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Serise yanked a handful of coarse white hair with her free hand and jerked. “Do I
look
like a Fury to you?”

I suddenly felt like a very small, very slow-witted child. “No.”

“Well then. Shut the hell up so I can get this right the first time.”

My cheeks flamingo pink, I scooched backward and fell in line with Mom and Scott, both of whom studiously avoided looking me in the face. Jerks. Calaeno, too, seemed to have better things to look at.

Namely, the Harpy getting ready to make like a vampire. And with
Vanessa ‘s
blood. My stomach suddenly heaved with the urge to vomit.
Stop thinking about it.
Of course, predictably enough, that only made my damned subconscious want to think about it even more.

Dark-red blood spilled along the glass and plunged inside Serise’s mouth. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Magic, the sickly green shade I’d come to associate with Harpies, sparked immediately to life, emanating from Sense’s mouth and seeming to shoot from her eyes like twin beacons of flame. Her voice sounded hollow when she spoke. “I sense her. The girl-child is not too far northwest of here.

Perhaps an hour’s flight.”

I rubbed my hands together. “Hot damn. That’s even better than I hoped for. We can be there in no time.”

Calaeno shot me a quelling glance. “That’s one hour for Harpies. Not Furies.”

My neck hunched up as I ‘bristled. “What do you mean, not Furies? I can fly with the best of them!”

“Harpies
are
‘the best of them’ as far as flying is concerned. My slowest sister could easily outpace your swiftest.”

“If I’m such a slow-ass flyer, how am I supposed to help Mommie Dearest over there channel her Rage while tracking Olivia?”

Calaeno’s second in command, and Sense’s earlier savior, Penelope, stepped forward with a smirk.

“Don’t worry, little Fury.” Something about the way she stood, the tone of her voice seemed familiar. I wondered if I’d known her when she’d been a Fury. Generally, the transformation was so complete it was difficult to tell, a very good thing indeed—made it easier to kill the psycho Harpy when visions of the Fury she’d once been weren’t dancing in your head. “We’ll take turns sharing our superior speed with you.”

I narrowed my eyes. That better not have meant what

I thought it meant. . . “And how do you propose to do that?”

She tapped her fingers against her thigh, smirk only growing bigger. I felt like wiping the smirk off her face, but there was the little matter of the truce we’d sworn. “By carrying you, of course?’

Oh hell. It
did
mean what I’d been afraid it did. “Absolutely no—”

Calaeno shot me an impatient look that would have outshone any Elder. Succeeded in shutting me up, too. Damned if I wasn’t starting to respect her, against my better judgment. “Do you want to find your sister’s child or not?” I nodded silently. “And is time not of the essence?” I nodded again. She stared pointedly at my serpent tats. “Sharing a magical bond with you will hurt Sense more than you can imagine, and yet she is willing to do it. Will you do any less?”

I felt about twelve inches tall. “No,” I answered softly.

“Very well, then. Let us continue.”

Mom and Scott pulled me off to the side, speaking in low urgent tones that informed me in no uncertain terms what they thought of me flitting off with my former assassins. Finally, I blew off my excess frustration on them, since! couldn’t vent it on the Harpies. “Do you have wings, Murphy?” He glared. “Nope? And you,” I turned to Mom. “Been flying around in captivity much lately? In peak condition then? You just heard them say they’re going to cart me around in the air. Doing that for two Furies would take more resources than thirteen Harpies would be able to come up with.” She scowled, but remained silent.

I sighed. “Look, I don’t like this any better than you two. But the sooner we track down Olivia, the sooner you all can join us at the new compound.”

Calaeno succeeded where I hadn’t, stalking over to chase them off, snapping at them that we would damned well call when we found the compound and they could make themselves useful by getting everyone on the road and heading northwest. Then she dragged me oven to Sense so we could perform the spell that would—temporarily—bind the two of us together in some sort of Harpy-Fury magical hybrid.

Something about that image was so wrong it made me want to throw up in my mouth, but I managed to fight back the gag reflex.

Serise watched me approach with a expression nearly as serene as her Queen’s. She held the vial of blood out toward me, and I recoiled. “Oh hell no. Nobody said
I’d
have to drink that. I’m not a damned vampi—” The ‘gesture Calaeno made had me snatching the vial from Sense’s hand and tossing back the smidgen of Vanessa’s blood remaining. The salty tang rolled over my tongue and down my throat as I forced myself to swallow.

Dizziness struck, bringing a much more physical urge to vomit. Penelope and an unnamed Harpy jerked my arms to keep me from falling as sickly green threads of magic spread from Sense to me. She chanted something in low, guttural Latin, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to pick up her exact words.

Her magic thrust its way inside my body, a sickening violation worse than any I could remember, and she opened some sort of channel between us that sent Rage bouncing from her to me, and then she somehow
pulled
sapphire strands of Fury magic from my body to hers, using it to filter the Rage before it passed on to me, slowing the violent flood into a much more bearable trickle. I don’t know
how
she did it, and I sure as hell could never duplicate the spell, but damn. I was impressed.

At some signal I didn’t recognize, the flock of Harpies took to the air in a rush of wings, dragging me along for the ride. The bond between Sense and me hit me a hell of a lot harder than it hit her, and I could see another benefit to the Harpies carting me along like dead weight. Because, basically, that’s what I was.

The ground grew dizzyingly small beneath us, and I could do little but stare down at it in a daze.

Minutes passed by, with Penelope maintaining her tight grip on my night arm and the other Harpies (except Sense and Queenie Girl, big surprise) taking turns supporting my left. The fact that Penelope never needed to be relieved spoke volumes for her strength and endurance, and I made a mental note to try
not
to deliberately piss her off in the future. Would hate to face her in a fight.

Serise continually drew on our bond for the next half hour, using Fury magic to filter the dizzying amounts of Rage Harpies had to deal with constantly. My sympathy for our former sisters went up several notches, because damned. if I didn’t find myself wishing for someone to knock my ass out after maybe five minutes of the hellish flight. How the hell they handled this day after day was way beyond my understanding.

Another agonizing half hour slipped by, no doubt

much more slowly for me than them, but finally—finally Sense drew less and less on my magic, and more and more on her own. And then we were descending, with the ground rising up to meet us at a pace that made me yet again feel like tossing my cookies.

Penelope’s talons loosened just a moment before my feet touched the ground, making me slam down with much more force than I expected. “Oops!” she said with fake apology in her voice. The other Harpy snickered and released her grip as well. I was way too fucking tired to say anything, much less exact a little revenge.

Serise and Calaeno strode over to us, and abruptly, the bond between ‘Harpy and Fury dissolved in an instant. Shockingly, so did the fog of exhaustion that had made me a virtual zombie for the past hour. I flexed my own wings suddenly, “accidentally” smacking Penelope in the process. “Oops!” She growled low in her throat, but one warning glance from Calaeno had her backing down. Ha. Who said revenge was a dish best served cold?

I glanced from Sense to Calaeno, to the unending line of dense forest land surrounding us. “So, where’s this compound we came to find?”

Serise nodded. “Beneath us.”

“Uh. . .“ I looked down at the patch of scraggly grass just visible in the darkness. “Color me crazy, but shouldn’t there be like, you know, buildings and shit like that if this is a former mortal military base?”

Penelope rolled her eyes in an amazingly mortal-like gesture. “Slow in more ways than one. Ever heard of underground bunkers, Fury?”

I bit back the retort itching to roll off my tongue and then blinked. “Hmm, ‘underground bunker. . .

Wait. This could actually work to our advantage.” The more I considered that new tidbit of information, the more I smiled. The Harpies remained silent while I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Scott’s familiar number. He answered on the first ring, sounding relieved to hear my voice, though he didn’t verbalize that relief.

-

“Hey. We tracked down the new base. Can you put Charlie on the line? I have a little gardening project for him...”

CHARLIE PEERED DOWN AT THE BLUEPRINT
spread out on the SUV’s lowered tailgate, oversized fingers running along the heavy paper while he considered. Harper stood just to his left, lips curved into ,a smug smile. She deserved to be smug. Damned if she hadn’t managed to give Mac enough information to hack into a military database and “borrow” an accurate schematic for the underground base Sense and I had uncovered. Okay, figuratively uncovered. Now we needed the Giants in order to make with the literal uncovering.

Impatience bubbled up inside me, spilling over when Charlie’s silence seemed to .drag on and on.

“Can it be done or not?”

He glanced up, lips pursed, seemingly unaffected by my outburst. “Of course it
can
be done. The only quest ion is whether the five of us can pull it off fast enough.”

I frowned. “What do you mean? I’ve seen you dig before, and it was plenty fast.”

Charlie’s partner from the Belly, I think his name was Michael, snorted. “You probably saw him digging through dirt, sweetheart. Even a slowpoke like Charlie can make that look fast.”

Confusion tugged my brows downward. I glanced from the blueprint to the hillside several feet away.

“Call me crazy, but isn’t that brown stuff over there dirt?”

Michael guffawed, slapping his knee with aloud, meaty sound. “Sure, on the topmost level. And then there’s rock, more dirt, more rock, and finally, concrete and steel. This
is
a military installation, sweetheart.”

My eyes narrowed. Charlie calling me
sweetheart
was one thing. He’d earned the right to such familiarity. But this bozo was really starting to irk me. I put hands on hips and took an aggressive step forward. Charlie must have recognized the look in my eyes, because he rushed to intervene. “I think we can do it, Riss, but once we get through to the’ concrete and steel, we’re going to need a distraction elsewhere. Their alarms are going to go haywire once we bust through.”

“Hmm, that’s not a bad idea anyway. Coming at them from two fronts. But I don’t see how we’d get in.. .My voice trailed away as I swung toward the Harpies grouped off to ‘the side. Calaeno arched her brow when our glances met, but mine slid past hers to lock on Sense. The haggard-looking Harpy needed no words to catch on to my plan. She nodded.

I spun, hand slapping down on the opposite side of the underground installation from where Charlie and company had already decided to tunnel through. The base’s front entrance. “They still think Mac works for them, so we’ll use that to our advantage. He, Ellie, Mom and I will ‘capture’ Serise and Calaeno and escort them inside. When you guys give the signal, our ‘captives’ will make a break for it.

The ensuing chaos should let us cull down their numbers and give you a big enough distraction to break inside.”

Scott leveled a pissed-off stare my way. “I don’t think so.”

My brow arched. “Excuse me?”

His right index finger jabbed at the base’s front entrance depicted on the map; his left slammed down on the location of the proposed tunnel. “There’d be more than a mile of space between the tunneling group and yours. You’d be effectively cut off from any sort of backup.”

A snarky smile curved my lips. “I’m pretty damned sure that one Warhound, her badass husband, two Furies, and two Harpies are more than capable of handling themselves until we can meet up.” I leaned down and tapped an area near the center of the map. “Here. It’s near the block of cells that are the most likely place for them to keep the captives.”

His lips, set in a mutinous line. Suddenly, I knew exactly what was bugging him. Not that we’d be effectively cut off from backup, but that he wouldn’t be there with us.

I touched his shoulder. “Mac can get Ellie in under the pretense, she’s chosen her husband over her, blood. Mom and .1 can assume the forms of mercs Mac hired for the extra firepower. There’s no way they’d buy you turned against your family, Scott. And we can’t sneak you in as our guard dog, either.”

My attempted humor ‘fell flat, and he didn’t crack a smile. But at least he finally nodded. “You’re right?’ His hands jerked away from the blueprint. “What sort of signal did you have in mind?”

I shot a saucy grin toward Charlie. “I was thinking you guys could shake things up right before you break through the walls.” .

He threw his head back and laughed, the sound booming overly loud in the evening air. “You’re nothing if not ambitious, Riss. You want us to dig through a half mile of dirt and rock, cook up an earthquake, and
then
tunnel through a dozen feet of concrete and steel?”

I tossed my hair back with a smirk. “What, like that’s hard?”

Michael and the other Giants exchanged looks that bounced from amused to annoyed and back again, but they didn’t bother speaking. Charlie was their appointed leader, and they’d abide by whatever he decided. Sometimes I wished other arcanes could be so practical.

My eyes zoomed in on Scott. Then again, life would be a, whole hell of a lot more boring without a good fight now and then.
Mmm, and makeup sex. Nothing beats makeup sex.