Page 49 of The Enemy to the Living
Chapter Seventeen
Asher
Afterspendingthedayrunning around trying to find where the twins might have moved Mischief & Mayhem to, I entirely miss Quinn leaving for his fights. I don’t know how. I see Drew go into the building, and IswearI hear Quinn talk to him, but I never see him leave.
Worry swirls in my gut. Has he managed to somehow slip past me? That shouldn’t be possible.
Still, I don’t spend the entire night waiting for him. I search the area instead. I’m exhausted, of course; being one of the only members of the Hunt who can be out in the day is wearing at times like this. But I come up with no sign of Quinn or the pub, and it’s not long before I’m at my wits’ end.
As I’m coming back to the pack building—because he has to come home at some point, surely—I catch sight of him.
My breath catches. He’s holding himself stiffly, but not like he’s injured. No. There’s something wrong, though, and I rush over before I can stop myself.
“Quinn!”
Quinn stops, shoulders tensing even further. When he first sets his eyes on me, they widen with something close to horror and I swallow hard.
I thought we left things well enough. I let him go without asking all the questions that wanted to burst out of me. Wasn’t that enough?
“What are you doing here?” he asks. A bruise is forming on his jaw, but it will be gone tomorrow. His knuckles are raw, and if I still had my wolf, I know I’d smell blood. I don’t touch him. I want to reach for his hand, see if my blessing can ease any pain, but I don’t do that.
“I came looking for you. I’ve seen the wolf. I need to know where—”
“No!” The horror is panic and my stomach sinks. “I can’t—You shouldn’tbehere.”
“Quinn,” I say, pitching my voice low, soft. “Did you—”
He shakes his head firmly, cutting me off again. “Don’t,” he says, and his voice cracks, which makes my heart hurt.
Did he make a deal with his wolf as collateral, too? I don’t know why he would. What could the twins give him? They’ve certainly not helped him get his wolf back.
“Sorry,” I mutter, even as I’m not, as I’m fighting the urge to drag him away somewhere and beg him to reveal every secret. That won’t work. I know better.
“I have to—I need to go to bed,” Quinn says.
He won’t tell me where the fights are. He won’t—orcan’t—tell me about the deal he made.
“Did you win?” I ask, and when his mouth twists, I realise he won’t even tell me that.
“I’msorry,” he says, and the desperate, ragged tone of the word has me reaching for him without a thought. He steps back. My arms fall. “I have to go. Sorry.”
I don’t follow this time. I watch him scurry up the street, through the wards, into the building. I’ve never been inside, but I can picture it. Picture him hunching down, trying to hide his return.
After a second, I snarl and turn on my heel. Maybe Maurice will have had better luck with the vampires.
Maurice has had preciselyzeroluck with the vampires, and neither has Vlad. They haven’t turned up a single one who’s been to Mischief & Mayhem before, and Vlad clearly wants to know who I’ve been talking to, to have been inside a second time, but when I tell him I think they’re caught up in a deal, he just frowns and grumbles.
And then the Huntsman calls.
“Wait for now,” he says, voice cold and firm as iron. “I will liaise with the Guardians. We need to know what the twins want with this wolf.”
“Don’t you already know?” Maurice asks. He’s pushing it a little, but the genuine curiosity in his voice is probably what saves him from being chastised. I know he’s been poring over books when he hasn’t been out looking for vampires, trying to work out why wolf magic would be so coveted by these fae.
I’m not certain, either. They can’t use it. It’s anathema to them. Maybe it’s just the torture, the fun.
“Not yet,” the Huntsman says and sighs. “There is a good chance they took the wolf for the fun of it. But we cannot risk there being another reason, not after all that trouble with the vampires.”
With the vampires who were tricked into drinking fae blood. With the fae who used a vampire to try to take power. Maurice scowls—he still takes all of that personally, which is not surprising—and makes a sound of agreement.
