Page 34 of Glass
“What else, Poppy?” Felix presses.
“There were a lot of names.”Think. Think. Think.“Kirkpatrick?” Felix straightens with interest as if the name means something to him. “And there was something about someone being good at not being tailed? An S-name maybe?” I’m flooded with a horrible sense of guilt that I haven’t remembered more, but in my defense, I didn’t know it would wind up being so important.
“Slaughter?” Felix asks with a dangerous measure of calm in his voice. His back is ramrod straight now and his grip tighter around mine.
Slaughter.“Yes! That’s it. Does that mean something to you?”
Felix scowls. “My surname is Slaughter.” My lower lip wobbles as I try to blink back the tears trying to form in my eyes. “Hey, it’s okay. You wouldn’t have known. Tell me if this is the guy.” Felix lets one hand go of me and reaches for his phone from his back pocket, scrolling for a moment before turning the screen to me.
The receding hairline jumps out at me first, the dark hair sparsely populated on Frank’s head. “That’s him. That was the guy that seemed in charge. Who is he?”
Felix puts the phone down on the worn boards of the porch and drops his head in my lap. In spite of the current circumstances, seeing him seek comfort from me sends an inappropriately-timed thrill up my spine. We’re still no good for each other—we don’t want to live the same way—but today’s trauma bonded us more than a mate mark ever could.
I run my free hand over his bearded cheek. He could use a good shave, but I kind of like how unruly the facial hair makes him look.
“The guy is a poacher,” Felix grounds out after a few minutes of tense silence. “I don’t know who’s paying him or what he wants, but he’s been trying for years to get access to the pack. Some of the rangers he’s been able to convince to share what they can about our movements, but most of them are friends. A few of them shifters.”
“What would a poacher want with a shifter?” It’s a foreign concept to me. It’s not like someone could come in to hunt for a shifter’s coat. We could shift into human form and keep them from ever getting it.
Felix shakes his head against my thigh. “I have no idea, and I don’t particularly care to find out. But it’s one of the reasons I keep the apartment in Brooklyn, even though I rarely go anymore. The guy seems to be working out of New York. A couple years ago I thought I almost managed to track him to whoever he’s working for, but he slipped out of view getting off the A Line at Broadway Junction.”
“Wait.” Something else is nudging at my brain, a memory trying to worm its way in. “I just remembered something else. Frank… He said something about being back in Brooklyn the next day to talk to a client.”
“I guess that explains whatever this half-ass plan was,” Felix mutters, raising his head to look around at the nearly empty street. There’s only the coroner and a single officer left, moving the last body from the SUV to the van on a gurney.
“What do you mean?”
“This was probably a last-minute effort to give the client some kind of good news. Someone must have tipped them off that I would be leaving Acadia, making all of us vulnerable.” Felix’s face reddens with fury as he works his jaw back-and-forth.
Something he said resonates with me. “But if Frank doesn’t hear from anyone, what if he reschedules the meeting? What if we could still make it to Brooklyn, find and follow him before he meets the client?”
“You’re assuming the meeting wouldn’t go on as usual or that they didn’t have any kind of lookout that saw all this shit go down and relayed the message,” Felix grumbles. “It’s too many assumptions to base any decisions from.”
“It’s better than the alternative—that we can’t do anything. Don’t you think?” If Frank is coming for Felix and The Lost, it means he’s also been coming for my siblings.
I can’t sit around and wait to see if trouble shows up again, not if we have any chance to intercept the problems before they come.
Felix puffs out his cheeks and blows out a long breath. His left eyebrow twitches as he considers my words. Finally he says, “I need to talk to Doc.”