CHAPTER 24

M y fingers tingled. The ropes tying me to the fucking chair were too tight— who the hell kept ropes just lying around? Especially in a fucking strip club.

It was a stupid thing to think about, considering my predicament, but it was all my hazy brain could focus on as I regained consciousness.

That and the fact that I was surrounded by sirens.

I blinked slowly, doing my best to clear the fog. The energy in the air was suffocating—thick and pressing against every inch of my skin. Dipping into the barest amount of my power, I touched it. I let my power drift along the connection, flitting around the room and under the door.

I frowned, feeling how my power zigzagged through the club—pinging off every siren spread throughout The Cove.

They were connected—intricately tied together.

No… their energies were identical.

Which meant if I could kill the leader, I could kill them all .

I reined back in the rampant pulses of my power before the pull was too great. It weaved through every inch of the club as I tracked its movements—desperate to know where the leader was.

“Wake up,” someone snarled. Something kicked my shin hard, and I groaned. Opening my eyes, I blinked lazily to give myself time to think.

“About time,” another woman snapped.

“Enough!” The voice that echoed through the room was rough and final. I stared at the woman. She was oddly beautiful with raven black hair and midnight eyes that stood out against her pale skin. The lack of emotion in her expression was unnerving. She grinned, revealing two rows of sharpened fangs. “Hello, hunter.”

I didn’t reply. There was no point. Instead, I studied them with the tiniest of dips into my power—enough to not give me away. The room was a clusterfuck of metaphorical strings. All the energy coiled around each siren in the room, wrapping around their necks like proverbial chains. Each and every one led back to the woman who had greeted me.

Studying her, I did my best to figure out what she was. Unlike the sirens, there were real emotions buried under her skin. No matter how well she hid them, I could feel them.

And yet… still not quite human.

“You.” I gave her my entire attention. She mattered. The others didn’t. “You’re not a siren.”

“My father was a siren, and my mother was a witch,” she explained. The child of a demon and a witch? There was no way. Demons crawled their asses out of Hell. Her head tilted to the side as she watched my reaction closely. “Most people have that reaction. Born demons aren’t as uncommon as you hunters want to think. We blend in, and you never find us.”

“That’s how you have so many sirens in one place,” I said. The magical chains holding them together. “You’re controlling them with magic.”

“Smart little cookie, aren’t you?” she replied. “Too bad you’ll be too dead to do anything with that information. ”

Except by tying all of them to her, she’d made it real fucking easy for me to kill all of them.

“You know the thing people forget about emotion,” I whispered, “is how intricately it’s tied to energy. You have no idea how fucking easy it is to manipulate one if you can manipulate the other.”

I dipped into my power, opening myself to the energy the siren-witch gave off. She was a straight shot to every siren in the entire club. There was no easy way to do it. My power expanded rapidly, doubling in intensity.

Tripling .

It spilled out of me in waves—powerful and violent as it latched onto her. She gasped while I poured my power into her. I connected with every drop of energy inside her and ripped it clean from her body.

Draining her.

Killing her at an agonizing rate.

But it cost me. The surge in my power became too much. It left me open to every fucking person inside the club. The pain. The anguish. The sadness. The anger .

I felt every single fucking thing as if it was my own. It slammed into me all at once, making me shudder.

My control wavered, frayed, and sawed apart as it was amplified by everyone inside the club.

I scrambled to rein it in, but I couldn’t.

Overwhelmed and so fucking tired.

My eyes rolled back as my body seized.

I could do this…

I could do…

I couldn’t…