Enthralled: Tainted Book Four

9. Freaking Witches

Josef Krall, drott of the Valhalla outpost

In the past, whole months could go by without me being able to get either eyes or ears on Kerry Harker, and now, in the span of a handful of days, I seemed to be doing nothing but meeting with him or talking on the phone to him or one of his team.

Since all his actions had benefited me so far, I could complain only so much - unlike Titus, who hadn't stopped whining about cleaning up after Harker's messes since the day we walked into the Witch of Endor's shop and found him shooting the breeze with Ti's fiancée.

Naomi Glace could more than take care of herself even when outnumbered by nephs, but with one of them being Harker, that was a whole different ball game. Understandably, Ti had lost it, which drove Harker to nearly lose it. If the Watcher, Gigi, hadn't intervened by freezing and rewinding time, I was certain I'd be conducting interviews for a new commander of my Huskarls right now.

If I had survived myself, that is.

I never hated Harker the way Titus did. Fate had dealt the kid a raw deal, and he'd played his hand as best he could. I sympathized and, if I could have caught him, I would have done what Hank Bishop did and got him to the Sanctuary to be exorcized. Ti, on the other hand, always had threatened to put an ax between the kid's eyes, but that was more out of rage for all the secrets Harker kept.

Where Og's den was located, for example.

Since we were committed to working within the confines of the Council's justice system, we had to play by rules. We knew the king of the Rephaim had his hands in many Diabolical activities and plots, but we'd never been able to make any evidence stick against him. If we'd known where his lair was, we could have raided it on suspicion and found more than enough to order his execution. Ti hated that Harker had known Og denned in the old carpet warehouse, yet left us in the dark when he was aware we'd been after the brute for years.

Same with Lizzie's.

That one stuck in Ti's craw the most. He was never, ever going to be able to forgive Harker for not cluing us in about that trafficking ring. I understood that Harker was little more than a slave to his demon by that point, but it gnawed at Ti. Lizzie's ran for three years, and we never even heard a whisper of it until the werewolf king, Julian Hemming, contacted the Council a couple of Decembers ago. He was concerned about a number of his wolves who had gone missing, and their trail dead-ended in Queens. Council agreed to partner with him and asked Valhalla to provide troops, so I sent Ti with a squad to meet King Julian's man. We both knew Angelo della Morte very well, and they found Lizzie's quickly with the help of Angelo's 'little birds' - four young witches who were avian shifters and all that survived of Angelo's flock.

After the raid, Ti was so tormented by what he'd seen inside the place that he didn't trust himself to not chop Lizzie up in little bits before wringing every last drop of information out of her, so he burned the place to the ground while the Angel of Death interrogated her.

Speaking of Angelo, I was currently standing next to him in the house of a dark witch named Talia Ben Elihud, also known as Bennie, and trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

"That's the stuff the Rephaim was forcing Queen Parvenah to make," I said, poking the yellow cloth with my finger and feeling my power instantly shut down.

Hmm. I might just take that with me, I thought. Could come in handy even if it does have a self-destruct feature woven into it.

Not that I needed it for myself anymore. My arm still ached from where Chessie had branded a rechargeable protection ward on my bicep. The girl was a genius, and her intervention was going to change my life. I owed Harker big time for making it possible.