Broken Girl (Book I of Anita Blake Adoptive Mother Series)

Chapter V

~ Anita's Point of View ~

As soon as Asher found out what Brittany was too panicked to say out loud he told Jean-Claude and Jean-Claude told me. I immediately alerted everyone that I could, including but especially Rafael so he could alert the rest of the Wererats.

I was desperately hoping that we would be able to keep Brittany safe. *Who the hell is Ahriman and what does he want with Brittany!?! Why was Araceli attacked!?! What the hell does this guy want!?!*

For a while as I made my way to join Jean-Claude, Asher, Richard, Jamil, Shang-Da, and Jason to hopefully protect Brittany I thought about calling Edward. Because I had a feeling that we were going to need as much help and back up as possible. A scary thought is that I even considered calling Dolph, but I stopped short of doing so for now. I did however, call Edward and left him an important message when he didn't answer.

Thankfully I wasn't the only to get to the Circus of the Damned. Micah, Nathaniel and Damien, Rafael, Benito, and Claudia were there as well so far, as well as some of the ex-harlequin. And others were coming. As we headed in I opened the Marks to ask Jean-Claude and Richard where they were and then headed to them as fast as possible.

Only to be attacked by cloaked figures that must have been apart of what Brittany called "Ahriman's Shadows". We managed to get to where Jean-Claude, Asher, Richard, Jamil, Shang-Da, Jason, and Brittany. My heart broke a little seeing how terrified Brittany was though we had to kill some of the attackers as we did.

After a while we managed to get the attackers to retreat without letting them get a hold of Brittany. We also took some captive and locked them up and made sure that they couldn't get away or do suicide to get away before we could try to get information out of them. We then worked to get Brittany calm enough to tell us what she could.