2
“The Boo Brothers.” I must have misheard him. “As in Malcom and Emmett Holmstrom?”
“The very same.” Clay practically skipped to the front porch. “Can you believe it?”
“I thought they were dead.”
“So did I.” He held the door for us. “They’ve got to be in their fifties.”
About to check on Colby, I froze as her battle cry rang out and then about-faced so as not to distract her.
The last time I got her killed in Mystic Realms, she refused to talk to me for a month.
Okay, she did speak to me. In elvish. It might as well have been Klingon.
“You’re sure the director wants us to hunt down a couple of humans?”
This would be a cakewalk compared to the caliber of cases usually assigned to us.
“Well, no, but what the director don’t know won’t hurt him.”
“Then who handed down the order?”
“Parish,” Asa answered, having overheard the call. “Do you know him?”
“Jai Parish?” A chill skittered down my spine. “The Dragon?”
Parish was an ancient fae of undetermined species who smelled like brimstone and death. Smoke spilled from his nostrils when his temper spiked, resulting in his affectation of being a smoker, but cigarettes were an amusing prop. He had been known to carry the same one in his pocket for years before replacing it.
As many fae did, he resembled a beautiful man in his midtwenties, about Aedan’s age.
But you only had to stare into the midnight-blue pools of his eyes to glimpse eternity.
“He’s the Deputy Director of the Black Hat Bureau,” Asa confirmed. “Took over right after you left.”
“The director killed Mikkelsen,” Clay added. “Used a nasty spell to rip out his spine.”
“Why?” I aimed for the fridge. “Not that he needs a reason to pitch a hissy fit, but still.”
Mikkelsen had been his right-hand man a century or more, but no one was safe in the Bureau hierarchy.
“Mikkelsen was there the night you took down the Silver Stag. The director wanted his proxy present on such a high-profile bust, but Mikkelsen didn’t even get out of his car. The director was pissed, looking for an outlet. He decided if Mikkelsen had gotten his shoes dirty with the rest of us, he would have figured it out, that you were planning to defect, and been able to stop you. That was his reason. Insubordination.”
Hard to believe Jai had accepted the promotion, but, much like Stavros, the director wasn’t a man who heard no often.
Where had the director, who had been hunkered down for months, gone that required Jai to step in?
Possibilities wedged under my skin like splinters, persistent and irritating, but I couldn’t pick at them yet.
“Drink.” I grabbed two cold water bottles for Asa. “The blood of your enemies can’t be that quenching.”
With a murmur of thanks, he downed the first one in a single gulp then reached for the second bottle.
He maintained eye contact with me while he drained it too, making my mouth go dry and throat tighten.
“Ouch.” Clay whistled low. “Swap bodily fluids, and he stops needing to swap, well, bodily fluids.”
As weird as it was to admit, I did miss that obsessive drive to share food with Asa, but it was fading.