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  “No, of course not. There’s still so much to see, so much to do. I don’t want to die, but I’m not afraid of it.” Lenna offered her hand, palm up. “My world needs to change. That can’t happen unless I have the deck in my possession. Will you give that card to me, so I may take the deck to the Emperor?”

  “I can’t,” Esma whispered. “I have a job to finish.”

  “You also have free will,” Lenna said, though she already knew that argument was useless. To a Hunter, the mission was always uppermost.

  Esma moved so fast Lenna could do nothing but spin out of the way as the female Hunter and Caine met with a monumental clash.

  Caine restrained some of his strength; his main purpose, other than protecting Lenna, wasn’t to kill Esma, but to retrieve the card. One wasn’t more important than the other. Without the card in Esma’s pocket, the Alexandria Deck would never be complete. Lenna would be grounded here. In a matter of days, Aeonia would crumble, taking all the Major Arcana down with it.

  She said she wasn’t afraid to die. He was afraid for her.

  Esma was a good fighter. He knew that going in, because even the weakest Hunter was much stronger than a superb fighter of any other species; that was how they essentially served as bounty hunters for the known universe. What surprised him was what almost immediately became evident. She didn’t want to kill him any more than he wanted to kill her. They were both after Lenna and the complete deck; only their assignments—their employers—were at odds with one another. He heard Lenna yelling at them both to stop fighting, to be reasonable. He ignored her, and so did Esma.

  They crashed into a wall, and Esma went partway through it. Toys fell from a shelf and tumbled to the floor and the bed. The crash was still resounding when Caine grabbed Esma’s shirt and pulled her back into the room, spun her and threw her to the ground. She landed with a grunt; the force would have knocked out any other being, but she was only winded.

  He grabbed for the card in her pocket. He felt the thickness of it under his fingers—and then she teleported out and left him there on the floor, with no card, and no opponent.

  Immediately he searched for Esma’s energy, but she had either left this world or had shielded herself. Likely she’d shielded herself and had been doing so before, otherwise he’d have felt her before he brought Lenna here.

  Caine flipped to his feet and whirled to face Lenna. She could no longer be allowed to call the shots. The timing was critical; the situation had to be in his control.

  He grabbed her and pulled her close, his fingers biting into her arms as he glared into those celestial blue eyes. Even in the dark, he could see into them, into her. “The search for Uncle Bobby won’t continue until I have every card of the deck in my hand.”

  “What I have immediate access to is no good without the card Esma holds.”

  “Then you lose nothing by allowing me to guard it for you.”

  Lenna wanted to argue; she almost did. He saw it in her face, felt it in the tension that ran through her body. Her brows snapped together. Much as Caine hated to take the chance that he might rouse her legendary temper, he had to take a stand, for the sake of the mission, for her, and for Elijah. But after a tense moment in which they glared silently at each other, he saw the reluctant acceptance cross her face.

  Her jaw set, she unzipped and reached into her red bag, coming out with a card that glowed as the Moon card had done. He took it with a curse—it had been right there, all along, but she’d been so careless with the bag that he hadn’t even considered the possibility she had the card with her and thus hadn’t checked—and slipped it into his pocket, asking, “The rest?”

  There was a moment of complete silence.

  “Trust me,” he said insistently. “We can’t just hope Esma won’t find them first. She already has the Moon. If she has the others, then the card you hold will be all that stands between her and success. Don’t get between a Hunter and the completion of a mission. She might not want to sacrifice you to get your card, but she’ll do it, anyway.”

  Lenna hesitated, then she sighed in resignation. “I’ll take you there.”

  He kept all sign of victory from his face, and instead pulled her close to him. “Don’t you mean, I’ll take you? Just tell me where. And do it now, because it isn’t safe here.”

  Chapter 16

  Lenna remembered precisely how many houses down the street Zack’s house was, and she conveyed the location to Caine. He held her, and they teleported out of Elijah’s bedroom, into the cold night. She found herself holding onto him in the dense shadow of a tall tree that was set between two houses and a bit away from the street. They were, for the moment, effectively hidden.

  “There,” she said softly, pointing. From the cover of darkness they studied the house; she was surprised to feel a bit of rogue nostalgia.

  It was here that Lenna had come into this world, thanks to Elijah and the Alexandria Deck. She couldn’t say she’d enjoyed everything, but she’d met Elijah, and Caine—most of all, Caine. Just thinking his name gave her a strange sensation in the center of her chest. It wasn’t his toughness, though by the One he was certainly tougher than anyone else she’d ever met; it was his heart. When Elijah had been traumatized by watching a man kill his mother, then another man try to kill him and Lenna, then yet another man attack Lenna, Caine had been the man who had undone the evil perpetrated by the others of his sex. He had protected them. Elijah would remember that.

  At some point during the past couple of days, the residents had returned. There were lights on in the downstairs part of the house, but all the windows upstairs were dark; she hoped that meant no one was upstairs grieving in solitude, too bereft to turn on a light. She had bolstered too many beings during intense grief not to know that the wounded sought the comfort of darkness and quiet. Would Elijah’s friend Zack be crying in his room? He was just a child, like Elijah; surely his parents wouldn’t leave him to weep alone.

  “I don’t like entering an occupied house,” Caine murmured, “but we have no choice.”

  She didn’t want to go in that house, either; she could feel the grief from here, a sharp sense of loss not just for the young mother whose life was no more, but for Elijah, who was missing and, they thought, likely as dead as his mother. Grief was always worse when a child was involved.

  Want to or not, she had to go with Caine. “The bedroom we want is the one on the right back corner of the house.”

  No sooner were the words out of her mouth than they were there, with her clinging to his shoulders and wondering if the effect ever faded, if she would ever stop feeling as if she wanted to lie beneath him right now. Teleporting shouldn’t be sexual, she thought dizzily. It should be … efficient. It was that, too, but she wasn’t the only one who felt the sharp zing of desire, if she went by the hard thrust of his erection against her. She rested her head on his chest, allowing herself a moment to revel in the feel of his strong arms around her, in the powerful beat of his heart beneath her ear. Just one moment, though, then she lifted her head and looked up at him.

  In the dark room, his eyes were a deeper darkness. “Shhh,” he whispered, his voice barely audible even though she stood in his embrace. “There’s a dog downstairs. We can’t alarm it.”

  She didn’t question his discernment. If he said there was a dog, then there was a dog, though all they could hear was the faint sound of a television coming from downstairs; perhaps the family was trying to distract itself. She gave a brief nod and pointed at the closet where Elijah had called her through, where the rest of the Alexandria Deck patiently waited.

  He looked at the door; the closet was only a few steps away, but they were steps that might be heard by the dog. He made a low sound—and then they were in the closet.

  Not without some difficulty, however; Caine’s head bumped against something, and Lenna’s shoulder sent clothing scraping on their hangers along the rail. They both froze, listening for the sound of barking.

  It was blessedly