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“Time out.” Kiva nudges me with her hatchet’s handle. “I thought he came here to investigate the shifter murders—not your murder.”
I don’t have an answer for her so I stare at Nolan which shouldn’t be so easy to do. Marshals aren’t supposed to be muscled with square jaws.
“The shifter murders and Lowell’s are related,” he says. “Every crime scene had arrowheads like those in your wings,” he tells Kiva.
We all glance at the dangerous silver tips on Kiva’s feathered wings.
“How’d he know they were arrowheads?” she asks me as if I have any idea. “I didn’t know what they were until recently. I thought they were dagger pieces.”
Nolan slowly holds his hands up, palms facing us. “If I reach into my jeans pocket, do you promise not to decapitate me?”
Kiva snorts a laugh. “If you flash us your pecker, the grizzly and the mountain lion at the top of the stairs will gut you where you stand.”
“You have shifter mates?” he asks, and I’m pretty sure he’s talking to her, but he stares at me.
“Yep.” I don’t offer more info. “Unless you have directions to my grimoire in your pocket, we’re not interested.”
“I think you will be.” He pulls metal out of his pocket, rolling it through his knuckles like a poker chip before pinching it between his thumb and index finger. “Recognize this?”
It’s a silver arrowhead like the one that killed Kiva.
“You found that at the shifter murders?” I ask, my voice sounding far off and flat.
Kiva had been human like all of us Furies in our first life, but she’d been killed in the company of her bear shifter mate moments after the murder of a shifter teenager. The girl had only been fifteen years old, but then my baby sister Mabel had been nine.
“We’ve found at least one arrowhead at every shifter murder.” He loses the sarcasm. “But not this one.” He grips the silver tighter.
When he leaves the rest of the explanation hanging unsaid, I bite. “Where’d you find that one?”
“In Nashville. At your family’s house—”
“No,” I say before he can finish. Deny, deny, deny. Because otherwise grief will spill out and carry me away on waves of pain that I won’t survive. Not without a guarantee of the revenge I was promised.
“Oh, Sadie.” Dottie’s big butterfly wings droop.
Kiva goes on the attack, stepping around me and closing in on Nolan. “You might think you’re the shit since you’re a big bad wolf shifter but know that pack laws don’t apply in Syn City. If you’re lying to her, we’ll dump your mangy butt in the swamp for the harpies, and no one would be the wiser.”
“I’m not lying,” he says. His gaze stays on me. “I was the first person on the scene, and I found this in the kitchen when I discovered your parents and your little sister…”
Their bodies.
Chills ratchet up my spine as violently as a full flight of Furies in battle rage. “My family didn’t keep weapons.” I push the words out through a tight throat and dry mouth.
“I know.” He would, given how often he’d visited our home.
A single arrowhead doesn’t prove anything, does it? “The detectives said Lowell went rogue, that he killed my sisters and parents before committing suicide. The wolf marshals confirmed that shifters can die of the same wounds that kills their fated mate. That it’s extremely rare, but possible.”
“They lied, and I need your help to uncover the truth.”
What if he’s right and whoever killed me and my family is still out there? What if they’re terrorizing other families? What if I can finally have the sweet revenge that the immortal Furies promised me when they brought me back for another chance? “A random arrowhead is hardly proof of Lowell’s innocence,” I say. “Only a shifter could’ve had the strength to do what was done to my family.”
“Or to the poor kid I was searching for when I died,” Kiva adds quietly.
“This isn’t just any arrowhead,” Nolan says. “I had it analyzed at our lab and then asked a friend at a magical research archive to examine it. She says the carvings look like part of a bigger engraving—a possible invocation of a deity.”
A deity? “Which god or goddess?”
Nolan shakes his head. “She isn’t sure. She narrowed it down to a few contenders but none have known followings here on the continent, and no other countries have had the shifter serial killings.”
