose that moment to flash through his mind. The cut had been clean, clearly made by someone skilled. And strong.

Was that going to be his fate as well?

Had the serial killer doctor come all this way to make Cal his next victim? It would suck, but it was a possibility. Of course if the thought he’d been rejected, he’d want to keep Calix quiet.

“It’s time you cool off, Be’urn.” Aodhan grabbed a fistful of Cal’s hair and twisted him around, holding him until he was kneeling in the mud. He flashed his teeth, grinning viciously in a way that was both enthralling and terrifying all at once. “Did I ever tell you about my little brother?”

The sudden curveball had Calix blinking in confusion, unable to respond, not that it seemed like Aodhan really expected him to.

“I tried drowning him as a kid,” he said, sounding far too pleased with himself after confessing something as heinous as that. “Watching him sputter and flail about didn’t really do anything for me. I wonder if this will be any different.”

“What—” Cal didn’t get to finish that sentence. In the next instance, he was shoved face-first into the lake. They were still on the edge, so there was only an inch or two of water there, but his face was submerged and held under, mud and dirty water gushing into Calix’s mouth, coating his tongue.

He gagged and tried to straighten, but his hands kept slipping, the ground too soft in the water for him to use as leverage.

Had he miscalculated?

Maybe the doctor really was here to kill him.

Aodhan pulled him back out with the same level of ferocity, holding him steady as Cal gasped and sucked in oxygen.

Brackish water dripped down his forehead, stinging his eyes, and he desperately brushed the droplets and strands of his hair away, blinking against the burning sensation. “Aodhan, stop. Please.”

The man at his side let out a bark of laughter that was a little too manic around the edges for Cal’s comfort. “Do you hear yourself? Not even you believed that was going to work. Three months, that’s how long it’s taken to hunt you down. There’s no chance in hell my fury will be that easily satiated.”

“I haven’t told anyone about you.” It was a desperate attempt, but Calix wasn’t above pulling out all the stops now.

Only, that seemed to piss Aodhan off even more.

“Oh, so now you want to live? Spent a few weeks sucking someone else’s dick and suddenly you’ve regained your sense of survival?”

So he knew all about how far Cal had gone during his training. “It was only a couple of times. It didn’t mean anything.”

“You’re mine, Be’urn,” Aodhan sneered, and when someone scoffed at their backs, instantly corrected in the exact same possessive tone, “Ours.”

Calix had forgotten all about the other figure chasing him through the forest, but at the sound, he stiffened, doubt returning tenfold. He tried to turn his head to look over his shoulder, but Aodhan wouldn’t allow that. Not that he really needed visual confirmation to know who the person who’d joined them was. “…Mercy?”

“Did you think we were alone?” Aodhan said. “There are four of us here.”

“Four?” He hated it, but his stomach dropped, and for a moment the whole world seemed to spin. He couldn’t possibly have been holding onto a shred of hope all this time that they’d been serious about making him their Third, and yet…Hearingthat there were four made him want to cry more than choking on filthy lake water had.

“Yeah. There’s us,” he forced Cal’s eyes forward, pointing toward a spot ahead, “and him.”

At first, Calix didn’t know what he was talking about, but eventually his eyes began to make out the floating lump ten or so feet out. He leaned forward a bit, not noticing how Aodhan allowed him to, and then gasped when he realized what he was looking at. “That’s…”

A dead body.

“Mr. Smith,” Aodhan supplied, though Cal barely heard him.

There was a dead body in the lake.

The lake he’d basically just drunk from.

Calix vomited, released from Aodhan’s hold the second he started. He emptied the contents of his stomach into that very lake, watching as chunks of his lunch drifted off toward the corpse.

A strong arm wrapped around him and pulled him away from the water. He was shoved down onto his back all over again, this time next to a pile of wood that had been carefully stacked. He frowned at it, only processing what it was when the man on the other side of the pile lit a match and set the whole thing slowly ablaze.

The flicker of firelight danced across Mercy’s face, highlighting the cut of his cheekbones and the disapproving glint in his eye.

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