by TA Moore
He remembered what the apples smelled like when they burned. The weight on his back. How long he screamed for.
No. Not useful. Madoc pushed the memories down, dragged the scented taint of smoke back from his brain like a recalcitrant dog, and headed into the kitchen.
Smoke eddied up from stubborn spots of char on the ground, embers still dull red despite the drip-drip of water that ran down the walls and soaked into the floor. Linoleum curled up in black, withered scabs on the floor that cracked under Madoc’s boots.
Desecration smelled like burned apples and piss. Madoc was barefoot, his soles gouged by charred splinters as he staggered through the remains of the first home he’d ever had. Where his first love—
Madoc shoved the old memories away with a flash of frustrated anger, wedged them back into the overflowing cupboards of his mind. One benefit of a long life should surely be the ability to forget, or at least take the edge off, old injury.
He thought of Took instead—the sharp brain hidden under that golden scruff, the taste of his skin, the tickle of an unexpected laugh against his throat, the secrets and unexplained silences. The jag of lust and frustration was enough to drag him back into the here and now as he headed into the other room.
The echoes of the Arons’ murder were gone, wiped out by this fresh violence. The plaster walls were cracked and the wooden floor burned down to concrete in a wide, black ring where the Molotov cocktail had landed. He scuffed the edge of his boot over the blackened rim and the wood crumbled into cinders under the weight. He wondered if the owner—an aunt, he thought, in Detroit—would be glad to see it go. Or would it sting to see the loss of the last thing her family had left behind?
Madoc shrugged off that thought—it was perilously close to brooding about his past—and started a cursory search of the space. Cracked walls, ruined floors, a house that—historical significance aside—would likely have to be taken down to the foundations and built up again. There were some signs of a termite infestation in the cavities of the cracked open walls, but that didn’t seem like such a worry anymore.
It certainly didn’t seem like a reason for Hunters to want to burn it to the ground, especially not when their overkill approach would have taken out a whole street of the breathing, mortal citizens they claimed to protect.
Madoc paused on the way to the stairs. He claimed that he wanted to find the children, so maybe he should start in the place where he knew one had been?
He backtracked into the kitchen and crouched down in front of the counter. The doors were blistered and melted into place. Madoc dug his nails into the warped seam of the door and pulled. It cracked and groaned as he forced it open.
The revealed cupboard was smoke-stained and still a pathetically small space to imagine an eight-year-old wedged into as she tried to hide. Fire had buckled the sides and cracked the back of it, and there were burn marks on the Formica where the counter above had burned. The base of the unit had fallen through completely, and something metal glittered in the torn linoleum underneath.
Madoc reached in and brushed the ashes and debris out of the way. He peeled back the stiff, brittle flooring in cracked shards until he could see a long, metal lid sunk into the floor. It was, he supposed, big enough for a child to hide in. Or to think they could.
VINE hadn’t missed this—it hadn’t been their case—but someone on the local police had. He wondered bleakly, after the fire truck last night, if it had been deliberate.
“You okay?” Kendall yelled from outside.
“Fine,” Madoc gritted out. A cursory examination of the box didn’t reveal any obvious way to get into it. He supposed that he should wait for CSU to cordon off and deconstruct the area, record each step as they removed the box. However long that took.
Or….
Madoc stood up and wrenched the countertop off the wall. He tossed it aside—the heavy length of pressed board cracked as it hit the wall—and went to work on the cupboards. Screws screeched as he wrenched them out of the concrete floor and revealed the four-foot-long metal box that had to have been installed as a feature of the kitchen.
“Hey!” Kendall snapped as she pushed through the door, hard hat on and gloves tugged over her hands. “You want this place to come down on your head? Keep doing that.”
“I intend to,” Madoc said. He kicked a metal pipe out of his way and straddled the box. “Get out.”
“This is my—”
“Get out,” he repeated coldly as he bent down and dug his fingers into the concrete. “Or stay. It’s up to you.”
It cracked under the pressure he put on it, splinters of it dug into his fingertips and under his nails, and gave way in divots. After a moment Kendall took the path of least resistance and retreated. Her voice rose angrily outside as she radioed in for backup. Madoc ignored it. There was only half a house left as it was. If it came down, it wouldn’t kill him. Maybe it would even be for the best. There had been enough horrors associated with this address, and Madoc suspected he was about to add another. Better to rip it down and salt it clean.
He clenched his jaw and wrenched at the box. The concrete groaned audibly under the strain and then cracked in deep, jagged fissures that fractured out under the ruined linoleum. One hit the wall and spiderwebbed up through the plaster and the few tiles left on the wall popped loose. Heat spread across Madoc’s shoulders as he dragged the box one reluctant inch after another out of its grave. It finally came free with a brittle crack as the bolts sunk into the floor snapped off at the roots.
There wasn’t much weight to it once it was free of the concrete. Madoc could have tucked it under his arm to carry it out. Instead he cradled it carefully to his chest as he carried it outside to lay it down on the ground.
“Fuck. Me,” Kendall muttered succinctly. She walked forward to peer at the box. “What the hell is that? Some sort of safe?”
Madoc ran his fingers along the edge of the box. There was an electronic combination lock on the top, or there had been. Even if the fire hadn’t gotten to it and the plastic screen and black rubber buttons weren’t a clotted mess, he didn’t have the patience to play Took with passcodes. Luckily he didn’t need to.
He broke the hinges on the box and lifted the lid off.
The little girl curled up inside looked like she was made of cobwebs and ash. Pale hair tangled around her face, and she was curled up in a tight ball with her withered arms wrapped around her legs. The heat from the metal during the fire had singed her elbows and the heels of her feet dark as charcoal. Her bed was a handful of curled papers and booklets.
“Oh damn,” Kendall sighed with the weary compassion of someone who’d seen too many small bodies carried from too many burned buildings. “Poor little thing. How did she—”
Madoc lowered the lid back into place.
“She’s in VINE custody,” he said. “This whole building is quarantined until VINE has completed a sweep and decontamination. I’m sorry, Chief Kendall, but you need to get off the property.”
“What?” Kendall spluttered. “This is my scene, Agent. You can’t just—”
“People keep making that mistake,” Madoc said flatly. “Trust me. I can and I am. I don’t want any city employees on this property until I’ve given the all clear. Or are you completely confident you’ve cleansed the corruption from your house after yesterday?”
He waited. She set her jaw, angry color high on dark cheeks, and glared at him.
“We’ll see what SSA Crane has to say about this,” she said brusquely. “Until then, the scene belongs to you, Agent.”
She stalked away out of the garden. Madoc looked back at the little metal coffin and rested his hand on the lid. He flipped his saint’s medal out of his collar and kissed Michael’s image as he mouthed a prayer over the girl.
That done, he got up and called Pally.
“I need you in Charleston,” he said the instant the line connected. “And I need a deep dive on the Aron family. I want to know everything about them. Cr
ack juvenile records, break into the Proverbial’s files on them, scrape out their secrets. I want it all.”
The pause conveyed Pally’s doubt. He was the only Biter who’d also been a cardinal, the only one who was older than Madoc. He didn’t need to ask if Madoc was sure. He knew Madoc wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t.
“It will take a while to convince the Senate to crack open Mission records,” he said in his quiet, ruined voice. “The Proverbials have a lot of support among Senate breathers, and the boyars respect religion still.”
He didn’t. The contempt in his voice betrayed that.
“Off the books, then,” he said. “Do what you need to do.”
Pally exhaled softly and, for once, wasted the words to state the obvious. “If this backfires, even you might not weather it intact.”
Down the street, a flash went off in a window. Some homeowner had let a photojournalist install a telephoto lens in one of their upstairs rooms. Madoc scowled and let the smoke out of his heart. Even if no one ever took another photo of him, his face was well-known and his nature too indisputable to ever pass unnoticed. The child was a different matter.
He looked down at the sad little coffin and sighed.
“I want to find out why the Arons had a dead dhampir buried under their kitchen,” he said. Pally forgot himself enough to swear with a guttural rasp of Old Country coarseness that would usually make him wince. “If anyone, breathing or boyar, has a problem with that, they can address me directly. Get it down, then get down here.”
“Before you wake next,” Pally promised. It was an old promise and less impressive than it had been in the days before planes, but still worth something. “Keep the child safe.”
“She’s past that,” Madoc said bluntly. He hung up on Pally’s resigned sigh, so the older vampire didn’t hear him. “But I will.”
Chapter Eleven
TOOK SCRATCHED his shoulder as he poked through the depleted stash of suits in his wardrobe. They were all nice—no more and no less. The neatly folded shirts stacked on the shelf were better quality because he liked the expensive cotton against his skin, but you could get away with that. It was hard to price a shirt without actually touching it, but an expensive suit spoke for itself. That wasn’t the impression Took wanted to give.
He picked out a dark gray, fitted suit and the band-collared shirt that was a shade darker. Usually he didn’t wear them together. They were too matched and slick for a trustworthy agent. Today he wanted to look more like a successful professional, someone people with money would listen to—lawyer, accountant, security consultant—someone who’d cost enough that you valued them.
Took shrugged the shirt on and then peeled the suit off the hanger. He dressed quickly, the truth of him, and his scars, buttoned down under the well-tailored silk mix.
People tended to see style as self-expression. It was intrinsic and immutable. You either had it or you didn’t. Most never consciously realized that appearance was the first metric when you profiled someone on the street, how what they wore indicated class and interests, that the woman with the Cath Kidston baby bag was someone to hold a door for and the boy with the shiny tracksuit bottoms and white sneakers was someone to avoid.
Took had learned that long before the Academy. Pull on a collared shirt and shine your Sunday shoes and people never pulled you up to ask what you were doing. A lot different than if you scuffed up in boots and a work-stained T-shirt and they recognized you as “that boy” from “that family.”
His dad had always said, “There’s the clothes you wear to work, and the clothes you wear for work.”
So when Took went to the Academy, he presented himself, day one, as who he wanted them to think he was. The only one who ever saw through it was Madoc, and even then, not all the way down to the bone.
The thought of Madoc made Took falter halfway up the shirtfront as he glanced at his reflection. His collar would cover the bite on his throat, the pierced skin and bruise still dark after two days, but he’d know it was there.
What the fuck, he thought bleakly as he finished up his shirt, had he thought he was doing? He’d spent two years twisted like an overtightened spring with the morbid suspicion that Madoc was the one who had taken him. Who’d broken him. How many sleepless nights had he spent on a hundred fruitless polished theories about why Madoc did it?
Even when West picked holes in his theories, he’d never been able to let the notion go. It stuck to his heels like a bad smell, because who else could it have been? All that, and yet, first opportunity he got, he still fucked Madoc.
Took absently touched the raw bite with his fingertips, Hell, he’d let Madoc do whatever he wanted. The punctures felt raw still, the itchy pang of a fresh injury, but when he pressed down, his nerves rerouted the ache into a slow wash of pleasure. He swallowed, throat dry, and pulled his hand away. How he wanted was apparently not the only thing that had changed—he didn’t know what he wanted anymore either.
Something blunt and harsh in the back of his mind called him a liar. He ignored the brief stab at honesty as he fastened the collar and put last night away with all the other scars. Dressed down to his socks, Took padded downstairs and looked for his pills.
It took a while. They were gone from the drawer where he usually kept them and not on the table or the counters. In the end he found them on the floor. Snack had batted the little round bottle under the fridge with the detritus left by the last person who lived there and did anything with their stomach.
Took fished them out and scrambled back to his feet with a muttered curse for his cat to dodge. He popped the pack open and shook them into his hand. The last prescription had nearly run its course. There were only six left.
Dehydrated. Powdered. Packed into gelatin caps.
Took stared at the oblong pill in the palm of his hand. It wasn’t even red. The capsule was colored a crisp blue and white that made it look medical. The whole effect was innocuous enough that it could have been a vitamin or a painkiller. They sold it as a “diet supplement,” the vegetarian alternative to vampirism.
For two years Took had taken one of them every morning and two in the evening. They tasted of chalk, he washed them down with tepid water, and he never really thought about it… until today, when he ached from sex and the headiness of the Kiss and wondered if it would be so bad to just accept it.
Took had to come to terms with the sun-raw skin, the fangs, and the creepy silence that used to be filled with the soft rush of blood in his ears. He’d even adopted the name that online assholes had laid at his door, because he could call himself Luke all he wanted, but he’d never really be him again. Why not just let the rest of it go too? He was Anakim now—bloodsucker, vampire, monster, no matter how politely someone mouthed the right words—so did it really matter how it happened?
The idea tempted him. No more questions about who betrayed him, about what had been done to him when he was gone. No more hours spent in church as he bargained with the silent Divine, with drymouthed immortality on his side of the table and redemption on theirs. Maybe. Theoretically. In some denominations.
And he could have Madoc, cold and deadly and oddly sweet, without any guilt or suspicion. If it turned out it had been Madoc who did this to Took, maybe Took would even think it was a favor. People had fed him that line before, that at least he’d come out of that missed year with fangs. As though that was a fair enough trade for his scars and his mind held together with platitudes and staples of blank time.
Took wanted to agree with them. If he could grab that version of himself, the one who could cope with this new life, he would. Like a nettle.
Except he couldn’t even suck blood from a bag without a popped staple and a spill of pus-sour half-memories that were just fear and no useful details, never mind from someone’s throat. And he’d never been able to let a lie go. Even as a kid, he gnawed on them until he worked out the truth.
He closed his eyes for a second and let himself remember Madoc’s bod
y under his, the fingers that tangled in his hair, and the rough scrape of Madoc’s voice as he promised things in a language Took didn’t know. His tongue curled around the memory of a drop of Madoc’s blood, heady as coffee and honey, and then he banished it with the hard, dry caplets that rolled down his throat like stones.
It didn’t matter if he wanted it. That wasn’t someone he could be. Whenever Madoc was around, Took could forget every creeping, dark thought that had ever scabbed over his brain. He could even sleep easy in his own bed, but he couldn’t stay at Madoc’s side all the time. Lawrence was his second-in-command, the one who had his back these days. Once Madoc was gone, the doubts came back, whispered in his ear in the dark. Took couldn’t live with that.
But right now wasn’t the time to come to terms. Took needed to talk to Liam Waring. Took needed to speak to Liam’s son before the boyars reopened Dom Waring’s case.
Once the Anakim got the idea that their lost children might still be alive, Dom’s situation would get a lot more precarious. There was no way the Senate let anyone they didn’t trust approach the man. Took might have fangs now, but he had always been too good at killing the undead for any of them to call him trustworthy.
He fed Snack and scratched her ears before he headed to the door and yanked his boots on. Right now his job was the one thing he could do well, and he was going to.
If he lost out on… something… because of it, so be it.
IT WAS obvious from Liam Waring’s fogged eyes that the man didn’t stay up this late very often. For a man with his political affiliations, being an early bird was an ideological stance that his weathered tan and his heavy coffee use for forced midnight meetings testified to.
“So this girl,” Liam said. “This Worm—”
“Annabelle,” Took corrected him, because he thought that Madoc would have. He replaced the book he’d plucked from the shelf. It was new. Lawrence was, Took had to reluctantly admit, good enough that she wouldn’t have missed a copy of Stoker’s Secret History of the Dragon, otherwise known as the Hunters Bible. It could indicate that the Warings were more involved with the Hunter cause—either all along or since their son’s arrest—than Took had believed. He still thought it was just set-dressing for the role that Liam was ready to play. If the man had real faith, the book wouldn’t be dusty. Took brushed his fingers against his leg. “Annabelle Franklin.”
