Chapter 31

THIRTY-ONE

Infirmary no longer needed, the tasting table had been moved back into the barrel room and all but one seat was occupied around it, the room full of people, including Mac with Paris sitting beside him, waiting for the last person to arrive.

To confirm the wheels had been set in motion.

Jason, on the other side of Paris, leaned across the table, asking Icarus, "What happened to Miss Types-Like-the-Wind?"

"You wouldn't want me to send these messages to the wrong people, would you?" Mary said as she cleared the bottom step.

No, they would not. With Charlotte's help decoding Vincent's books and contacts, Mac's cold case files and access to missing persons reports, the pack digging deeper into Atlas's potential whereabouts, and Mary hacking surgical records, official and not, they'd identified three possible suspects as the giant who'd attacked Paris, all of them erased persons, presumably all the names they'd associated with them aliases too.

Brett Barrett.

Samuel Thomas.

Neil Roberts.

And just now, Mary had sent encrypted emails to each, putting it out there that Paris, as Vincent's successor, wanted to meet at the Stick tomorrow, the day before Samhain, to discuss a possible partnership for future endeavors. They were counting on the giant, whichever one he was, to see an opportunity he couldn't pass up. A chance to catch the one who got away.

And Paris acting the bait on his own terms, with plenty of backup.

Mac looked again at the pictures of their three suspects—a single photo of each that Mary had managed to scrounge up. "Can you give us a more likely than not?" he asked Paris.

Paris pulled each photo closer, taking a long look then trading one for another. "All of them are the right build and appearance, perfectly average. But all of their beards are too thick for me to see if the scar is there," he said, tapping at the spot on Brett's chin where the raised slash would be. "And the photos are too grainy to see much else."

"Best I could find," Mary said. "We're lucky to get any for erased persons."

"Samuel is the most likely candidate," Robin said. "If that report he paid a surgeon for fixing his face after a bar fight is legit."

"A bar that has the ingredients for the drink you smelled on his breath," Mac said.

"Wrong eye color," Jenn countered.

"Could be contacts," Kai said, and he would know. The white raven's contacts had fooled people for years into thinking he was a human.

"Then there's the loan shark, Neil," Abigail said. "Vincent did business with him."

"He could've taken that knife Paris painted as collateral," Jason speculated. "High value." The smuggler would know.

But Icarus shook his head. "Atlas would've known him."

"That might be an apron Brett is wearing," Liam said, peering at the photo he'd snagged from in front of Paris.

"Store clerk, janitor, mechanic would make sense for an erased person," Adam said. "He bounces around, gets paid under the table."

Paris shoved back from the table with a frustrated grunt. " If , might , could be ... We don't know anything for sure," he said, raking his hands through his hair as he paced away from the table.

Mac rose slowly, not cutting him off abruptly this time, but letting Paris wind down as he circled back to where Mac stood. When he was in front of him, Mac laid a hand over his stomach. "Who do you think it is here , in your gut?"

"It could be any of?—"

He splayed his fingers. "Who, Paris?"

"Brett," he answered without hesitation. "Adam is right, and the malice in his eyes... Whomever he was looking at, he hated them. That was the way he looked at Lola." His whole body shivered, and Mac wrapped an arm around his shoulders while the remembered fear passed.

"Brett is priority one," he told the group over his shoulder. "But we still need to be ready for Samuel or Neil."

"If we can find them," Mary said. "I'll keep digging, but no known addresses as of yet."

"What if I'm wrong?" Paris said, quietly, as if intended only for Mac's ears, but in a room full of shifters and magical beings, everyone heard him.

And of course Robin was the one to press, the coyote strolling over to where they stood. "You can't go into this and be knocked off your game if it's not Brett who shows up at the Stick tomorrow."

He was an asshole, but he wasn't wrong. Given the geography of the location, the plan depended on Paris keeping the giant, whomever he turned out to be, talking long enough to one, incriminate himself, and two, allow the teams to converge from the water, air, and land.

The asshole, it seemed, tended to bring out the fight in Paris. He straightened his spine and lifted his chin, glaring Robin down. "As long as you're on your game to catch the fucker."

Behind them, Icarus and Jason high-fived, and Robin even cracked a smirk. "We'll be ready," he said, then gestured to the table. "Let's go over those mission specs one more time so you'll know exactly where we're coming from."

With a nod, Paris led them back to the table, and after another hour of planning, the meeting broke up, folks scattering for the evening.

Paris moved to stand too, but Mac placed a hand on his knee, holding him seated until it was just the two of them left in the room. He rotated Paris in his chair toward him, their knees bumping. "It's just me now," he said. "I know you can do this, I believe in you, but if you have any doubt, or if you don't want to do this, you always have an out." They were asking a lot of someone who was relatively new to this war, who hadn't been fighting it for decades like him and many of the others. "You just have to tell me."

Paris shook his head, sharp and certain. "I'm the last line of human defense," he said, repeating the mantra he'd said to Icarus the other day. "We need a place in this fight. This is our home too. I intend to defend it."

"All right," Mac said, standing and offering Paris his hand. "Tomorrow we fight. But tonight, I have something else in mind."