Courts and Cabals 2 by G.S. D'Moore (best novel books to read .txt) 📕

with the big nose. From there, I caught a bus around town. I spent an hour on public transit looking for a tail. If someone was following me, I couldn’t tell. I took a cab to Caesars and found my way into the secret garage entrance. Security must have registered me crossing the magical boundary because Lilith and Fern were waiting for me at the door.

I gave them a tired smile. “Honey, I’m home.”

Both women enveloped me in a hug, but we didn’t say anything. There was no need to. We all knew we were fucked.

Chapter 16

The lights and sirens around the resort and casino attracted Vernon and Becky like moths to the flame. Their rental car had to park at the rear of the cluster of emergency vehicles that had swarmed the area. Today, with only a handful of rag-tag agents, they marched into the crime scene.

“We look like the Dirty Dozen,” Vernon fought down a grin, and the urge to look slightly behind him and to the right.

Becky had opted to be on another surveillance team, but being the boss, that allowed him to set her schedule to match his. When it was time to work, they worked. When it was time to play, they played . . . hard.

“She’s getting the best performance report ever,” he told himself as they worked their way through the looky-loos surrounding the perimeter. “Able to handle a big workload . . . always tackles the mission with open legs . . . I mean mind,” he put the kibosh on the dirty evaluation as he ran into a local cop.

“Sorry, you can’t . . .”

“UN,” he flashed his badge and brushed past the human. Becky followed him, while one of the UN’s human agents broke off to settle the cop and get details from the rank and file.

They worked their way around a casualty collection point, where ambulances were staged and waiting to transport the most critical cases to the local hospitals. A scent hit his nostrils, and he stopped dead in his tracks. He expected Becky to walk into him, but she’d already halted.

“I smell him,” she said, and took a deep breath through her nose. “It’s subdued, but that’s definitely Cameron Dupree.”

Vernon agreed, which was why he grabbed the nearest EMT. “I need a list of every ambulance that has been here, every patient taken away, and what hospitals they went to.”

The guy looked wide-eyed and confused, so another agent broke off to liaise while Vernon kept moving forward. He kept his senses open. He smelled fire, dryad, dwarf, troll, shit and piss from where people had lost control of their bladders; but beneath all of that, was the smell of what he was hunting. The wolf inside him howled in victory. The hunt was on.

“Who the hell let you in here?” a lanky man in a black suit objected as Vernon pushed into a command tent set up by the Bureau’s local office.

“UN,” he flashed his badge again, and kept it out for the suit to review his credentials and call them in. Just flashing your badge might work with local cops, but the feds had a stick up their asses about clearances and other shit like that.

Once Vernon was confirmed as legit, the FBI agent growled something about this being his jurisdiction, yada yada yada. Vernon didn’t listen.

“I need all the security footage from the incident,” he walked past the man who was trying to bully him. The agent wasn’t succeeding; least of all because he barely came up to Vernon’s chin. “Every single scrap of data from the cameras inside the building, and anything pointed at the ambulances,” he turned to Becky. “We’ll comb through it and cross reference everyone that came and went during and after the fight. Dupree was here, now we just need to track him down.”

“Wait a second,” the agent protested.

Vernon snapped around toward the agent, and the agent’s rebuke became a nonsensical stutter. Vernon’s eyes glowed like the harvest moon. The wolf inside him wanted to come out and play, hunt, and find the kid that had sent him on a wild goose chase across Upstate New York. Then the entire country. He was done fucking around. He had his scent, the trail was laid out in front of him, and Agent Fuck-For-Brains wasn’t going to get in his way.

“Easy, killer,” Becky put her hand on his shoulder, and that calmed him. She took over liaising with the FBI, while he walked the scene.

Someone had nearly burned down the casino. That made it hard to work through the individual scents, but he had lots of training and practice at this. It didn’t take him long to find a muted scent of Dupree in the bathroom. He followed it to the center of the fighting.

“Still pissing people off left and right, kid,” he had to admire Dupree’s growing reputation. Whatever Dupree was, he’d taken on a second troll and lived, so he wasn’t some pushover anymore. If he ever was.

“I should have listened to my gut and taken the kid in when I first saw him,” he was never going to let himself live that decision down. People were dead because he didn’t listen to his instincts. The wolf rumbled agreement within him.

He also caught another scent, which put Underwood at the scene. That meant wherever Dupree was, he was likely to find them all. Scents identified by shifters with the training and certification he had were admissible in a court of law, which meant he could get a warrant. Putting two of the four suspects in the same place was enough to bust this case wide open.

He tracked the scents back into the convention center. For the most part, it was intact, but a section by an emergency exit looked like someone had taken a bulldozer