Black Rook by Kelly Meade Page A

Bishop said.
    Five words spoken over a cell phone on speaker mode had the striking ability to sweep their father off his feet. Rook watched with rising panic as he sat heavily on the edge of the library sofa and dropped his head into his hands, as though he’d lost the power to stand.
    Bishop had texted them a few minutes ago, announcing an incoming phone call. Their father had gathered Rook and Knight in the library so they could hear the update together, but the first words out of Bishop’s mouth were not what any of them had been expecting.
    Knight was sitting in a leather chair opposite the sofa with the active cell phone in his hand, and he stared at it as though the small piece of plastic might explode. Rook couldn’t seem to move from his spot by the door, planted in place by shock. Shouting voices and the rumble of engines spilled over the line from Bishop’s end, but he didn’t add anything else to his announcement.
    “How many dead?” Knight asked when no one else did.
    Bishop made a sharp, choked sound. “We found one survivor.”
    “One?”
    Their father scrubbed his hands through his silver-streaked hair, then looked up. “Stonehill had three hundred and seven residents,” he said in a hollow, toneless voice. “You found one alive?”
    “One,” Bishop said. “A woman. She’s hurt pretty badly, but Jillian thinks she’ll live.”
    It took Rook a moment to remember that Jillian Reynolds was the squad leader sent by the Delaware run. “Who would slaughter an entire town of loup garou?” Rook asked.
    “The method worries me more. Hold on.” Bishop said something that was muffled and not to them. “Sorry. We found no traces of gunfire or explosives. It was a literal slaughter. Throats torn out, bodies mangled. And it was methodical. Most of the victims were in their homes and didn’t have time to shift and fight back.”
    The descriptions of the murders turned Rook’s stomach, and he was glad it had been a few hours since supper. It also enraged his beast, who demanded justice in kind against whoever had done this.
    “And there’s another problem.”
    “Which is?” Father asked.
    “I’m no expert in morbidity, but the bodies aren’t fresh, not by at least half a day. I think it’s a safe bet that the massacre was over before that anonymous call to Joe was placed.”
    Father swore loudly—a single word that marked his anger and shock. “You’re certain?”
    “Positive.”
    “So it’s likely our anonymous caller was one of the murderers.”
    “Yes.”
    “What does your nose tell you about who did this?”
    “Nothing that makes sense, but it isn’t easy sifting through the smell of death. The strongest scent is loup, and there’s a lot of it. Some of it’s foreign to the local loup, but that’s not the worst of it. We can also smell vampires.”
    Knight fumbled the phone, but managed to not drop it.
    “That makes no sense,” Father said.
    “No, it doesn’t, but the scents are here.”
    “Vampires and loup don’t work together, and certainly not to do something like this.”
    “I wish I had an explanation, but I don’t. It’s possible the loup involved were half-breeds.”
    “That still doesn’t explain working with vampires.”
    “No.”
    Only a few hundred vampires were known to still exist in the world, and that was largely due to the actions of the loup garou. In the early days of Rook’s grandfather’s generation, a bloody feud had broken out between the loup and the vampires. With their superior numbers, the loup had overpowered and killed a large percentage of the vampire population. In the last sixty years or so, the vampires had remained mostly silent, making no bold moves and taking no part in the occasional hostilities between the loup and Magi.
    So why step forward as a threat now?
    “There’s one other thing,” Bishop said. “I’m pretty sure, and both Jillian and Devlin agree, that a Magus was here.”
    Knight glanced in his direction, but Rook