Page 52 of Silver Claw

But I’d begun to think of him as a friend I could depend on.

“Here we go,” I said when Aaron parked in the empty parking lot of one of the council’s buildings. “Here we go.”

“Nervous, Kaity Bug?” Joe asked.

“Yeah,” I told him. “Anxious about what I want to happen and nervous that it won’t.”

Aaron opened my door. “Ms. Silver,” he said, once I was out of the car. Then he stopped.

I smiled at him quizzically. “What is it, Aaron?”

“I remember a time when the council brutalized you to test your strength whilst you were dragging a nearly dead vampire from the building.”

“I remember that, too,” I said. The vampire had been Farrow, and one of the council’s people—Lilah—had tortured her so savagely that it had twisted her mind and broken her body. It had taken Farrow a long time to recover from it.

“What are you trying to say?” Joe asked him.

“It is always a good idea to be prepared for anything,” Aaron said, then turned toward his door. “I will wait for you, but none of the men who followed us here will allow me to take you from them when it’s over.” He got into the car and stared out the window. “Still, I will wait.”

I’d never seen Aaron so doleful.

My pack and my alpha stayed in the cars as I walked with Joe to the building. Because of Aaron’s words, I was beginning to believe the council might actually attack me, though I couldn’t imagine why they would.

When the council was in the city, they hid behind glamoured walls that looked like a regular warehouse from the outside. Sometimes they held meetings in a place that looked like a huge church, an effective front for supernaturals who hid from the humans.

In reality, the vampires would never have been able to step foot in a place of worship, but the meeting place was not even close to being a real church. Any human glancing casually toward it would believe that it was, however, and that was what mattered.

Immediately, the doors to the council’s hall opened to allow me inside, and Joe took my hand, linking us together. I honestly didn’t expect it to work, but when I walked through the doorway, he walked through with me.

The interior was nothing like the smallish, crumbling exterior. Magic had birthed the space, and it was huge, grim, and terrifying—and I’d been inside many times. But I’d gone through rather brutal training with Ael, the wolf shifter elder, and I’d saved Bastien’s vampire Farrow when she’d been held and tortured almost to her true death. I’d seen a lot of bad shitinside the council’s hall, and the cold, eerie feel of the place coated my psyche like black ice.

I was already eager to return to the fresh air of the night outside.

The sound of my boot heels on the cold, polished floors echoed through the sterile halls, adding to the background symphony of distant screams and muted laughter.

Joe released my hand to walk behind me. “Even I can feel the power here,” he murmured.

And quite abruptly, I began to get a very bad feeling. They might not have known about the siphoner at all. Maybe they didn’t know my magic was gone.

The council had a habit of testing me. They seemed to believe it made me stronger. Or maybe they were just assholes. But if they were about to rain chaos and violence down upon my head, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. Not without my magic.

They would give me what they believed I could take—but if they didn’t know I’d lost my power, what they gave me could very well kill me. It most definitely wouldn’t make me stronger.

Two minutes later, a couple of rather large nonhuman goons stepped from the shadows and waited for us to reach them. They said nothing, but they didn’t have to.

They never even glanced at Joe.

I walked between them with Joe at my back until finally, we reached the meeting room. They shoved open the double doors, and the creaking of those doors sounded a little bit like bones breaking.

The demon blade began to burn in my tight grip before I realized I’d pulled it from its sheath. Smoke drifted from it as I stepped past the guards into the large room where the council waited.

I had to go in full of bluster and bravado, because that was who I was. I stood before the line of council members perched on their throne seats, my feet apart, my spine stiff, my demon blade smoking in my hand, and I grinned. “It feels extra bleak in here, guys. So tell me. How much pain is this meeting going to cause me?”

For a heartbeat, they only stared down at me, silent and blank.

Ael, the wolf elder, was the one to speak. He leaned forward and looked down at me, his huge staff in his meaty hand. “When are we going to develop something resembling trust, Kait Silver?”

I shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe when you stop trying to kill me.”