Pray for Dawn by Jocelynn Drake

only warning was a soft knock at the door before the lock clicked and Mira walked in. I guessed that she had gotten the room key from James. She had changed out of her blue jeans and into a pair of tight-fitting black pants and dark blue silk shirt that buttoned up the front. Mira paused beside me, looking down at my two bags before walking over to the windows and pulling open the curtains. The view was nothing spectacular, just the front of another building looking down on Bay Street, but for Mira, I don’t think it mattered. She was home.
    “I spoke to Ryan about Thorne’s death,” Mira suddenly announced. Her voice was just a pale ghost drifting through the room toward me, soft and ethereal. I jerked at her sullen tone, almost surprised that she had broken her silence.
    Standing at the end of the bed, I could see only her profile. Mira leaned forward, touching her head to the glass as her eyes fell shut. I folded my arms over my chest and strengthened the walls around my own thoughts. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want her slipping into my brain, but there was something in her emotions, some chaotic quality that I didn’t want leaking into me either. “What did he say?”
    I was stunned she even wanted to discuss Thorne. We had been sent to protect Thorne so that he could replace his maker in the triad. Unfortunately, he was killed shortly after we found him, poisoned with naturi blood. By the tension in her shoulders, the failure continued to haunt her.
    “Ryan located the witch coven that killed Thorne. A naturi had contacted them that night and had told them to kill me,” she said, the words stumbling to me. “They hadn’t even been hunting him. He was probably killed because that witch couldn’t be sure which mug I would drink from, so she spiked them all.”
    The guilt lacing her tone was unmistakable. She had blamed herself for not protecting him when she first met him and now she blamed herself because he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite her general blasé attitude about life, she took each task assigned to her seriously.
    On the other hand, I couldn’t muster an ounce of guilt when it came to the death of the nightwalker. I hadn’t known him beyond the fact that he was a vampire living “out in the open.” In truth, if I had known about him prior to meeting Mira, I probably would have killed him for the danger he posed to the people of London.
    “What happened to the witch coven?”
    “Ryan said it looked like three of the original eight had been in the club that night and were killed by the fire. Two more were gutted, their hearts stolen,” she said, counting off each one. She didn’t need to go into any more detail than that. They had been killed by the naturi they served and their hearts harvested for spells.
    “And the remaining three?” I prompted when she paused.
    “Ryan says disbanded and scattered.”
    My arms loosened and my hands slipped into my pockets. “You’re not hunting them?”
    Mira cracked one eye open and turned her head slightly without lifting it from the glass to look at me, a grim smile quirking one corner of her mouth. “Why bother? The naturi will finish them. Let them die at the hand of those they serve.”
    What she wasn’t saying was that she was confident that whatever death the naturi meted out, it would be slow and painful. What more could we ask for?
    “Danaus?” The sound my name on her lips drew my narrowed gaze back to her face. For a moment, she sounded hesitant and even little lost. It was a foreign sound coming from her. Mira exuded strength and confidence in whatever she did, even when she hadn’t a clue, and her weakness made me wish for a knife, to defend her against whatever threat had caused the slight tremor in her voice.
    “James said that you’ve been out hunting naturi throughout Europe,” she said then suddenly stopped, seeming to wait for me to comment. Placing her hand against the glass, she lifted