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

but her bright, teal-clad lips tipped up in a self-satisfied smile.

Ember watched Seke’s hand reach across the table and pat Aria in a proud manner. The phoenix’s eyes narrowed, scrutinizing him closer.

“Now that’s some girl-on-girl action I’d like to see again.” Cole had opened his eyes without lifting his head, and his amber eyes twinkled beneath his brows.

Aria’s lip curled, and the ring there glinted. Ember wasn’t the only one who noticed; Seke seemed to be fixated on the banshee’s mouth as well. “Well, at least, you could see it,” the banshee snarked. The hellhound’s inclination to snatch her ability to see from her without any notice was a sore spot.

“You need to be ready to handle any disadvantage,” he argued.

“Guys,” Ember butted in, snapping her fingers over the table. She could see Seke’s patience beginning to wane by the thinning of his lips. “The mission?”

“Thank you, Ember.” Seke gave her a respectful nod, which she returned, gesturing at him to proceed with the debriefing. “I am delighted to see you all working together. It gives me confidence that you are ready.” The tightness didn’t leave his jaw, and Ember crisscrossed her legs in the chair, leaning forward.

“What’s the mission this time?” She cocked her head, ready to ingest the necessary details.

Seke folded his hands on the table. When he remained silent for a full minute, inspecting his thumbs, Raven whistled.

“That bad?”

Jessica pouted. “It’s gonna be somewhere gross, isn’t it? One of those dirty dungeons with poor funding and even poorer sewage systems in a tiny, godforsaken, backwoods township again?”

Seke shook his head. “No. The prison is situated in a large metropolis.” His eyes lifted, and he looked at Jessica for a long moment before pinning each member with his stare, ensuring he had their full attention. Completing the alpha game, his inspecting eyes landed last, more softly, on their newest teammate. Again. The banshee’s eyes were round in response, and he gave her an encouraging smile while she worried the piercing in her lip with her tongue.

Ember almost snapped her fingers again to ensnare their captain’s attention, but Seke collected himself and continued.

“This mission will be more complicated than I’d like for your first official mission with Aria.”

At some point over the last few months, their captain had switched to using Aria’s first name instead of calling her Miss Grey as he had in the first weeks of her union with the team. All of the HDPU members’ familiarity with the banshee had grown, Aria settling into the family, and the bunker, over time. Ember couldn’t remember when, exactly, Seke switched to the informal moniker but had a suspicion it occurred after the first one-on-one mentoring session he’d held with the rookie in the library.

The pair met there, alone, every evening after group dinner to get the new kid up to speed on supes and work on her abilities.

Raven insisted that, one night, she’d been shooed out of the pool by a swimsuit-clad Seke so that Aria could use it as a “sensory deprivation chamber” to concentrate her mind on accessing visions intentionally. The four of them had been drinking around the outdoor fire pit when Raven revealed that happenstance, so Ember didn’t wholly trust the story.

“How so?” Cole questioned.

Seke raised his forefinger and middle finger. “You will have two targets at this location.”

Jessica flapped one hand as she curled platinum strands around a red-tipped finger on her other. “Easy as pie, Cap’n. We’re old hat at that.”

“We had three once,” Ember added, and Jessica pointed her way in agreement to the impressiveness.

Seke inclined his head. “Indeed. However, Aria has not.”

“We did two targets in our simulation the other week,” Aria interjected in objection.

A hand slapped down on the table. “And we failed.” Raven’s black eyes nearly spit fire at Aria. “We didn’t get to the second ‘target’ before his soul had resorbed into his fucking corpse. You remember what happens if we don’t escort the soul across the veil in time, Silver?”

Aria answered quietly. “Vampire.”

“That’s right. Vampire. And no one wants any of those fuckers again.”

Ember gave a shudder, eyes catching on the Egyptian god’s. Out of all the supernatural beings present at the table, only she and Seke were old enough to remember when vampires roamed the Earth. She hadn’t had as close a contact with them as he had, but she’d encountered one or two, during her many lives. They’d even been the cause of one such death. While Ember could relate to the coming-back-from-the-dead thing, it wasn’t the same. Their bodies were not designed to keep running, and their souls were rendered insane after such a harrowing experience. They were just wrong. Abominations. Vamps shouldn’t exist.

And that was why the harbingers the world over had made it their mission to ensure no souls got stuck on this side of the veil, walking the earth as a reanimated zombie, in a sense.

Aria’s chin tipped up. “We only failed the first time. We got him the second time we attempted the simulation.”

“We only get one shot in real life.” Cole’s voice was cold. Like Ember, he wasn’t fond of imperfections, mistakes.

If Cole failed to protect anyone, it ate him up inside. He’d admitted it to her one night when she asked why he muttered a name in cheers each time he cracked a beer. He drank to the memory of each person he’d let down in his eyes.

“That is why I need you all to be in top form for this mission,” Seke said, taking control of the conversation again. “We can’t afford any distractions.” One brow raised at Jessica, who flipped her hair in feigned ignorance.

“I’m excellent at multitasking,” the siren insisted. “I don’t need my lips to keep an eye on the surroundings.” She puckered said lips to make her point.

“I mean it. Nothing.”

Ember sat up tall. “We will all focus entirely on the mission,” she promised and cast a sharp commanding stare around at her companions. “Right?”

“Duh,” Raven droned.

Cole nodded once, dreads swinging.

Jessica sighed