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Chapter One
CARNAGE
My bike eats up another mile of dead-end mountain road, and Sentinel still won’t shut up about the last time I let a lead go stale.
“I’m only saying that if you’d trusted my instinct in Concord, we wouldn’t have lost three days chasing a rumor that turned out to be a very confused pack of coyotes,” Sentinel grumbles.
“Those coyotes were shifters, altar boy. I stand by it.”
“They were coyotes, Carnage. Actual, mundane, four-legged coyotes.”
I snort out a huff. “Semantics.”
He lets that shit hang there, taking his sweet-fucking-time as his eyes slide toward me.
Whatever it is, I already hate it.
“Semantics,” he repeats. “That’s a big word for a man who once described a demon summoning circle as ‘spooky homework.’ ”
Fucking asshole.
I twist the throttle, and the engine growls beneath me, vibration crawling straight into my bones as something low in my chest answers it. Bike and beast. Both restless and a hell of a lot easier to understand than the angel sitting on his bike beside me.
Sentinel keeps his wings tucked away under his cut, which might fool a human, but my hellhound isn’t buying that shit for a second. Heaven rolls off the bastard no matter how hard he tries to hide it, and every bit of Hell inside me feels him sitting right there.
“It was spooky. It was also homework. I don’t see the lie.”
Sentinel shakes his head.
I grin and turn my attention back to the road as the pavement starts narrowing ahead, houses thinning out until there’s nothing but trees crowding both sides and mountain ranges rising dark beyond them.
The joking dies somewhere around the last mailbox.
This is why we’re out here.
Coil got the tip two nights ago. Whispers moving through the shifter underground about cages, supernaturals disappearing off back roads and never turning up again. A buyer with deep pockets and zero-fucking-conscience moving them through Kings’ territory like we wouldn’t notice.
We noticed—we always fucking notice.
My hands tighten around the grips as we take the turn that will carry us deeper into the tree line.
This is our mountain.
Our stretch of dark where supernatural folk are supposed to be able to disappear from the human world without leaving it entirely.
Somebody decided to start hunting them in our backyard.
So we’re hunting back.
The trail spits us out at an old logging depot about three miles off the main road. Rust has eaten through half of the tin roof, weeds choke the clearing, and the woods have damn near swallowed the rest of the place whole.
Sentinel kills his engine, and I cut mine a second later.
The sudden quiet is jarring.
Too-fucking-quiet.
My hellhound shifts beneath my skin, restless enough to put every instinct I have on edge.
