Priceless

don’t like killing.”“ He was scared and needed help. I know how it feels to be in that kind of a bind.”
    She cocked her head and her eyelids fluttered. “What do you know of fear? You are a Tracker. You are a killer.”
    My chest constricted. Was that how all the other supernaturals thought of me? As a killer?
    “I was accused of killing my baby sister, a lot of years ago.” I crouched by her foot and put the blade to the edge of the stone, working around it to loosen it up. “She was the first I tried to find, but she was already dead by the time I realized I could track people. No one believed me, not even my parents. I had nowhere to turn to for help.” I lifted my eyes to hers. She was crying. “Am I hurting you?” There was no blood from her foot, no cuts from my blade; I was being as careful as I could.
    “I miss my sisters. They kept me safe,” she said, her head dropping to her thickly feathered chest.
    I worked at the stone and with one final pop, it flipped out of her foot, leaving a depression but no wound.
    Tucking the stone into my pocket, I stood and backed away. There was no glitter of a spell breaking, no clash of thunder or backlash of power being released. The most powerful of spells were often also the simplest, and this was one of those. “There. You’re free of the Coven now.”
    She twitched and her wings shook. “I have nowhere to go. We are the last of the Harpies in this range; the others would kill me because I am young and alone.”
    Deadly, they are as deadly as anything out there. But I still opened my damn mouth. “You can stay with me. For a while.”
    Her eyes flicked up, hope flared between us like a sucker punch to my gut. I’d killed her two sisters and now she was looking at me as if I was her saviour. Shit.
    I motioned to O’Shea, who made his way to the mineshaft and starting hooking up the gear.
    “We have to go. If no one shows up, wait for us here. If people show up, hide yourself,”
    She bobbed her head and settled down on the ground. It was too surreal, even for me, to see the sprawled out half-eaten bodies next to the young Harpy I’d just given leave to stay with me.
    “What the hell are you thinking?” O’Shea snapped my own thoughts back at me.
    “We have to get India. Then I will deal with the rest.” I forced the confidence into my voice and my movements; forced myself to turn my back on Eve, though my every instinct screamed at me to
run
.
    O’Shea slipped on the harness and climbed up on top of the mineshaft, a glow stick dangling from his hip barely touched the murky darkness below him. He passed me a flashlight, which I stuck in my back pocket.
    Then he held out his hand. “Come on.”
    Tucking away the sword I’d used to pry the gem from Eve’s foot, I did as he asked; put my palm against his, and; he yanked me to his chest.
    “Hang on.”
    “Like I was going to let go?” I lifted my eyebrows in tandem.
    He flushed and I snaked my arms around his neck, shifted more to his side before I wrapped my legs around his hip and right thigh. Even though it wasn’t a tight squeeze, the mineshaft brushed up against us, banging us back and forth down the pipe, our bodies swaying with the movement of the rope.
    O’Shea worked the ropes, lowering us slow and steady, his muscles flexing under his dirty white shirt. At some point along the way he’d lost his tie, his hair was a complete mess and again, I could see just before we lost the light from above that there was a glint in his eye.
    “You having fun, Agent?” I tightened my grip on his thigh as the pipe bumped into my hip.
    “What?”
    “This whole time, with all this crap going on around us, you look like you’re enjoying it.” The pulse of his blood beat strong against my hands. I forced myself to not trail my fingertips along his neck and jaw, to feel the stubble that had been pressed against my own face not so long ago. I swallowed hard. This close proximity was not a good thing for me. Never in all the times I’d been tracking down kids had I been so distracted, and it wasn’t like this was the first time O’Shea had been involved—to some degree—with a salvage I was on. He’d almost always been there on the periphery, just on the edge of my life.
    He shifted his arms and we slid down, the light around us dimming completely except for the little glow stick below us. “I don’t think enjoying is the right word.”
    We slid down into the darkness, no longer able to