Band of Demons (The Sanheim Chronicles, Book Two) Read Online Free PDF

Lord Halloween?” she said.
    Quinn almost gave her the answer then and there . I did , he wanted to stay . I slid my blade across his neck and took his head clean off. He opened his mouth to say it—he was proud of what he had done—but Kate flashed him a warning look. The truth wouldn’t work here.
    “Does it matter?” was all he said instead.
    “Yes,” responded Kate. “It does. It’s the entire reason that Summer had an opening here and we should have seen it earlier. She’s not claiming that Kyle Thompson wasn’t involved in the murders—that would be easy to disprove, given what we know now. What she’s arguing is that he was merely the assistant, a partner in crime with someone else. It was that person then, who killed him. So whoever killed Thompson…”
    “Is the real Lord Halloween,” Quinn finished.
    “Right,” Kate said.
    “Do you know who killed Kyle?” Tim asked.
    It was a dangerous question. Quinn knew right away that Tim was really asking whether they had killed Lord Halloween. He didn’t know anything about the Prince of Sanheim or their powers, but he had seen them last year. While Lord Halloween was hunting them, they were tracking him. It was not impossible to imagine a scenario in which they had gotten the better of him.
    But Kate, to her credit, didn’t miss a beat.
    “I wish I did,” she said. “I would give him or her a medal. That bastard killed my mother, Quinn’s best friend, and a whole lot of others who didn’t deserve to die. No, Tim, we don’t know. If we did, don’t you think we would have reported it?”
    “Yet you seemed curiously uninterested in the question,” Tim said.
    “Excuse me?” Kate said.
    “There was no follow-through on the single biggest question left hanging,” Tim said. “You never speculated about who killed Lord Halloween. It’s as if you didn’t care about the matter at all. Frankly, I’m surprised it took this long for someone to step in with their own theory.”
    “It wasn’t…” Quinn started. He had been about to say “relevant.” But of course it was. The only reason Quinn and Kate had appeared uninterested in the question was because they already knew the answer. In their articles, they had sidestepped the issue entirely, implying incorrectly that Lord Halloween had somehow died when police tracked him down. But they had never explicitly addressed it head-on.
    Tim nodded his head when Quinn stopped speaking.
    “You see?” he said. “Look, what you did was incredible work—truly outstanding journalism. What I am saying is that you left a good follow-up angle totally unexplored, and it’s the only way we are going to effectively respond to the Post .”
    “We could just attack them head-on,” Kate said.
    “Wouldn’t work,” Rebecca responded. “If we run something that just says, ‘No, he’s dead,’ but doesn’t add to the conversation, forget it. We’ll look defensive. People will conclude that the Post might have a point.”
    “Don’t misunderstand me,” Tim said. “While you are out there reporting, Rebecca and I will have your back. When we get media inquiries—and we probably have some already—I know plenty of ways to subtly suggest the Post is off base without coming off as petty or defensive. But that can’t be our only response. We have to have something better in the works.”
    “Like what?” Kate said, but Quinn knew she already had the answer.
    “Who really killed Lord Halloween?” Tim replied. “You don’t have to have a definitive answer, but you need to provide enough new details to make it clear it wasn’t some fictional partner. Get the police involved. They have two reasons to help you. For one, if people believe Lord Halloween isn’t really dead, they’ll panic again the next time anyone dies in this county. Secondly, it will also make them look stupid. They already declared Lord Halloween dead once—Charles Holober, remember?—and were proved wrong. Sheriff Brown can’t