Fatal Sight (Harbingers Of Death Book 2) by LeAnn Mason (book club reads .TXT) 📕

space in a moment. Cloaking himself and leaping through the air, he shifted just enough to close hellhound teeth around the soul’s arm, preventing it from sucking back into the identical, unmoving corpse beneath.

He’d almost been too late.

Seke had been unfocused and distant since the banshee left. Being his subservient, Cole had said nothing, but now it was interfering in their mission. Seke hadn’t escorted the soul quickly enough, and now prison officials were arriving, distracting the god further.

Mouth full, playing tug of war with the errant soul in an attempt to keep a vampiric monster from forming, all Cole could do was flash his red eyes at Raven.

In her bird form, she was pecking at a nearby corrections officer in order to confuse and distract him. They needed the body to stay where it was just a bit longer.

The man’s gun swung dangerously around the room as he tried to get the bird off his head, the barrel pointing fleetingly at Ember.

Cole couldn’t warn her in this form, especially while cloaked. Their phoenix was both canny and able to revive, but they needed all able bodies. He couldn’t watch another of his girls fall.

An inmate rushed the scene with a gun he’d taken off a CO behind him who’d been knocked unconscious, presumably by Raven.

The hellhound cast his gaze across to Seke engaged with two other inmates who were trying to flee out the now-unlocked dorm room. Cole had them both blinded, but they were fighting like animals, scratching with limp claws and biting with dull teeth.

He tried to extend his blinding capabilities to the rest of the room to help Raven and Ember too, overexerting himself and loosening his grip on the soul. Clamping his jaws tighter around the slipping form, Cole growled in frustration as the inmate with the gun threw Raven off and strode purposefully toward Seke, who wore a prisoner’s uniform.

Ember, dressed as a medic, made a noise and tried to escape the battle she was having and reach their captain. But they were a teammate short — or two.

At the last second, shadows swirled up the gunman, winding up his body like a coiling snake. He shrieked when his head vanished in a swirl of darkness. The panicked human made the worst choice when blinded: he fired his ill-gotten weapon.

The quick explosion of noise stopped Cole’s heart.

After a tense moment in which no one fell, the Egyptian god strode unharmed toward the hellhound, jaw tense and shadows hugging his frame like an inky shield. In his wake, the bodies of the two inmates he’d been struggling with lay slumped, unmoving.

“Apparently, we have two targets,” Seke said. His words indicated that one of those bodies was unconscious and the other dead. Most likely from the bullet intended for Seke when his shadows discombobulated the gun-toting human.

It was the term “apparently” that concerned the hellhound. Though they didn’t know the identities of their targets or the timing of their deaths, the director would certainly have informed their captain of the number of souls they were intended to escort across the veil.

That meant the second wasn’t predestined. They’d caused it with their piss-poor pick-up efforts. Cole couldn’t recall that ever happening to them before. It couldn’t be good. Maybe having a wildcard banshee in the ranks wasn’t such a horrible idea after all.

Halfway across the room, the god transformed into his falcon. Cole waited until the massive beak opened and the oversized raptor swooped toward the soul he held in his teeth before he released his hold, ensuring a quick trade-off. The flash of red vanished both Seke and soul. Luckily, Cole had still had enough energy to cloak the area so no one just blinked out of existence after transforming into a bird.

“About time. Is it just me, or is he getting slow in his old age?” Raven stepped around the man bleeding from several marks on his head where he’d been pecked and scratched, again in her human form.

“I don’t think gods age,” Ember retorted, throwing out a solid jab, knocking out the shooter recovering from his shadowy incapacitation.

Cole breathed a sigh of relief to see his girls safe and whole. Reverting to his human depiction, he joined them, standing protectively behind in case any of the nearby parties awoke or another wave of guards decided to investigate this overactive cell.

“This one’s detaching,” Ember said of the second corpse, the one Seke had been forced to add to their mission.

The trio stared at the space from which Seke had vanished in silence, willing him to come back quickly.

“It’s weird, not hearing Jess making slurping noises, isn’t it?”

Cole chilled at Raven’s comment, and he noticed Ember bow her head. Before they could wallow in grief too long, Seke reappeared, restored from his bird form.

“Seke, do you—”

He held up a hand. “I will handle it.”

Cole pulled the girls back, wrapping a solid arm around each of their shoulders to give the terse captain space to work. Before the soul had even recognized its conundrum and exclaimed in a fuzzy voice, Seke had grabbed him around the throat. “You’re coming with me.”

Cole’s hands tightened on the girls’ arms. He’d never seen his captain so brusque, and he wanted to intervene. In a flash of red, Seke became the hawk again and consumed the fallen inmate.

“Guess we’re not doing the moment of silence thing. Shit,” Raven breathed the moment he was gone. “Cap needs a vacation. Or a massage.”

“Or to get his head in the game,” Ember opined. “He knows what our charge is. He’s forgetting himself.”

“He’s distracted,” their guard dog disagreed.

His girls sounded worried. No one had been hurt this time, but they were down to four. They couldn’t afford distractions. Cole was going to have to confront his captain because he had a suspicion about who Seke would want a massage from. And it was time he stopped pinning after his former subsidiary.

The hellhound took his time with clean-up duty after dinner that