The air crackled with tension, and I didn’t know what possessed me, but I had to saysomething, so before I could even think it through, a cry escaped my mouth.
“Wait!”
All three of the older adults chuckled, but it worked, because Arlene held her hand up, and her daughter stopped opening Luther’s cage.
“There’s no use pleading for your lives,” she said, and I could tell she was loving her position of power. “There will be no mercy here. And don’t think you can stall until someone from your little security team comes to find you. My daughter has been thorough in her work, even before we activated Luther, so every single member of your staff has a tracker on them. Either physically or programmed into their phone.”
If she wasn’t such an obviously wicked woman gleefully celebrating our impending deaths, I would have thought it was cute that she looked so proud of her child. “It was ingenious, really. A simple ghost program that they got by clicking on a link in an email she sent to sign up for her Christmas baking list. That’s really it. The chance for fresh cookies and macarons ended up being the downfall of your entire pack.”
“Nobody likes shredded coconut that much,” I objected.
“Macarons,not macaroons,” Alexandria objected quickly, and it might have been the most impassioned I’d ever heard her. “There’s a differe—Never mind.”
If Cherry was around, she would no doubt have a grand time listening to an info-dump about two desserts that sounded the same, but she wasn’t, so I turned my attention to Arlene and Vincenzo.
“There’s still time to undo this,” I said, choosing not to address Arlene’s remarks about the tracking devices. I had thought our cyber security was far too adept to let something like that happen, but clearly, I had been mistaken. And that mistake was likely going to cost me and my family our lives. “If you made a pact with some entity beyond our realm and gave them your wolf in exchange for all of this, that entity will not take kindly to you trying to find a workaround. There are some things that are just not worth messing with. But we can get experts, people who have experience with this, and try to get you out of it before anything goes wrong.”
“Before anything goes wrong?” she crowed. “You say that like we’re not already victorious. The game is over, and although you put up quite the fight, it’s done.”
“Enough of this pontificating!” the grandfather snapped, stepping forward. “If you keep monologuing, I’m going to expire of old age before we do anything! Alexandria, let the beast out and end this already!”
“ButNonno,what if they’re right? Should we be double-crossing adaemoniumlike this? What if no one has to die?”
“Have you lost your mind, child? Open the cage!”
She jerked, hurrying to do so, and Luther took two lumbering steps out before pausing.
“What are you waiting for? Kill them! Kill all of them so that the Parracida pack can once more rise to our glory!Semper?—”
He never quite got the words out, suddenly stumbling back and holding his throat as he choked. All of us watched, stunned, as he fell to the ground. Foam bubbled out of his mouth as he clawed at his throat.
“What the hell?”
Another stream of water shot down, hitting the old man in the chest, making him scream as smoke rose from him. Collectively, every head in the room snapped in the direction of the water. A damp Cherry was crouched in one of the highest windows of the tower, a comically large super soaker in her hands.
“The personal assistant!”
“The social media manager!”
“That bint from the funeral!”
“How are you here?” Vincenzo snapped, his face going purple. “We have alerts if any of your trackers get remotely close to our home!”
Cherry pumped her artificial gun twice before aiming it again. “Joke’s on you, I never remember my phone. Or my wallet.”
Chapter 22
Cheribelle
Consequences of a Bad Deal
Never in mylife did I think I would rain down pandemonium while spraying a mix of mountain ash, holy water, wolfsbane, salt, dried sage, and a few other things, but that was exactly what I did. I fired at Alexandria, her brother, and the two remaining older adults, causing them to scatter.
Once I really had them on the run, I jumped down from the window, tucking into a roll that hurt my shoulder way more than I would have liked, and popping up behind Paul. I started cutting him free with the sharp piece of metal I’d tucked into my bra when I’d hauled myself out of the sewers.
“Cherry! I thought you were dead! Not that I’m not grateful, but how are you here?!”
Yeah, couldn’t really blame him on that one. It was still difficult for me to believe that I had survived, but unless I was having a very convincing pre-death hallucination, I’d managed.