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“The thing?” Christian spoke loudly and we both shushed him.

“The thing in The Grove,” Caleb stated softly. “A fucked up monstrosity, a cosmic horror born from nightmares.”

“How do you know about it?” I was honestly shocked. “You’re no kin to the druids.”

“I am not,” he agreed. “But I felt a strange presence the first time I entered this building, and I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out what it was. Enough to rile the thing out of hiding. Enough to make it show itself and scare me off. It worked.”

“You’re scared of this thing?” Christian asked, sounding impressed. “This I’ve got to see. Where is it?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to rattle that tiger’s cage,” Caleb said softly and convincingly.

“Have you met me?” Christian asked, utterly undeterred.

“What did it offer you?” Caleb asked me, already tired of talking sense to the senseless.

“What did it offer you?” I shot back.

He grimaced and it wasn’t a show. It was a genuine expression of regret, which was horrifying in itself. “All it did was scare me off. I have nothing that it wants. But I’m assuming that you, being the love of the druid Arch’s life, had much more that it coveted. A better bargain all around. Do not go in too deep with this thing, Jillian. You do not want to be at its mercy.”

“All it wanted was my blood.”

He stared. “You can’t possibly be naive enough to believe that. And what did it offer you?”

I closed my eyes, my mind going back against itself. To the past. To the clean feel of Dom’s mind. The pure love of it. “Memories,” I said softly.

“Tell Dom,” Caleb said decisively. “Before it gets its hooks in you. Before you make a bargain that you can’t be free of.”

He was right. No question. But the thing was, I really, really didn’t wanna. So I put it off. At least, the telling Dom part of it. Just for a bit. “We’ll stick together in this place. I don’t think it can catch me unless I’m alone.”

“I think you’re right about that, but it worries me that it caught you between here and the bathroom. That’s what, a hundred feet? That means it’s focused on you. It wants you bad. Dom’s quarters are warded and so are most of the places that the druids do their business in here. It’s the free space, the civilian play areas, I think, where it’s found a way to roam free. And I don’t think the druids realize it.”

I didn’t ask him how he knew all of that. Caleb didn’t do anything in half-measures. If he said he’d spent a considerable amount of time looking into it, I knew he’d been thorough.

“So we don’t go anywhere alone around here,” Caleb said.

“Agreed,” Christian said with a sad sigh. “What now? I’m booored. And I need to pee, and I don’t particularly want a buddy holding my hand while I do it.”

Caleb stood abruptly. “I’ll go with you.”

When they came back I was trying and failing to take a nap under my sunglasses.

“She’s doing it!” Christian said cheerfully. “She’s relaxing. Look at her. She’s zen af.”

Corbin had left to check out another empty vampire nest before dark but promised he’d contact us if he figured anything new out.

I lifted my shades at him. “Af?”

He smirked in a very British way. “Oh that’s right, you’ve been gone for a minute. Af means as fuck. As in, you’re zen as fuck.”

“Something tells me you’re going to start adding an Af to the end of everything you say.”

“Correct af.”

“Great.”

“Great af.”

“Enough.”