and shrugged, and grabbed one of the witches instead. She squealed in delight as he lifted her and spun, her petite booted feet coming up and almost clocking Hartt in the face.
He huffed and leaned back to avoid being struck, and the darkness writhed in response to the switch in his emotions. If it had been a living being, it would have smirked. Sometimes, it felt as if it was alive and had a will of its own.
Sometimes, he couldn’t control it, failed to contain it.
Bad things happened then.
Hartt sidestepped and peered at the crowd, forcing his mind back on track. The mission. The reason he had come to this fae town near Fort William.
The intel he had gathered pointed towards his mark being here tonight, somewhere in this dense throng of revellers. While he couldn’t imagine his target celebrating the new year, let alone being anywhere near a crowd of this size, following up the lead seemed like a good way of distracting himself.
He rubbed a hand over his mouth again.
Gods, he needed a distraction.
Taking on this contract was keeping him busy, but at a cost. Fuery wasn’t happy about it. His friend had been on his case about rolling solo on a mission since day one, didn’t care that the client had stipulated that he had to work alone on it.
And that it had to be him who took it on.
Fuery preferred him away from the frontlines, as far from danger as he could get, and while Hartt usually indulged him because he didn’t want Fuery to suffer, he couldn’t do it this time. He needed some action. He needed some space, some time away from the guild. He just needed a moment to breathe.
A distraction.
His gaze hopped over the heads of the gathered males and females, cataloguing them all, discerning their species whenever he could from a distance. The demons were easy to pick out from the crowd with their horns that flared from behind the tops of their pointed ears and the fact they stood a head taller than most of the crowd, as he did. The witches were equally as easy to identify for the most part thanks to their gender—mainly female—and the colourful and interesting fashion they wore.
Neither species were of interest to him.
He kept searching, picking out the vampires he could easily spot, studying them to see if they reacted to anyone else nearby, someone unseen by him. They were all too interested in eyeing up potential prey among the gathered, their crimson eyes following females or males that were clearly inebriated. Easy pickings.
His mark was here somewhere.
Hartt moved again, wove through the people and headed towards a set of broad grey stone steps that led up to a raised walkway that ran around three sides of the square. A better vantage point.
He stopped near the top step and his gaze caught on something on the other side of the square.
A distraction.
Her flame-red hair tumbled around slight shoulders in soft waves as she peered at the crowd. The dark makeup that surrounded her eyes and streaked across her temples made her honey-coloured eyes look stunningly bright as they sought something. Burgundy leather hugged long lean legs and a curvy waist, cupped breasts that had many males staring. She paid them no heed as she frowned at the gathered, a mulish or possibly dissatisfied twist to her red lips.
Hartt studied her in silence, still amidst the crowd as they pushed their way down the stairs behind him, as if his boots were rooted to the stone.
She was unmoving too, her amber gaze serenely taking in her surroundings, charting everything.
His black eyebrows pinched hard as she was forced to take a step back and then turned, drifting down into the crowd in the middle of a group of demons. He canted his head, curious now as he tracked her through the crowd, as she emerged from the trio of demons and left them behind. She slipped through a gaggle of witches and twittering succubi and stopped at the far end of the square, closer to the clock tower.
The crowd was thicker there, stealing her from view.
He growled as he lost sight of her as a large group of males pushed their way deeper into the busy square from the avenue that led to the northern section of the town. Shifters of some sort if he had to guess. They jostled and jabbed at each other, grinned and whistled at several females, gaining scowls from some