Sampson pushed himself off the couch, avoiding my gaze. “Sophie, Alex—”
I launched myself up then, too, hands on hips. “Alex knew this whole time, didn’t he?”
“Not the whole time, Sophie. I had to hide. I had to make it look like I was dead or they would keep coming after me and no one at the Agency would be safe. I wasn’t going to do that to the Underworld, Sophie. I needed to know when it would be safe to come back again. And the only way I could do that—the only way I could do that and still even have the slightest hope of coming back—was to have eyes out here.”
“Alex’s.”
“He helped me, Sophie.”
I thought of Alex, of his ice-blue eyes and that cocky half smile, of the two-inch scars above each shoulder blade that had grown silvery with age after years of wandering the earth without his wings.
Alex may have been fallen, but he swore he was determined to do good, to one day be restored back to grace. He had been my protector, my lover, my friend.
And he had been lying to me.
“Does he know you’re back now?” I wanted to know.
“No.” The stern look in Sampson’s eyes convinced me he was telling the truth. “And you can’t tell him. You can’t tell anyone I’m here. You can’t tell anyone I’m alive.”
I swallowed hard, the weight of knowing crushing against my chest, squeezing out the air. “No one?”
Sampson shook his head. “You have to promise me.”
I felt myself nod, mute, while the wheels spun in my head. Finally, “If you don’t want anyone to know you’re alive, why’d you come back from—where were you?”
Sampson cocked his head. “Everywhere. Nowhere. After that night—”
An involuntary shudder wracked my body. The memory of being chained with Sampson in an underground basement while a madman sharpened the sword he was going to use to pierce my flesh was still as cold and as fresh in my mind as it was a year ago. Sampson slid a comforting arm across my shoulders and I slumped against him, my body relying on muscle memory because my brain was still calculating, figuring, trying to make sense of Pete Sampson, alive, in my living room.
“I was rescued—or so I thought—from that damn little kennel.”
Sampson clapped a hand over his chin and rubbed where the salt-and-pepper stubble littered the firm set of his clenched jaw. He looked at me and I could see the smallest flitter of embarrassment cross his face; his shoulders seemed to sag under the weight, under the memory of being chained, being beaten—being treated like an animal by a man whom he had once considered a friend.
“There were people—they said they knew about the Underworld. I didn’t have a choice. I got in the car and immediately passed out. I must have been drugged. Then I was crated, moved. I woke up in a shipping yard, somewhere. I knew it was woodsy, or forested, but that’s all I knew. Nothing was familiar.”
“They dropped you in the woods? In the middle of nowhere? That’s awful!”
Sampson wagged his head, the hand that was stroking his chin now raking across his ragged curls and over eyes that were tired, heavy. “I was starving, naked, in the middle of nowhere, and by the time I fully came to, so did they.”
I gulped, the sour state of my own saliva catching in my throat. “Who were they?”
“The werewolf hunters.” He licked his lips. “Trackers. It’s an ancient calling. . . .”
I nodded. “I know what trackers are, Sampson.”
I knew all too well. It had only been a couple of weeks since Will—Will, the man charged with keeping me and all my Vessel of Souls–filled self safe—had had a run-in with Xian and Feng Du, Werewolf Hunters. And although werewolf hunters sound incredibly elegant and Van Helsing-esque, you should know that werewolf hunters have come out of the silver-bullet-forging days of ancient, dusty castles and now taken up residence in more urban environments—like in the back of a retro delicatessen in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
You should also know that werewolves are not the drooling, shirtless mongrels changing each time the moon becomes full that modern cinema would like us to believe. First of all, it’s not just the moon that brings on the hairy changes in werewolves. If it was, I might have never gotten my first job at the Underworld Detection Agency under Pete Sampson. What edged out the other applicants—a fairly well-put-together zombie woman with melon-shaped boobs and a vampire so newly formed that his fangs were still short—was my ability to chain up a grown man in thirty-four seconds flat. That grown man was Pete Sampson.
I licked my lips, choosing my words carefully. “So why now? Why did you come back now?”
Sampson swallowed slowly, his eyes flicking quickly over mine, then working hard to avoid my questioning stare.
“Hey, who’s this?” He patted ChaCha, who popped up on her popsicle-stick back legs and danced around like the ferocious three-pound ball of fur that she was. I snatched her from under his hand and held her to me.