Gray Dawn, page 1
GRAY DAWN
HAILEY EDWARDS
Copyright © 2024 Black Dog Books, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. Only the author’s own blood, sweat, and tears (and possibly tumble weeds made from corgi fur) were used in its creation.
Edited by Sasha Knight
Copy Edited by Kimberly Cannon
Proofread by Lillie's Literary Services
Cover by Damonza
Illustration by NextJenCo
CONTENTS
Gray Dawn
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
The Body Shop
Chapter 1
Join the Team
About the Author
Also by Hailey Edwards
GRAY DAWN
Black Hat Bureau, Book 10
In this tenth and final installment of The Black Hat Bureau series, Rue races the clock to find her little moth girl before it’s too late. As much as she wants to believe that Clay will protect Colby, he isn’t himself when he’s under the director’s thrall. And the director would toss a loinnir back like a shot of pure magic if he got his hands on her.
As if Rue doesn’t already have enough heaped on her plate, Luca is spreading her poison west in a twisted game of take-out roulette. Now Rue must decide if saving one life is worth sacrificing the dozens of innocents Luca will kill if Rue doesn’t make stopping her the top priority.
As the director, Rue ought to put her agents’ lives and the Bureau’s purpose above her own, but Colby is her child and—right or wrong—Rue would burn down the world to save her.
CHAPTER ONE
Twenty-one hours left until Calixta expected me to deliver the director in exchange for reducing Aedan’s sentence from a lifetime spent in her court as a slave to her whims, to ten years in service as her heir. Four hours ago, I would have been ecstatic to learn Calixta hadn’t picked apart my threadbare plan to liberate my cousin. But three hours ago, my short-lived triumph came unraveled as my heart was ripped from my chest and stomped into pulp on the glittering sand before the mocking sea devoured it in lapping waves.
Clay had betrayed me.
He hadn’t meant to, hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t had a choice, but he had done it all the same.
And when he disappeared with the director, my only leverage with Calixta, he had taken Colby with him.
Hold on, my little moth girl. Be brave and strong as only you can. I’m coming for you.
The steady beat of my heart was proof she was still alive, but for how long was anyone’s guess.
The director had been in a bad way before the fight that blew the roof off his cabin in Lake Okeechobee.
If he drained a loinnir, it would restore him to perfect health.
If he drained Colby, it would kill her and me both.
The only thing keeping her alive, I knew down to my marrow, was the golem who wouldn’t recall why he had a moth in his pocket. A child he couldn’t protect if his master discovered her and ordered him to…
“The Kellies.”
The leather strap of the quartz pendant I had been dowsing with above a sun-faded paper map slid from my fingers to thump onto the card table. I had been hunched over it for a solid hour, willing the stone to show me the path to Colby through our familiar bond. I could have thrown a dart and had better luck.
Without magic, the tether between us was a dead end. I couldn’t rely on it to locate her. I had to find another way.
“Hmm?” I blinked away the state lines superimposed on the backs of my eyelids. “Oh. Isiforos. Hey.”
Saltwater dripped from his hair, and his eyes were bloodshot. Shivers wracked him, chattering his teeth.
A thread of tension had strung taut between us since the moment he let Clay walk out with the director. I couldn’t blame him for recognizing Clay’s authority, but we had yet to pinpoint who put the director on the phone with Clay. Whoever facilitated the exchange had allowed the director to seize control of Clay.
The missing guard, who never returned from his lunch break, was my guess. Just another loyalist I would be plucking out of the Bureau’s ranks like weeds for years to come. But the urge to cast blame or wallow in guilt made things awkward between Isiforos and me. I regretted it, but I didn’t know how to fix it.
“You didn’t wear a wetsuit?” I grabbed a towel and draped it across his shoulders. “Are you insane?”
As soon as he realized what he had done, what he had cost me, he drove to ground zero from where the director had been hidden. He parked his SUV, walked past my tent, unable to meet my eyes. He rode the lift down, walked into the ocean to join the divers collecting debris, and I hadn’t seen him since.
“The Kellies.” He smacked the map with his damp palms and sent the table wobbling. “I found them.”
Most of the missing had been recovered from the sea, so it had only been a matter of time. “Good.”
“No. Not good. Fucking great.” He jabbed a dripping finger in my face. “They’re alive, Rue. Alive.”
“Alive?” I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of good news. “Arthur Kelly and Kelly Angelo?”
With their help, we could get the Bureau back on its feet. We could organize the agents and assign cases instead of letting them sit on their hands until I figured out how to coordinate efforts between agencies, packs, covens, etc., and our myriad outposts. We could get back to work.
“I’ve never actually met them.” His excitement fractured in the face of my reluctant belief. “I didn’t have the clearance for it.” His gaze slid to the dirt at my feet. “Those are the names they gave.” He raked a hand through his hair, scooping it away from his face. “A vampire and a gargoyle.”
As much as I wanted to believe the tides were shifting in our favor, I wasn’t ready to trust our luck yet.
“Start at the beginning.” I needed a second to process what this could mean for us. “Tell me everything.”
“I doubled the size of the team when we switched our focus from rescue to salvage. The extra hands let us work faster to clear the rubble, so our newest team was dispatched to a new quadrant a few hours ago.” They must have hit the water on Isiforos’s orders the second Calixta and her retinue exited the area. “Their team leader informed me they heard rhythmic tapping from within the rock. The team listened until one of his guys determined it was Morse code. Once he heard the pattern a few times, he was able to decipher it. The same message was repeated after a ten-minute interval.”
As I grasped for something real, I found the leather cord in my hand. “What was the message?”
“‘Send blood. Tired of old-ass vampire biting me. Also livers. Chicken. Cow. Human. Not picky.’”
“That…sounds like something Kelly would say.”
Thirty years into their service, the Kellies had slipped their leashes, fled to a small town in Pennsylvania, and slaughtered a human family in their beds. Arthur drained each one down until he was too gorged to flee the scene then climbed in bed with a corpse and waited for the agents to collect him. Kelly hadn’t fared much better. She glutted on organs, crawled out the front door, and passed out like a drunk on the lawn where the dawn turned her to stone.
Neither of them had been allowed to leave the compound, for any reason, since.
Until now.
“Medics are with them.” Isiforos stood in a puddle of his own making. “Where do you want them after they’ve been cleared for duty?”
“Boston.” I swallowed past the lump rising in my throat. “Clay has a decent setup there.”
The thrill of building a new database from scratch had made Colby giddy.
So had the black card I entrusted to her sans parental controls.
“Rue…”
“I don’t hold what happened against you.” I had trouble shaping the words. “It wasn’t your fault.”
It was mine.
For allowing the others to forget Clay wasn’t always a friend. That he wasn’t always safe. But I loved him too much to ostracize him during the stretches when he was free to be himself. His authentic self. It gutted me to erase the person they knew so I could draw them a clearer picture of who he was when his autonomy was stripped away to expose the shell controlled by his current master.
The real question was—how had the director gotten Clay on the phone? Who let him place that call?
We
“Agree to disagree.” He stepped back. “I’ll begin preparations to contain the Kellies at The Spinnaker.”
“Send our best witches ahead to secure a ballroom for their use. Ward it top to bottom. Keep fresh guards in rotation in case the Kellies get any ideas about reliving Pennsylvania.” I entrusted him with a kernel of rare knowledge. “The Kellies are magically bound together. They can’t get more than fifty feet from one another. If they escape, they’ll go together. That makes them easier to track.” I clenched my fingers until the cord bit into my skin. “Keep them happy. They can order whatever they need to get our operation up and running. They can request foods or drinks, but nothing with a pulse. Actually…” I bit the inside of my cheek until it stung. “Maybe email me their requests, and I’ll approve them myself until you get the hang of it.”
“Okay. Yeah. Sure.” He lingered in the entrance of the tent. “I’ll do that.”
The pruned fingers of his right hand toyed with the ties on the canvas tent flap. He sucked in a lungful of air, parted his lips, then left without another word as Arden joined me, raising her eyebrows at the map.
“I’m new to the whole magic thing, but are those splotches where we should search or Isiforos’s tears?”
“Too soon,” I chided when I couldn’t find the humor in our circumstances.
“Sorry.” Using the hem of her tee, she blotted the soggy paper. “No luck?”
“None.” I glowered at my palms, willing the skin to tingle with power, begging my fingers to prickle with an uncast spell. “I have no magic.” I choked on a laugh that made my ribs ache. “I can’t even dowse.”
Humans armed with forked sticks and a prayer for water were more accurate than my pendulum swings.
Annoyed with myself, with the whole situation, I dropped the quartz and stomped it into the sandy soil.
“You have magic.” She pocketed the trash then gathered my hands. “You just can’t access it right now.”
“What good am I to anyone like this?” I searched her face. “I’m basically—”
“—human,” she finished for me without bitterness. “You were human when I met you.”
“Technically,” I interrupted, “I have always been a witch.”
“For argument’s sake, we’re calling you human for the duration of this pep talk since you lived like one.”
“Noted.” I squared my shoulders. “Carry on.”
“You were human when you launched Hollis Apothecary out of your home, when you hired Camber and me, and when you gave us real jobs with actual responsibilities. You never treated us like we were dumb kids. Or food. Or playthings. Or spell ingredients. You treated us as your equals.”
“And when you two suggested I open a storefront…” I saw where this was heading, “…I listened to you.”
“Exactly.” She dug her nails into my hands. “So, listen to me now.” She stared into my eyes, right down to my soul. “You’re not worthless without magic. You’re not powerless without magic.” She risked a hesitant smile. “You’re still you. Still Rue. Still my mentor and…my friend.”
Tears stung the backs of my eyes as I reeled her in for the bone-crushing hug I had been wanting to give her since she first stepped off the plane. “Thanks.” I sniffled against her cheek. “I’m glad you’re here.”
A cool wind tore at the tent flap, and Asa walked in dressed in white from head to toe. His hair had been braided into intricate loops accentuated by the rainbow flash of an opalescent hoop piercing his septum. The small studs in his ears glinted with a metal I couldn’t identify. Even his hair sparkled with glitter.
“I see you’re back from the land of Faerie.” Arden pinched her lips together, but a snorting laugh choked her. “I’ve watched all of The Lord of the Rings movies, but they didn’t prepare me for this.”
“I’ve been in meetings with my grandmother and a visiting scholar priest in The Holy Temple of Divine Reflection for days,” he explained away the flowy tunic and loose pants. “This is standard attire required for the children of priestesses while the council is in session.”
As the son of Priestess Callula and the grandson of High Priestess Naeema, he must have gotten a double whammy in the stylist’s chair to make him this shimmery.
“Days?” Arden gawked at him. “You were only gone three hours.”
“Three hours here,” I said to her on my way to him, “is about forty-eight hours there.”
“Are you serious?” A slow-building wonder brimmed in her eyes. “That’s so cool.”
As soon as my cheek hit his chest, I breathed in the green-apple scent of him and felt the caged animal in me quit its frantic pacing. A hint of sweet cherry tobacco laced his skin, and knowing Blay was home too let me breathe for the first time since he stepped through the portal Dad anchored for him near the spot where Blay had burned the otdrel corpses to ash.
“Did your grandmother, or the scholar priest, have any good news for us?”
“He believes the only way to remove the Hunk is to behead you, but he also expressed concerns that the Hunk would grow stronger for bathing in your blood. There is also some concern it would view your death as a sacrifice made in its honor and become more sentient.” His slow exhale rustled my hair. “As much as I enjoyed visiting with Grandmother, the trip was a waste of time we don’t have.”
We hadn’t tried decapitation as a method of Hunk removal, true, but it wasn’t like it would sit idly by while I let the ax fall. Though, now that I thought about it, we hadn’t tried any potentially lethal methods since I got cut off from my magic. Who was to say, with it bound within me, that it could act even to save itself?
“We had to try.” I kissed the underside of his jaw. “We’ll just have to find our own solution.”
Dad had promised to work on one, and since he was one of the authors of the Maudit Grimoire, he had a better shot of breaking its hold over me than High Priestess Naeema. The Tinkkit choker she created for me had been twisted by black magic, which was Dad’s specialty.
“I heard Isiforos found the Kellies.” He tightened his hold. “They really carved out their own safe room?”
“They did indeed, which proves they knew the compound was rigged with explosives.”
“And they had enough warning,” he agreed, “to hide before the compound came down on their heads.”
Arden scratched her forearm, wincing when the scab flaked off and a perfect crimson drop formed over what was fast becoming a scar from her constant picking. With Colby gone, and my magic off the table, I would have to fall back on my white witch ways. A salve was just what the doctor ordered to soothe her irritated skin.
Comfrey and plantain leaf, lavender, and tea tree essential oils, with extra virgin olive oil and vitamin E.
That should do it.
Really, since this was Arden, who had worked at Hollis Apothecary for years, I should give her the recipe.
“I’m going to find Fergal.” She caught me frowning at her and hid her arm. “He has a job for me.”
Once she was out of hearing range, Asa angled toward me. “You should warn her about the Kellies.”
The last thing we needed was for her to get it in her head that because Fergal was approachable that the Kellies were too. “I plan on it. I’m debating how much she needs to know. Their history is messy.”
The old setup made fraternization next to impossible. It kept their interactions with other agents to a minimum. This new arrangement presented challenges, among them allowing for socialization that the Kellies might use to finagle their way out of confinement.
“Arden should know they’re two of the most prolific killers the Bureau has ever enlisted.”
“There are a lot of things Arden should know and twice as many she shouldn’t but...”
“You’ll tell her if she asks.”
“If she asks, yes. I will.” I drew in air between my teeth. “I don’t want to lose her again.”
“I don’t think there’s any chance of that.” Amusement softened his features. “She’s glued to Fergal.”
I made a noncommittal noise in the back of my throat and strode out under the moonlight for fresh air. “The Kellies could make the difference between Black Hat catching its balance or falling flat on its face.”
