That meant she hadn't even made it a block. Between our building and the corner she'd vanished. Bright and warm in her cherry chocolate dress, she'd melted away as quickly as the ice cream she had carried to me.

"Cal."

We were going to talk, she'd said. No way out of it for me. No way at all. I guess I'd proved her wrong there.

"Cal," more insistent this time.

The taste of supper, chicken burrito, lingered in the back of my throat. The salty tomato salsa was so similar to another darker flavor that I wanted to gag. George was strong-willed, independent, quick-witted, and fierce, but she wasn't like us. Not like me or Niko or Robin or Promise. She wasn't a killer. And sometimes… sometimes you had to be.

To survive.

"Cal." The hand pinched a nerve in my shoulder, generating an electric tingle.

On autopilot my hand rubbed at the spot. It hurt, but it hurt in a place that wasn't here… wasn't now. Or maybe it was me that wasn't here, wasn't now. "We're screwed, aren't we?" I asked colorlessly.

"No," Niko said instantly. "We're not. You were gone much longer and I found you."

"Actually, I found you." Then I'd fired a bullet right at his heart. And I was a good shot. Helluva one, really. I hadn't missed. Closing my eyes, I felt a slow acid burn pass through to the back of my brain. "Not the best example you could've come up with."

"Perhaps not." His hand pushed mine aside and efficiently rubbed out the ache of the twisted-nerve attention getter. "But it doesn't change the fact that we'll find her. And then we'll clean our swords." The promise, deadly and gray as a hurricane sea, wasn't for me. "But for now you'll stay with me, and I'll call Caleb."

By staying with him he wasn't referring to being glued at the hip holster. He was talking mentally, not physically. Big order. Making with the superglue would've been easier, proved by the fact it took a few moments before I caught on to the mention of Caleb's name. "What the hell are you calling him for?"

"Goodfellow and Promise are already contacting everyone they know. But Caleb works for Cerberus and is in a unique position for gathering information."

It was true. Not only were the Kin involved in 99.9 percent of supernatural crime, but they also kept a greedy eye on that tiny fraction that they didn't own. All well and good except for two things. "Why would Caleb or Cerberus help us?"

"We waive our fee for last night's job."

We hadn't exactly found out the info Cerberus had wanted, but we had discovered there was a spy in his organization. We also might have sent Boaz to the pet cemetery. I know I was keeping my fingers crossed. As for earning Cerberus's goodwill, it might be enough. That and a fifty-thousand freebie. It was a hope, not much of one, but something. That left only the second problem.

"What if…" I grimaced in self-disgust as the words stuck in my throat. Yeah, this was the way to get her back. This was the way to be her salvation. Being afraid to look at the entire picture, being too cowardly to even say the words. "What if it's just a guy?" I said bleakly.

"Just… what do you mean?" It wasn't often Niko was puzzled. And it was far more rare that my mind moved faster than his razor-sharp one. We'd lived this life so long, even he had trouble seeing beyond it.

"What if it's just a nut? Your average human psycho," I said bluntly. A rapist, a murderer, a monster of strictly human origin. What the hell would Cerberus know about your average Gein or Dahmer holed up in Mommy's basement? "What do we do then?"

"A demon is a demon, Cal. If he's human, he'll simply be easier to kill. Finding him won't be any more difficult," he said with absolute conviction.

As lies went, I wasn't sure if it was solely for me or if he was lying to himself too. The really good lies are flexible that way. Two days later we made a deal with the devil and all lies went out the window. And so did the comfort that went with them.

Caleb's message was stained with blood, fresh and red.

It wasn't George's blood. No, the warm liquid flowed freely from another source, the message itself. That would be Flay, or, as he was better known, our old pal Snowball. A message, he wasn't bright enough to be a messenger. Inert piece of shit was the best he could hope for.

He had come to our door only minutes ago. After two days… two days of no sleep as we scoured the city. Endlessly falling. Two days of hating myself for not telling her what she wanted to hear, not telling her the truth of what I felt for her. I could've been honest with her for once. I could've made her happy. Could've made myself happy, but no. Why the fuck would I want to do that?

And then Caleb had called this morning. He'd accepted our deal when Niko called days ago, accepted it promptly. We would waive our fee for the Boaz job and the Kin would help search for George. He told us that Cerberus would be sure to go along. Not a problem. The Alpha knew a good business deal when he saw it. We should've been suspicious, but we weren't. It was a good deal for them. Yeah, we just didn't know how good. At least, for Caleb.

He'd said he'd send Flay, his wolf, with information on what they'd found so far in their search. He lied. That wasn't the information Flay had come bearing at all, and what he had brought was now causing the living shit to be beaten out of good old Snowball. We'd thought Cerberus had a spy in his organization. He did and he didn't. The spy was Caleb, but he wasn't in the organization. Wasn't Cerberus's accountant. Didn't work for Cerberus at all, although he coveted something of his pretty fiercely, it seemed. He was the one, however, who had leaked the information to Boaz that we were coming. He'd wanted to know if we could "handle" ourselves. Lucky us, we proved that we could. And when we did, he had taken George. Now he wanted to make a trade. He wanted us to do the dirty work, and it was Flay's bad luck he got to pass along this little tidbit of joy. Get me what I want or your little psychic dies. "Dies"—that wasn't the word Flay had dutifully parroted in his shattered-glass voice. It was something far worse than that.

My hands circled the wolfs throat and slammed his head one more time against the floor. Crimson bloomed brilliantly against the blank canvas of his white hair and trailed from the corner of his mouth across transparently pale skin. And with the next thudding blow our floor turned red as well. The contrast wasn't as striking as it could be, but it still made me happy. Very, very happy. Goddamn ecstatic, in fact.

"If he kills him, it could make things worse." Goodfellow's voice came faintly through the haze, sounding indifferently musing and not particularly sympathetic to a certain albino wolf. "Of course, could isn't necessarily would."

While Robin didn't have strong feelings either way about Flay living or dying, Niko did. A hand fisted itself in the back of my shirt and lifted me off the wolf. "Cal, stop it."

With the sound of tearing cloth, I pulled away from his grip. The rage was a white-hot noise in my brain that blocked any other emotion from penetrating. But that was fine by me. I loved rage. It was better than fear or pain or agony. Better than despair, guilt, and desperation. Yeah, rage was my friend right now, and I wasn't ready to turn loose of it yet.

But before my hands could regain their grip I was yanked backward again, this time with an unyielding arm around my throat. "Don't make me choke you out, little brother," Niko warned quietly at my ear, "because I will."

Sucking in a breath that did little to tame the bubbling acid rising through my stomach and lungs, I rested my chin on Niko's arm. I stared down at the blood on my hand that made the fist I formed slippery and warm. The stitches that wreathed my other arm from elbow to hand were torn in spots and leaking my own blood to mix with Flay's. "Okay." It came out strangled and hoarse and that had nothing to do with the arm pressed against my neck. "I'll be"—the grin that twisted my face was carved with the darkest of knives—"good."