Where The Heart Lives by Marjorie Liu

control fire.”
    “A shape-shifter,” she
murmured, as golden light continued to shimmer over her hand, and her flesh
rippled with scales. “A dragon.”
    Eddie reached up, very slowly,
and pushed her hand away from his face. “I don’t understand why you don’t go
yourself. One of your kind to another.”
    “It would draw the wrong kind
of attention. More than what is already focused on the child.” Long Nu glanced
at Roland. “She is being hunted.”
    Hunted. A girl, hunted. Eddie
felt a cold, visceral disgust when he heard that. It made him think of his
sister.
    “No one told me,” he said.
    “We were not sure. Now we are.”
    “Who’s after her?”
    Long Nu hesitated, and that was
enough to convey to Eddie just how bad it was.
    “They are called the Cruor
Venator ,” she said, in a cold, heavy voice. “Blood Hunters. Witches who
steal power from blood.”
    Serena sucked in her breath, a
startling sound because it was filled with fear, dismay: two emotions Eddie had
never, once, associated with her.
    Eddie shared a quick look with
Roland. “Witches?”
    “Not just any witches,” Serena
said sharply, continuing to stare at Long Nu. “Killers. Vicious, ruthless. They
live for death. It’s their first, and only, pleasure.” She moved even closer to
dragon woman, as though stalking her, hands flexing at her sides. “But it’s impossible.
That magic hasn’t been seen in a hundred years.”
    Long Nu shook her head. “I know
what such a death looks like. A shifter in Florida was lost to a group of them
only two weeks ago. The same shifter who contacted Dirk & Steele about the
girl.”
    A hard knot of unease hit
Eddie’s gut. “I didn’t know he was dead.”
    Roland rubbed a hand through
his hair, and closed his eyes. “I only just found out. Long Nu discovered
Estefan’s murder through different channels. When he stopped emailing me, I
thought maybe he’d changed his mind about asking for our help in finding the
girl.”
    “I suspect he reached out to
you because he had an idea of what threatened her. Except the Cruor Venator got him first,” said Long Nu in a cold, blunt voice—looking directly at Eddie
as she spoke. “Estefan was ripped apart. Drained of blood. Part of his heart
eaten. Skinned. It was a very bad death.”
    Eddie did not blink or flinch. Long
Nu, still watching him, added, “His wife is human, and was away when he was
murdered. She explained that just before her husband died, Estefan told her that
three women had been asking locals about a girl with golden eyes. It concerned
him a great deal…especially when he learned that they were using her real
name.”
    “You think those women are
witches,” he said, “and that they found the shifter, and murdered him, because
they were looking for the girl.”
    “I know it,” Long Nu replied,
with chilling certainty. “And even if I am wrong, the mere possibility makes it
urgent that we find her as quickly as possible.”
    Serena’s eyes narrowed. “Did he
know that she was headed to New York?”
    “Yes. And everything he knew,
the Cruor Venator now knows.”
    Deep, dangerous, waters ,
thought Eddie, feeling that old familiar shift inside his skin, as though he
was a shape-shifter himself, transforming into a different person.
    That transformation had begun
as soon as Long Nu said the girl was being hunted. After all these years, it
was natural as breathing. Part of him was always quiet, always waiting, beneath
the fire. A mindset, where nothing could be depended on, where violence was
expected, promised, and always lethal. He had the scars to remind himself, if
he ever forgot. But he never had.
    His heart donned a cold armor:
where he would feel nothing. Nothing, until this job was done.
    Because it was obvious this job
was going to require doing things he was going to regret.
    “Just find the girl,” Roland
said heavily, clearly reading his thoughts. “Serena, talk to your contacts. I’ll
do the same here.”
    Eddie