Page 12 of Silver Claw

“Okay,” I said, wiping tears of laughter off my face. “We’re all good. We’ll figure out how to find this bitch and the thugs she brought with her, and we’re going to take back what she stole. And if we can’t do that, we’re going to kill them all.”

“We’ll kill them anyway,” Zach said, returning my smile.

None of us ever worried about the human detective listening to our talk of killing. He was one of us now. And we weren’t killing humans.

I ran my fingertips over the raised scars I could feel beneath my shirt. “I’m going to take that blade from her,” I murmured.

Jared didn’t argue or say that without my magic, I had no hope of taking anything from her. He nodded. “You take her blade. I will take her life.”

I looked at him, and it didn’t matter that I knew him intimately, or that he loved me, or that he was Jared Walker, the wolf alpha who would defend me to his last breath. Something intense and dark and deadly lit his eerie blue stare, and for just an instant, I shrank away from him.

Jared was…fierce, and he was savage.

He leaned over to kiss my forehead. “You will not be afraid of me.”

I smiled, touching his face. “Sometimes I will, Alpha, but it’s only instinct. You can be a scary wolf.”

“For the enemy,” he told me. “Never for you.”

“Kait,” Max said, and there was something in his voice.

I sighed, regretful that things were about to get heavy again. “What’d you find, Max?”

Max was better than anyone I’d ever met at finding information and finding it fast. After his outburst and Joe’sattempts to comfort him, he’d thrown off his atypical emotions and buried his nose in his phone.

And now…

“I found her. She didn’t steal your magic to use. That’s not possible for her. She’s a siphoner. They’re rare.” There were no signs of his earlier tears. He was excited, though, at his discovery. Max loved nothing more than digging for information, finding clues, and impressing people with his skills.

“Siphoner,” Remy said. “I’ve heard the term. Never met one of them, though.”

“She came to Jakeston for Kait,” Jared said. “She came to take her power.”

Max nodded. “It’s what they do. Like humans who hunt vampires or ghost hunters who travel the world destroying ghosts. Siphoners feel it when power is upsetting the balance. No one person should contain that much power or magic. It’s the siphoner’s mission to restore stability and…” He frowned at his phone. “They seeyouas the evil. To a siphoner, Kait, you’d be a time bomb that she has to detonate before you go off and kill the city. More than the city.” He raised his gaze to mine, and I didn’t like that his was actually…considering. “She believes she protects innocents from people like you.”

Rick leaned back in his chair, his voice overly casual when he spoke. “You know that’s not true, don’t you, Max?”

And Max’s eyes cleared. “Oh, of course. I know Kait is the good guy.” Then he went back to his reading.

“Where are you getting all this information?” Lucy asked him, leaving her chair to peer over his shoulder.

He grinned. “She has a website.”

“A website,” I said. “A thieving, monstrous, cowardly supernat has a website talking about what she does.”

“Yes,” Max said pointedly. “Like you do.”

“You run my website, and you advertise our job of clearing haunted houses,” I told him. “I don’t tell the humans or the world that I’m a wolf with a whole lot of power.”

“Doesshehave any power,” Zach asked, “other than siphoning?”

Max tapped on his screen. “So when I ran a search, I found some interesting stuff. Siphoners are super strong, fast, and can take a lot of damage. It seems as though they’ve evolved to become a mixture of supernaturals—vampires and shifters, for starters—and some researchers believe there’s some fae in there somewhere. If a siphoner comes for you, he or she is coming to fight. They’ll kill your power and kick your ass while they’re at it. And Kait…”

I swallowed hard. “Yeah?”

“You said she cut you with her weapon.”

I nodded and once again ran my fingers over the slight ridges beneath my shirt. “I feel like the wounds are alive,” I murmured. “I believe I saw glowing green symbols on them. Just like the ones on her blade.” I looked at him. “What’d she do to me, Max?”