Page 151 of The Rut in the Road

I looked down at the cross, the small stones set into heavy platinum. “Where did this come from?” I asked him, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

“One of the Church members who died in the raid.”

One of the Church members I killed.

I nodded, trying to ignore the slight churning feeling in my gut. “She thought about how they were going to stop Senator Adams,” I whispered, and Raj went very still.

Too still.

“You’re telling me this is connected to what happened last spring?” he asked, and I could hear the worry in his voice.

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” I said, then told him everything I’d read from the cross.

“Fucking hell,” he snarled, then grabbed his phone and walked out of the room.

“How sure are you?” Hart asked me, his eyes too bright.

I swallowed. “Pretty sure,” I answered. “She thought aboutthe senator who kept trying to bring the monsters into society, and I think he’s the only one pushing pro-Arcanid legislation.”

“Fucking hell, indeed,” Hart echoed, but his expression looked… less angry and more hopeless. I didn’t much like the idea of Hart being hopeless.

Hart, for all his bluster, was a nearly endless optimist. And if he was about ready to give up, that didn’t seem to bode well for the rest of us.

I was sittingin Raj’s spot on the couch—the recliner on the end—a plate with a still uneaten slice of pizza on the end table beside me and Raj’s head resting on one thigh. I ran my fingers through his thick, dark hair, and he made a soft sound that that might have been a hum or might have been something like a purr. He’d eaten his pizza, and his empty plate was on the floor.

I offered him my plate. “Want one more?”

He tilted his head back a little to look at me, studying my face. “You sure you don’t want it?”

“I’m sure,” I answered.

He picked up the pizza, taking a big bite off the end, and I returned the plate to the side table. I kept stroking his hair as he finished the pizza.

“You okay?” he asked me.

“Yes?” I wasn’t sure why he was asking.

“After today, I mean,” he clarified. “Finding out that—” He cut off whatever he’d been about to say.

“That the Church of Holy Judgment”—Even the name left a kind of sour taste in my mouth, and I suddenly understood that the saying wasn’tjusta saying.—“is part of a larger network of organizations set on eliminating all Arcanids and Arc-humans.”

Raj grimaced. “Yeah,” he replied darkly. “That.”

I let out a soft sigh. “I’m okay,” I told him. “I don’tlikeit, but if you think about it, something like this couldn’t just have come from nowhere. And neither could some of the protests.”

He sat up, looking at me. “What do you mean?” he asked.

I shrugged. “The protests are too big and too coordinated not to be connected to some sort of larger organization or network,”I replied. “At least, it seems that way to me,” I added, feeling my cheeks flush. It wasn’tmyjob to pay attention to those things.

Raj grunted, his expression thoughtful. “It’d be nice if Anti-Terrorism would think about that,” he muttered.

“Do they focus on hate groups?” I asked.

Raj’s expression grew darker. “No, not really,” he answered. “That’s technically Civil Rights’s job, but once they cross the line into acts of terrorism, like driving a car into a crowd, then they become Anti-Terrorism’s problem.” He sighed—a heavier one than mine—and flopped back into my lap. “So theyshouldhave taken that up after Halloween.”

“And they didn’t?” I asked.

I felt him shrug. “No idea. They don’t really talk to us.”