Michael told me one of our contacts had spotted an Ethiopian Cetus off the coast of Maryland while I was out last week. I feel like something of that scale would’ve made the news, but they don’t always and I don’t follow the regular news all that closely so it’s not impossible that I missed it.

I can say now, I didn’t miss it.

We loaded equipment into the back of my Jeep and left the boys with Jesse before driving south to Edgewood, Maryland, taking turns behind the wheel. It was a nice drive and I had time to review my notes again long before we got anywhere near Edgewood. Michael rolled the windows down as we got into town and I smiled as the scent of the ocean reached my nose, so familiar and yet so different from the scent back home. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as contentment settled over me for a moment. Michael’s quiet laugh made me glance back at him in question.

“It’s been a few years since I saw you relax like that,” he paused in thought, “I think it was the December after you turned 21 and you seemed very drunk,” I growled, gaze narrowed.

“I wasn’t drunk,” arguing wasn’t going to get me anywhere and I knew that, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

“That was you sober? What are you like drunk, then?” Sometimes I wasn’t sure if Michael was being serious or not so I opted to ignore the question and returned to watching the buildings pass by outside my window. We pulled into the hotel parking lot and he parked my Jeep, turning off the engine while I got out to unload our bags from the back. He led the way into the lobby with his bag as I was adjusting the strap on my duffle. I paused mid-stride when I caught the scent of something other than human, something I’d never run across before, following it up to the counter where a beautiful young woman with fair hair, dark eyes, and olive skin sat on the other side waiting to check us in. She reminded me of one of the women mentioned in a few of the journals from Ancient Greece that I kept in my library back home, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on which one. Michael checked us into our room and though she definitely looked up at us, she never made eye contact, a minor detail, but still enough to put me on edge. Michael said something I was too distracted to catch and the woman laughed, a sound so musically hypnotic that I almost lost myself in it. “Alright, thank you.” Michael’s voice drew me back as he took the room keys from the woman and we headed down the hall. “She seemed nice.” He broke the silence when we reached the room right beside the side entrance.

“Funny, so did most of my foster parents,” I spoke bitterly as he let us in and Michael blinked in surprise.

“You never talk about your foster families.” His surprise was clear in his voice as well, but I just shook my head.

“That’s because they’re not important.” I dropped my duffle on the floor next to the wall and moved back to the door as I changed the subject, “Where exactly was the Cetus last seen?” Michael was quiet for long enough that I turned back to him with a look of distrust.

“About that…” He began, but he trailed off when I bared my teeth in warning, rubbing the back of his neck and averting his gaze.

“There’s no Cetus, is there?” It wasn’t a question, but still, he nodded in confirmation of my guess. “Michael, I’d like you to think very carefully about how you’re going to explain exactly what’s going on.” My voice was a cold growl that made even Michael seem to shrink.

“Ethiopian Cetus was the best Jesse and I could think of to get you and me out of town for a vacation.” I was stunned, at least in part because I’m fairly certain Michael had no idea what a vacation even was before maybe last week. I exhaled slowly, rubbing my temples for a moment while I struggled to respond.

“I think-” I swallowed and tried again, “I think I need some time to process this.” I finally spoke and slipped out the door before he could do more than open his mouth.

“I’m sorry, the number you have dialed-” I hung up, swearing at Jesse again under my breath. I’d called her every half hour or so while I wandered, even sent her a few texts, but she seemed to be avoiding me.

I sent off one last text before breathing a defeated sigh and tucking my phone back into my pocket. I found a low ledge at the edge of the water and sat down, unlacing my boots and setting them and my socks aside so that I could dangle my feet in the water.

“Alix had spent the whole day sitting like this the day we met,” I chuckled at my talking to myself, “I wonder what she was thinking about.” It was quiet, easy to get lost in thought as I watched the sky grow dark over the waves. A stranger joined me on the cliff an hour or so later, leaning back on his hands and dangling his legs over the water next to mine.

“I’ve never seen you around here before.” I glanced up at him when he spoke, eyes cold, “Business or pleasure?” I was quiet for a second as I studied him.

“Pleasure, apparently, but that’s no business of yours.” My voice was cold and blunt and for a second, he seemed insulted, but it didn’t last long.

“It can be if you want.” He leaned closer, reaching for my hand, but in an instant, I had one of my knives against his throat.

“Try me,” I spoke with an easy smile, “I dare you.” He swallowed hard, nodding his understanding as I picked up my things and started walking back to the hotel.

The light was still on in our room when I got back and I set my boots down by the door to check my pockets for a key when I remembered I hadn’t taken one. I sighed, I wanted a shower, I wanted to wash off the sand and that guy’s scent, but I stopped, my fist hovering a centimeter away from the door at the sound of voices. I told myself it could be the tv, but I still followed the urge to press my ear to the door and listen. I held my breath for a moment as a woman spoke and Michael actually laughed. The woman joined in, that unmistakable hypnotic laugh that tugged at my subconscious.

I swallowed, remembering to breathe when the madness tugged harder.

I didn’t knock.

I dropped my hand back to my side, picked up my boots again, and left in a daze.

When I finally stopped walking I found myself sitting in one of the dark corner booths of a pub because I’m a struggling alcoholic and seem to have a built-in navigational system that guides me to the nearest one when I need a drink. Honestly, I don’t even remember asking for the bottle of scotch I was nursing. I slouched further into my seat with a dark laugh after I finished the first glass; I’d been six months sober and now all that work was right back down the drain. I poured another and stared at it, spinning the glass between my fingertips as I took a long pull from the bottle. Most of the other patrons were smart enough to give me my space, but after I was down to about half a bottle a small group of men with too much liquid courage and too little brains approached my dark little booth with sleazy smiles.

“Hey there, little lady.” I turned my cold eyes on them, that look alone enough to cause the three of them to pause in their advance. As much as I hated it, I was used to this sort of thing by now, it came with being a relative of the Kitsune. “There’s no need to be so cold.” The leader of their little pack tried again and my gaze drifted back to my glass in disinterest.

“I’m in kind of a shitty mood right now, so if you don’t walk away in the next, oh…” I made a show of checking my watch, “five seconds, I will use this bottle,” I gestured to the half empty bottle of scotch on the table, “to disembowel the lot of you and then use whatever money you have on you to pay for the replacement.” My voice was level, a cold edge to it that I only ever heard once the taste of iron was thick in the air. I’m relapsing, the thought echoed somewhere at the edge of my mind, but try as I might, I couldn’t quite grasp it. Maybe they still had a little bit of brains in their heads after all because, after a moment or two of staring, the group left me alone.

Maybe their survival instincts kicked in.

I’d stopped by a liquor store on the way back from the pub, another bottle of scotch was hanging loosely from my fingers half empty by the time I reached the hotel. I made it to the door to our room by dragging my shoulder along the wall until I reached the end because I was in too much of an apathetic haze to read the numbers. The light was still on the inside, but no sound came from inside when I paused to listen. I raised my hand to knock, but something made me stop. Maybe I was too tired. I slid down none too gracefully to collapse in the doorway with my head against the door as the thought crossed my mind briefly that maybe I was a little bit tipsy after all.

I chased the thought away with a long pull on my bottle.

“Michael,” my voice was soft and I gave a harsh laugh as I raked shaking fingers through my wild hair, “what are you doing to me?” I smiled sadly and finished off my Scotch, “Do you even know?” I closed my eyes and leaned against the door, hugging the now empty bottle to my chest.

My head was pounding and there were miniature fireworks exploding behind my eyelids the next morning. I opened them slowly, squinting towards the silhouette of Michael sitting in a chair in front of the window where he watched me over his tented fingers.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” My voice was shaky as I pressed the heel of my palms to my eyes and hoped the throbbing would subside soon. He waited in silence, the judgment coming off him in waves obvious even without looking. I took a deep breath and shifted to shield my eyes as I squinted towards him, mentally preparing for the lecture. He set the empty bottle of scotch on the nightstand between us, the sound echoing loudly in my head.

“I thought you said you wanted to hunt sober.” I didn’t answer, instead baring my teeth at the ceiling in a silent snarl. “6 months, Reyna, then you go and get dead drunk.” I thought about pointing out that I wasn’t dead drunk, but he was already frustrated with me, knowing him for as long as I had, I could read the near imperceptible signs when I looked, “All of that work you did down the drain.” I needed some coffee if we were going to have this conversation, but that wasn’t really an option, so I chose to lash out instead.

“I wouldn’t have gone to the pub in the first place if you hadn’t been in here flirting with the girl from the counter last night the first time I came back.” I snapped the words, “Or had you come after me yesterday when I left.” It wasn’t his fault, not entirely, but what else was I good at if not shifting the blame.

“I wasn’t flirting.” He met my glare with one of his own, his black eye cold and dead while his white eye was a sharp reminder that hurt me perhaps as much as it had hurt him, but I didn’t flinch this time.

“Then what exactly were you doing in here with the lady from the desk who seemed so nice yesterday? The hell else am I supposed to think you were doing?” I paused in my shouting long enough to half roll and half fall out of the bed. “Of course I went out to drink! I couldn’t-” I stopped, swallowed the lump in my throat, and tried again, “I couldn’t handle the idea that I finally started to trust you and you went and broke it.” I stormed out the door, slamming it behind me loud enough to draw the few people in the rooms nearby into the hallway.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?! I grabbed the man by his shirt and slammed him hard into the wall behind him.

“Another word out of you and I’ll strip the flesh from your bones.” The level iciness in my voice was back, despite the snarl that tugged at my lips. Some corner of my mind was frightened by that thought and what it meant, but I ignored it. Michael opened the door to follow me, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw my face, paling slightly. “Do we have an understanding?” I smiled at the man in my hands, a rather cruel smile I hadn’t worn in years. He nodded frantically, darting back into his room the moment I let go of his shirt. I turned my cold gaze on Michael only briefly before I turned to continue down the hall.

“Reyna.” His voice wasn’t quiet enough I didn’t hear it, but still, I didn’t turn or slow my stride.

“Go to hell, Michael,” I called back and disappeared around the corner and out the door.

In hindsight, I haven’t the faintest idea what I was thinking when I stormed out of the hotel that morning. I was wearing yesterday’s clothes, which reek of the pub I was in last night, and I didn’t take the keys to my Jeep or any of my things, so I couldn’t just leave. The plus side to having fallen asleep in yesterday’s clothes is that my wallet and phone were still in my pockets, though my phone battery was on its last legs by then. I wandered for a while until I found myself in front of a public library and the thought crossed my mind that maybe finding something to read for a while would help me cool off. I was on book number five or six and so far, it wasn’t working. I closed the book and breathed a heavy sigh, leaning my forehead against the cool glass to look out the window from my perch on the sill. I was lost in my head when I heard someone trip over my stack of discarded books, the ones in his arms scattering across the floor.

“I’m sorry, I kind of just left these in the middle of the road, didn’t I?” I slid off of my perch and started picking up the books he’d dropped without looking up.

“Reyna?” I froze, looking up then with a half dozen books in my arms to find an old friend of Alix’s from Ireland staring at me in surprise.

“Logan?” A smile tugged at my lips as I relaxed slightly. “What are you doing here?” I glanced down at the stack of books in my hands, skimming them, “Ghouls?” I looked up at him in mild surprise, last time we’d met, he was too busy trying to keep his brother out of trouble to think of much else, “You took up the family business after all?” Logan flashed a sheepish grin, scratching the back of his head at my question.

“We both did.” He started walking, gesturing with his head for me to follow, “Nick was almost as bad as you but not as good at it, so he’s not exactly welcome back home anymore.”

“So you came with him?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged, “He’s my brother, I can’t just abandon him, you know?” Logan paused to set the stack of books in his arms on a table with a laptop and a bunch of scattered papers, so I set my stack down as well. “So, what’re you doing here, anyway? You lived in Maine, last I heard.” He sat in one of the chairs at the table and I hesitated a moment before draping my jacket over the back of a chair and sitting down next to him.

“Supposedly I’m on vacation.” My voice was quiet and I trailed off in a harsh laugh before straightening up. “So tell me about this project of yours.” Concern filled Logan’s hazel eyes and he opened his mouth, but I could guess what he was about to say, so I cut him off while I lifted a copy of a news article to skim the contents. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d really rather not talk about it.” He closed his mouth, his eyes lingering for a minute before he straightened up, sliding his chair closer to the table.

“So there have been incidents here, here, and here,” he slid a map of Harford County towards us and marked the locations with a pen, letting me hide in the work. I listened quietly, slipping into business mode and skimming through paper after paper and book after book while Logan gave me a rundown of what was going on.

“I think I have more on Ghouls in my journal than you’re going to find in any of these books,” I spoke when he finally fell silent, twisting in my seat to slip my journal from inside my jacket just as a young man a little taller than Logan with jet black hair and pale blue eyes approached the table.

“Nick!” Logan beamed up at the man who was apparently his older brother, “What took you so long?” I didn’t meet his questioning gaze, focused entirely on thumbing through my journal.

“Who’s this?” Nick pulled the chair across from me out and slunk into the seat, a smile tugging on his lips as he continued to study me.

“Oh, this is Reyna.” Logan elbowed me and I finally looked up, eyebrow raised in question, “Reyna, this is Nick.”

“Ah, here it is,” I set my journal on the table open to the pages where I’d collected all of the information on Ghouls I’d collected from my past hunts and the old journals in my library back home, “everything you could possibly need to know about hunting Ghouls.” I couldn’t help the smirk on my lips, I took a lot of pride in my work when it came to data. Nick beat Logan to the journal, lifting it and reading quietly through the information before marking the page with a finger and thumbing curiously through some of the other pages.

“You’re a hunter?” He finally looked up, an incredulous tone to his voice as he passed the journal across to Logan. My gaze narrowed slightly and I opened my mouth to answer, but Logan beat me to it.

“Come on, Nick. Reyna Wildes? She’s a Soul Collector.” Nick still looked uncertain, “They call her the Bloody Red Queen of the East.” Logan lifted my journal to show my ouroboros branded in the leather cover by way of ID. “Alix talks about her a lot.” That finally got some recognition.

“Half. I’m half Soul Collector.” He scoffed at that.

“No one is just half Soul Collector, Alix’s DNA is like a bloody parasite; it overwrites everything.” I leaned back in my seat with a smile.

“I’m. Half.” I spoke the words again as if it were the simplest thing in the world, “My faither was a pure blooded Alcaimynder,” I paused to let that sink in, “that blood isn’t so easily overwritten.” Nick was quiet for a long time, considering while I returned my attention to the articles on the table and the map of the county.

“You’re really her? The Red Queen?” I looked up when he finally spoke, lifting pen from paper where I’d been estimating the location of the Ghouls’ nest.

“Yes.” He almost looked impressed.

“I’ve heard rumors in the underground about someone pulling strings here on the east coast,” he smirked to himself, “didn’t think she’d be a hunter, too.” I shrugged as I returned my attention to the map.

“I’m not surprised you’ve heard rumors, but hunting is my primary job.” I paused to finish marking the map, “Everything else, including my position on the Council, is just because I get bored quickly.” I slid the map to the center of the table and shifted to the edge of my seat as I changed the subject. “The area within the circle is going to be your best bet for the Ghouls responsible for these incidents. This section here,” I gestured a region along the coastline with the end of the pen, “is where I’d personally start looking; there’s a lot of natural caves along there and it’s not too far from any of the incidents so that’s probably your best bet.” I set the pen down and slid my chair back.

“You’re leaving?” Logan almost sounded a little disappointed as I stood.

“Yeah,” I shrugged my jacket back on, “my vacation didn’t exactly go as planned, so I think I’m going to head back to Maine after I check out of the hotel.” I shrugged, “I’ve got a shop to run and a couple of kids to look after now, so I’ll let you guys handle this by yourselves.” He passed me my journal and I tucked it back into my jacket, “If you guys are ever in Washington County though, swing by Dogwood Apothecary and I’ll treat you to lunch or something.” Logan grinned at that.

“Sure thing. It was good seeing you again.” His smile was infectious, kind of like how people react to seeing cute animal pictures.

“You too. Nice meeting you, Nick.” I waved farewell and took my stack of books to return them to their shelves before I left.

There was no one at the front desk when I stopped by to ask about getting into the hotel room without a key, which was a little odd when I stop to think about it, but at the time I just shrugged it off and borrowed the computer to key another card for the door. The room was empty when I opened the door, though Michael’s things were still there. I started to lift my duffle from the floor and sling it over my shoulder when I really registered the familiar metallic scent of blood almost thick enough it stuck in the back of my throat. It wasn’t unusual that it was there, the scent clung to Michael and I like a fungus, but it was usually pretty faint and this… as I took a deep breath, it was overwhelming almost to the point of intoxication. I surveyed the room again, taking in the missing mattress and the acrid taste of ammonia that hung in the air; all signs pointed to someone in the middle of “cleaning” the scene because someone had died in a rather bloody way.

After a moment’s consideration though, I decided that it had nothing to do with me and was, therefore, not my problem.

So I strode quickly across the room to lift my pistol from the nightstand and tuck it into the back of my jeans before picking up my keys and casting one more careful glance around the room to make sure I left nothing of mine behind. Then I left, slipping out the door and leaving my key card at the still empty front desk. Once my duffle was secure in the passenger seat, I pulled my pistol out again to tuck into the holster I’d built into my center console before I climbed in and started the engine. A moment later and I was driving back to Pembroke in relative silence.

I had mixed feelings about what to do with Michael’s things after I thanked Jesse for watching Loki and Zevi and saw her out the door. Part of me wanted to burn it all, and part of me just wanted to box it up and leave it for him on the curb. I ended up doing the latter with most of it. When I found a rolled-up canvas painting in one corner of his workshop, I stopped. It was Michael’s, I’d never had any real talent when it came to painting. I unrolled it slowly, knowing what I’d see. It was me, asleep and wrapped partially in a sheet; I’m pretty sure I looked a good five years younger than I actually was at the time, despite the fact my expression was twisted in pain and terror. I laid it out over a metal barrel in the back alley, struck a match, lit up a cigarette because apparently I was breaking all of my good habits this week, and tossed it on. The canvas burned remarkably easy and there was something refreshing about watching it turn to ash. As I took a drag of my cigarette and watched, the smoke swirled up into the dark sky, carrying the occasional embers into the night like tiny, dying stars.