Page 82 of The Enemy to the Living
Paxton reads it all on my face. “Asher.”
“He made a deal with the fae. Payment was due.” My sentences are terse, sharp, and Kieran doesn’t like them—he takes a step toward me, but Paxton walks around him and shakes his head.
“What do you mean?” Drew asks. Fuck, it hurts to look at him. His lips wobble, but he sucks in a breath and tries again. “Why would he do that?”
Paxton grabs my arm when my hands curl into fists. I don’t want to yell at any of them. Idon’t.
But did they even try with him? Did they?
“The twins run fights in a pub in London,” I say instead because that’s not really worth it at all. “Quinn’s been going. Toget in, I think he had to make a deal. I don’t know what it was, only that he did. They—Last night, he—”
He knew, didn’t he? That was why he wanted to come back. He figured it would all be over.
They tricked him. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. Paxton squeezes my arm again.
“Last night, he left to go there. He said he’d be back. Whatever happened, he failed to follow through on his part of the bargain. They took his wolf.”
Kieran moves to speak, but Sam gets there first. “Is that what they did to the other one?”
“Yes.”
“Quinn won’t—He won’t—” Drew breaks off with a sob.
“He won’t die,” I say.
“Asher.” Paxton’s tone is a warning, and for the first time, I swing my gaze to him.
“Hewon’t.”
The twins are taking the wolves. Bryn didn’t die for a few days afterwards, lingering, sure, but what if the twins haven’t had a chance to do whatever it is they’re planning with Quinn’s wolf yet?
But that means I don’t have much time. I start to pace, and Kieran tenses, but Paxton shakes his head and he lets me.
“What can we do?” Sam asks. He seems surprisingly focused, even with Drew sobbing into his shoulder.
“Call Spectra,” Kieran says immediately. He doesn’t look away from me. “I don’t know if Deacon let her in to look at Bryn, but maybe she can help us here.”
“I have to go there today,” I say to Paxton.
“No! No, the Huntsman said—”
“Fuck the Huntsman!”
The room goes silent after my outburst. I cock my head, listening, but there’s nothing I can hear beyond the door that leads to Quinn’s bedroom. Is he still breathing in there?
“Asher, you need to think about this.”
“No, I’m done. I need to help him. Please, Ihaveto—”
Paxton grabs me by the shoulders and it’s only then I realise how quickly I’m breathing. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I’ll help. Just take—Breathe for a minute, okay? I need to call Jeremiah, let him know.”
“The rest of them?”
Paxton sucks his lower lip between his teeth, then shakes his head. “I’ll call Jeremiah.”
“Yeah, let me call Spectra, too,” Sam says. He follows Paxton out of the flat, leaving me alone with Kieran and Drew.
I look at them both. It seems such a short time ago that I was spending time with Jeremiah or Paxton, keeping an eye on them both, and they’ve grown into strong men despite all the ways their father almost prevented that.
