“But…?”

Mira paused before a set of doors, her hand resting on the pale silver handle. “I thought…I thought I heard a baby crying,” she hesitantly confessed, then shook her head. “But it was extremely faint. It could have been a car or something else.”

“Do you think…?” I started, but the words seemed to die in my throat. The stealing of human babies was one of the few tales that the old mythology actually got right about the naturi. Unfortunately, they weren’t grabbing the infants because they preferred them to their own sickly children. Theories ranged from ingredients for complex spells to attempting to weaken a generation of humans.

“Maybe, but…I don’t know. The sound is gone now. Let’s keep moving,” Mira said, jerking open one of the doors.

We entered the main lobby of the conservatory, with its ceiling now standing a good two stories above us. Moonlight poured down, glinting off the polished marble floors. In one closed-off room to our right stood a gift shop, while a small office rested on the opposite side of the lobby. The doors to both rooms were closed and they were dark.

Laying a hand on her shoulder, I dipped into Mira’s thoughts. The naturi are close. Do you know the layout?

Yes. Exactly across from us is the exhibit room, which leads to the bonsai exhibit and desert garden. To the left is another rain forest exhibit. There’s a set of stairs leading down to it.

They’re in the other rain forest. Beneath my hand, I felt Mira reach in her jacket pocket where she had her gun hidden. I pulled my own gun from its hiding place in the small of my back.

There are two entrances into the room. If we split up—

Her words were suddenly lost under a surge of fear that threatened to swallow us both. My hand tightened on her shoulder as I sucked in a sharp breath between my clenched teeth. Her fear started to pump through my veins, winding a sinuous course through my body until its claws dug into my muscles.

I lowered my head so that my lips were right next to her ear. “What?” I whispered. Her mind was still open to me, but I had no desire to dip into her thoughts just yet. I was still struggling to surface from the last tidal wave.

“Can’t you hear it?” Her words escaped her in a fractured breath. “The crying…”

“A baby? No.” This wasn’t good. My hearing was good, very good. In fact, I was willing to bet that I could give most lycans a run for their money, but I couldn’t hear anything beyond the sound of falling water. Was Mira’s hearing that much sharper than my own?

“It’s across the lobby. In the exhibit room or maybe the desert.”

“I don’t sense any naturi in that direction,” I whispered after another quick scan of the conservatory. Of course, the only other creatures that I could sense in the conservatory besides the naturi were Mira and I. I didn’t sense a human in the area. “You go check it out. I’ll take care of the naturi.”

Mira nodded and darted forward, slipping out of my grasp. I watched her for a moment, moving like she was just another shadow within a house of shadows. Silently, she pulled open a set of doors and disappeared into another room.

I remained in the thick shadows by the door, staring toward the deep, black pit in which the naturi were hiding. Trees stretched up to the ceiling, their leaves brushing against the windows, but all their color and detail was lost to the night. The only sound breaking the perfect silence was a torrent of rushing water coming from deep within the blackness. This was no little fountain. The water roared out of the darkness like a set of rapids in a narrow gully. I could only hope I would be able to use it to mask any sounds I made as I moved closer, because heaven knew I wouldn’t be able to see where I was going.

With my Browning cradled in both hands before me, I edged away from the door to the entrance into the open rain forest room on my left. My heart had begun to thud faster in my ears and a bead of sweat trickled down my spine. I needed this—to violently lash out at the world, proclaiming to all who could hear me that I lived and I would take back my soul. Even if it meant saving humanity by destroying one monster at a time.

In a rare stroke of luck, the left-hand entrance was a gently sloping ramp for wheelchairs. I easily sidled down it, my back pressed against the metal railing while I faced the center of the room. I kept the gun pointed up toward the tops of the trees. The naturi were up in the thick foliage somewhere deeper in the room. Shafts of moonlight intermittently broke through the leaves, giving the darkness shape and depth.

Reaching the path at the bottom of the ramp, I caught a flash of moonlight glinting off a shimmer of water. The center of the room contained a narrow pool that ran the length from the lobby to the source of the roaring water. Around me, trees and bushes rose up, hugging the little path in a warm, humid embrace. I edged down the smooth track, my back brushing against the rough rocks that comprised the wall, which hemmed in the man-made rain forest.

I paused when I was just a dozen feet away from where the naturi were hiding above me. Nothing moved. The sound of rushing water had grown louder and a cool breeze drifted toward me from the rear of the room. The leaves were still, refusing to reveal my prey. The six naturi were clustered tightly together at the top of a couple of large palm trees. I ransacked my brain for anything that could have been able to huddle tightly together at such a height.

With Mira hidden somewhere else within the conservatory, I was on my own and wasting moonlight. I had to get these things taken care of before my nightwalker escort needed to find sanctuary from the rising sun, or worse, feed.

Lifting my gun, I aimed at the spot where it felt like the little buggers were clustered and squeezed off a single round. Leaves fluttered as the bullet ripped through a thick layer of foliage and eventually buried itself in a tree trunk. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound but the roar of water.

Moving the sight slightly to the left, I squeezed off another around. The bullet tore through a clump of leaves at the top of a tree before pinging off the metal window frame. There was a single, high-pitched scream, like a mouse might make if it were run over by a steamroller. Something larger and denser than a palm leaf fell from the top of the tree and splashed into the water below.

I couldn’t identify the little corpse as it fell, but I didn’t need to. Its companions had taken to the air and I could clearly identify them. The naturi were from the wind clan, similar to the ones we had seen in the forest outside of London, with their butterfly-like wings and small, lithe bodies. Sure, they weren’t a pack of angry air guardians with talons ready to disembowel me, but their poison-tipped darts were painful and frequently deadly. It also didn’t help that they had me outnumbered by five to one. Where the hell was Mira?

As they zipped through the air above my head, the wind naturi took on a slight glow in the overwhelming darkness like little balls of Christmas lights. Three were a brilliant blue while the other two were a bright orange. Two different families within the wind clan, I wondered. What the devil were they doing here in the conservatory? Hiding? Or nesting?

“Be gone from here,” ordered one of the naturi as it hovered overhead. “You’ve no business here.”

“And you’re not welcome in the Fire Starter’s domain,” I called back, lining up the gun’s sight with the creature’s heart.

“The Fire Starter does not know we are here. She does not need to know. We’ve killed none of her humans,” the naturi countered.

“She knows now.”

Another naturi zipped over to the one that was speaking to me, laying a hand on her slim shoulder. “He’s that hunter that travels with the Fire Starter,” she proclaimed. “He would have brought the Fire Starter here. She knows.” At once, the wind clan naturi started darting around the area, searching the immediate area for the nightwalker, causing me to lose my shot as they moved in and out of the trees.