The jagged point of the staff pierced his hands and buried itself in his head.
Becky screamed again, horror on her face.
I ignored Carl’s body as he collapsed onto the linoleum, and I ignored Becky’s continued screams. I released my control of the elements. The ground beneath the building settled and everything went still.
Keeping Becky within sight, I moved toward Adam. I dropped to my knees beside his body.
My heart felt like it had cracked like a wooden plank, then burned to cinders. If Dark Elves could cry, my face would have been flooded with tears. My eyes ached, and with everything I had I wished I could cry. I grasped Adam’s shoulder and moved him just enough so that I could see his precious face—with his sightless eyes. My hand shook as I reached for him and started to close his eyelids.
I went still. The smell of alyssum was so strong I almost gagged. The moldy odor of wet, ruined hay rushed over me, a smell given off by a dead Metamorph. This wasn’t Adam. This was a Metamorph who had taken on Adam’s appearance.
Confusion, then relief, made my head spin. My thoughts raced. If this wasn’t Adam, where was he? Had they killed him already? Please let Adam be okay.
“Nyx!” Olivia’s voice came from the doorway, and I jerked my head up to see my partner there. More relief touched me as I saw her. She looked fine, and this dead male beside me wasn’t Adam.
“Come on.” She cocked her head in the direction she had come from, and the kitchen light caressed her skin, which was like flawless brown silk. “We need to hurry. Something big is going down at the Paranorm Center.”
I registered four things at once in a rapid flash.
Olivia was human and didn’t know about the Paranorm Center.
Olivia didn’t talk that way. She would normally have told me I looked like hell and to stop screwing around and get my ass down where I was needed.
Olivia was wearing a plain T-shirt. Just a plain black T-shirt. She never wore plain shirts. Ever. The shirts always had sayings like the one she’d had on this morning—
I sometimes go to my own little world, but that’s okay. They know me there.
And this female smelled like alyssum.
No way in all of the Underworlds was this Olivia.
I dove for the pile of silverware that had scattered across the floor. I grabbed a steak knife and rolled onto my back.
I flung the knife across the room. It flipped end over end and then buried itself in the fake Olivia’s heart.
CHAPTER 3
Becky’s screaming was like a shrill alarm clock in the background. I was tempted to shut her off, but she was nothing more than an ignorant pawn, who hadn’t tried to kill me, which meant I had to return the favor. Still, I kept her in my peripheral vision just in case.
I started toward the archway where the not-Olivia had crumpled to the floor. I automatically reached for one of my dragon-clawed daggers when I realized I was still in human clothes and wasn’t wearing my weapons belt. I ground my teeth. It wasn’t likely they’d had the courtesy to bring my handbag along with me, much less my leather fighting suit and weapons.
Rodán and the other Trackers needed to know what was going down, and I needed backup.
“Give me your handbag.” I held my hand in Becky’s direction. The flour-coated simpleton stopped screaming as she grabbed her purse from off the floor and clutched it to her. Idiot. Facing her possible demise and she was protecting her Ferragamo purse from me. She had only one of her matching heels on; the other was near Carl’s body.
With my hand still extended, I scowled at her. The floor started to rock again and Becky screamed and threw her handbag at me.
I caught it and she yelped as I jerked the purse open in a not-so-delicate manner. I dug through it, found her cell phone, then dropped the purse on the floor. Becky started to scramble toward it but stopped when she got a good look at my expression.