On the Hunt by Alexandra Ivy, Dianne Duvall, Rebecca Zanetti Read Free Book Online

sent it to him.”
    “Oh.” She grimaced. “It wasn’t me. I never met Jacob until I discovered him injured.”
    “Did the boy mention any friends or family in the area?”
    “He wasn’t much of a talker. He admitted that he was from the monastery and that . . .” She frowned, suddenly recalling the boy’s parting words. “Wait.”
    “What?”
    “When he left, he said he had a friend he could stay with.”
    The air prickled with a tangible tension. Mika was preparing for the hunt.
    “Someone local?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but he wasn’t strong enough to make it far.”
    A sudden buzz interrupted his next question, and pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, Mika glanced at the screen.
    “It’s Wolfe, I have to take this.”
    She shrugged, returning to the kitchen before Mika could glimpse her expression of frustration.
    It was a familiar sensation.
    When she was with Mika, they rarely had more than a day or two that wasn’t interrupted by his duty as a Sentinel.
    It wasn’t unusual. The warriors were always on call. And even when they weren’t hunting, they were expected to devote hours to training.
    If she hadn’t been so young and so sensitized by her parents’ habit of forgetting her existence when they were wrapped up in their work, Mika’s devotion to his position as a Sentinel probably wouldn’t have made her so crazy.
    With a shake of her head, she cleared away the plates and put the rest of the dinner in the fridge. Neither of them had eaten much, but at the moment she wasn’t hungry.
    She did, however, keep her glass of wine.
    She didn’t mind wasting eggplant.
    But tossing out a fine wine . . .
    Never.
    She was leaning against the counter when Mika returned to the room, his expression more stoic than usual.
    Always a bad sign.
    “What’s wrong?” she instantly demanded.
    “Wolfe has been trying to track down Jacob’s family.”
    She set aside her wineglass. “Did he find them?”
    Mika moved to stare out the window over the sink, his profile grim.
    “He discovered that Jacob had been left at the edge of Valhalla around ten years ago by a man who’d run off before anyone could speak with him.”
    She licked her lips, not needing to be a psychic to know that this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending.
    “Not unusual,” she murmured. “Many families are embarrassed to realize their child isn’t normal.”
    He gave a slow nod. They both knew that they’d been fortunate to have families who hadn’t turned their backs on them when their gifts began to develop.
    “Wolfe managed to track him down.”
    She blinked in surprise. The Tagos had managed to find a stranger who’d dropped off a boy and then disappeared ten years ago?
    “How?”
    “It’s always better not to ask.”
    Yeah. Probably a wise choice.
    “Has the man heard from Jacob?”
    “Impossible to say.” Mika swiveled his head to reveal his bleak expression. “He was found beaten to death last week.”
    She pressed a hand to her lips. “Dear Lord.”
    “And he wasn’t alone,” he continued, his voice oddly harsh. “A healer who had been missing for the past three years was found decapitated in the man’s basement.”

Chapter Five
    Bailey gasped, the blood draining from her face. “Who was it?”
    Mika cursed himself for being so blunt.
    Of course she would instantly fear that the dead healer would be someone she knew.
    But dammit, he’d been sucker punched by Wolfe’s grim report.
    “Benjamin Lyman¸ a healer who lived in Cleveland,” he revealed, carefully watching as Bailey paced the cracked linoleum floor.
    There didn’t seem to be any recognition of the name, but her expression remained troubled.
    “Why?”
    “The human police wrote it off as a drug deal gone bad,” he said in disgust.
    She turned to study him with eyes darkened to jade. “And Wolfe?”
    “He managed to smuggle someone from the Order into the morgue where they’re still holding the bodies.”
    The