Page 18 of Cold Sacrifice

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” I said. “Call me when you have something.”

Then I called Rick. He didn’t answer, so I left a voicemail asking him to call me.

I made it all the way to Huntersburg without a single call, emergency, or dire situation. The day was bright and sunny and warm, my belly was full, and I’d fallen asleep with my alpha.

I felt good.

Then Max called me, just as I was stepping out of my car and into the middle of half a dozen noisy hounds, and some clouds slid over the sun just as he spoke.

“It’s a necromancer, Kait.”

“Necromancer,” I repeated, as I attempted to reach the front door without stepping on an excited dog. “That’s somehow…simpler than I thought it would be.”

“You were expecting an evil wizard?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Tell me everything you found.”

“Necromancers can call the dead. Control them. Vampires are technically dead. So…”

“I know what necromancers are, Max. I need to know how and why a necromancer might be targeting Bastien and his vampires. Why would a necromancer compel a vampire to kill himself?” I slammed the door and leaned against it, feeling like I’d just escaped about a hundred hellhounds.

I barely had time to recover from my walk through the yard of hounds when Ash came rushing around the corner and into the living room, Lucy right behind him. I dropped to my knees, putting the phone on speaker and then setting it on the floor as I tried to keep Ash’s tongue out of my mouth, nose, and ears.

Zach and Sam wandered in from the kitchen, arguing about whether Zach could beat Sam in a fistfight if Sam weren’t a shapeshifter.

“Also,” I said, giving Ash a final kiss before getting up off the floor, “necromancers can raise the dead. Actual corpses they call from their graves with rituals and blood sacrifices. I don’t think they can just reach into a random vampire’s mind while he’s sleeping and make him kill himself.”

Zach and Sam stopped arguing, apparently finding necromancers more interesting than the impossible argument about who might be the better fighter.

“Well,” Max said, a little on the huffy side, “necromancers are what I found so far? If you think you can do a better job—”

“No, no,” I said. “You’re awfully damn touchy today, Max. What’s going on with you?”

He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Nothing. Do you expect me to always be polite?”

I laughed. “Oh no. I would say rarely.”

“Bring some of Lucy’s donuts to work tonight,” he said, choosing to ignore my reply. “Or I’m not going to tell you anything else I find.”

I snorted. “I’ll ask her.”

But Lucy, who’d left the room a minute earlier, stuck her head around the doorway. “I’ll make you some fresh, Max,” she said.

“Thank you,” Max said, and ended the call.

“Kait,” Sam said, when I sat down on the couch between him and Zach. “What’s happening with the vampires?”

I told them.

“I’d have given anything for that to have happened when I was Axton’s prisoner,” Zach said. “I think you should let the vampires figure it out.” He shrugged. “Or let them die.”

I studied him quietly. The longer Zach was away from the vampires, the more he seemed to gradually be changing back to his former self—or what I imagined was his former self. He was a vampire hunter from a long line of vampire hunters.

He’d been abducted and tortured by vampires. Tortured in ways I still couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to know. So it was understandable that he’d be carrying a whole truckload of rage.

Still…

“You protected Farrow,” I reminded him. “Joe is your friend. I don’t think you really mean that. And you know what else I think?”