by Lauren Dane
“You’re the one who went and married him, deesse.”
She flipped him off. “Yes. I’m doing a few things without you. Not because you’re incapable, but because it’s mine to handle.”
Her phone rang then and the name on the screen was one she rarely saw. “Summerwaite,” she said.
“Have you heard from Thena or Martin recently?” the mother acolyte for Athena asked.
The person asking was, in a very real way, Rowan’s close friend Thena’s boss. Thena, like her mother before her, was in service to the goddess Athena. It was how she’d originally met Rowan, who served Brigid. The mother acolyte lived in the local shrine and served to guide and train those who followed a Power like a god or goddess.
“I’ve been in Europe so I haven’t really been in contact with anyone back here. It’s been two weeks or so.” A trickle of fear. A whisper of panic and ice slid down Rowan’s spine. “Why?”
“It’s been ten days since anyone has had contact with Thena. She’s not returning calls or texts. She hasn’t been to the shrine. It’s unlike her. I was hoping you’d have an explanation.”
“I’ll go over to her house now. Poke around and hopefully get back to you with good news soon,” Rowan told her before disconnecting the call.
David was already in motion. “I heard.”
Rowan opened her phone to the contacts screen and tapped Thena’s face to call. If she was home and getting a call after eleven at night, Thena would be pissed as hell, but she’d be alive.
But the call went to voicemail, which was full. “No answer. Let’s go to her house now.”
Rowan looked around as the silence settled in after David had left.
She’d only just moved in when she’d met Clive the first time. A bigger apartment as a thank-you from the Hunter Corporation for the ordeal of an eighteen month circle jerk of hearings and meetings and the like after she’d killed the previous Scion of North America.
When she’d traveled and gone on various hunts it was the place she returned to. And now it was the place Carey was killed under her watch.
It would never be anything else for her.
She shook herself free of the threatened grip of grief and let herself open up to her surroundings. She needed to be a Hunter. She was good at it. It kept that numbness at bay. She’d give the place one last look before heading down to meet David.
They’d come in through the kitchen.
Rowan headed that way, starting from the elevator.
Magic—she’d have to have some of her witch friends look this place over because there were things she just couldn’t know about the signatures of whatever it was they did to overcome her wards.
Still, it was there, that signature, or whatever it was that happened when magics were used. The same sticky, mottled, aggressive magics she’d felt the last time she’d dealt with these sorcerer motherfuckers she was going to erase from existence.
Rowan put herself in Carey’s place as she stood there, imagining it as it would have been that night he was murdered. It would have been dark other than the light on the hood above the range. He’d been eating, so he’d been in there cooking but cleaned up behind himself before he’d gone back to the room he’d been using as his office.
The intruders had made noise—Rowan remembered the look on Carey’s features when he’d heard—they rushed forward as Carey had turned to face the sound of the breach. She took the path to the suite of rooms he’d been using as an office and his bedroom.
His back had been to the door because this was his home. He was supposed to be safe.
Rowan approached the chair and pulled out her handgun to mimic the movements of the attacker. Careful to keep her face out of the camera’s frame as the killer had. The killer had been about three inches taller, she thought as she adjusted her stance. Two others had come in with him and fanned to either side. Sweeping the room.
Lost in that replay, Rowan mimicked the motions, noting the point of view of each action.
While remaining out of camera range—and someone had to have given the sorcerers inside info on the placement, they were too smooth otherwise. They’d taunted her and then killed Carey and taunted her some more before leaving shortly before the Vampires Clive had called over had arrived.
Bold. A familiarity and precision that told her they’d watched this building and apartment and they’d been given whatever backdoor keys—magical and otherwise—they’d needed directly from the leaks within Hunter Corporation.
These fuckers had come into Rowan’s house and killed one of her protected. And they’d used information they’d gotten from a human being who’d betrayed everything they’d taken an oath to protect.
She’d only just rooted them out at the London Motherhouse, damn it. Had agreed to create another Motherhouse in Las Vegas as a result. There were those Hunters who’d been part of the attempted coup who’d escaped. Rowan’s mentor Susan was on their trail. Which meant they weren’t long for the world because Susan was very, very good at her job.
But it wasn’t just those rogue Hunters on the run. There was something far bigger at work here and Rowan knew she only understood a small portion of whatever was happening. With what was motivating these attacks. But she would figure it out. Even if it took her years.
Each and every creature who took part in this was going to die if she hadn’t already killed it.
Brigid burned so bright in Rowan’s belly she had to brace a hand on the doorjamb to keep from going to her knees. She approved.
Rowan turned a slow circle, noting a few smudges in the energy there. More a sense of something not being right than an actual precise understanding of what it was. Only that they’d been there at a prior time.
Which only pissed her off more.
She pushed the call button, wanting to see if the magic was inside the car. Wanting to get all the intel she could about her enemy. It didn’t appear they’d even come out into the foyer leading to the front door and the elevator. But she’d bet they had an exit plan out that way if they’d needed it.
When the elevator car arrived and the door slid open she held it, taking a careful look but not getting inside. She caught Clive’s magic, that sharp edge of Vampiric energy. Normal given how often he’d been at her place. Some of his various employees. Alice was there, along with Seth, one of Clive’s lieutenants. All normal as well.
But in the very back corner, she thought, there it was. Just that...difference. One of them had been in that elevator car. Or had been in it long enough to set up some sort of magical something or other.
They’d been casing her place so they knew she wasn’t there. Knew Carey had been alone with her on a different continent. Knew she’d be on video with him as he’d called in to congratulate her on her marriage.
Which enlarged her circle of suspects to more Vampires as theirs was the world she was in the moment Carey had been murdered.
Clive had been right. Theo would consider this attack on Rowan and her people as an attack on the Vampire Nation and he’d give her their allegiance. A good thing and yet, like everything else involving her foster father, a bad thing too. Endlessly complicated. The First never did anything without a purpose. Usually multiple purposes that played out over years and years until his exact desired result occurred. He was old and powerful and kooky but he hadn’t survived as long as he had by ignoring the big picture.
A highly placed Vampire with access to information about the daughter of The First’s location had helped these sorcerers. After Theo had an entire family line executed for betraying the Nation just several weeks prior.
She didn’t feel bad for whoever had done this. Theo would figure it out and he’d extract his own form of justice.
Unless Rowan found out who it was first.
She let the elevator door slide shut before heading back through the apartment, locking
up as she went. Turning out lights and setting an alarm system she knew didn’t work against her biggest enemy.
* * *
At Thena’s house they found nothing more than a place that’d been empty for at least a week.
No sign of trouble. Windows and doors locked and intact. Being Las Vegas, the house didn’t have a lawn, but instead a yard full of drought resistant plants and stone paths, so it wasn’t easy to tell if the yard had been neglected.
“They like to travel,” David told Rowan of Thena and Martin. “It doesn’t mean anything. Just that she’s gone off without telling the mother acolyte or you. As you’re wont to say about her, she does what she likes when she likes to.”
Rowan snorted, though unease still lurked in her belly. She couldn’t deny the truth of David’s words. Thena was as close to a free spirit as one could be with a job. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone off without telling anyone only to return with bags full of presents from whatever far flung locale she’d been in.
A peek in all the windows showed a normal house. Kitchen was tidy, beds made. There were no newspapers piled up, not even the local weekly most everyone got.
She let herself in with her key, pausing to see if any mail had been left in the front hall. A few envelopes and a lot of junk mail had landed in the basket but a quick check said nothing older than a week was there. It gave at least part of a timeline.
Rowan gave the place a quick once-over. Folded laundry in a basket on the dryer. There wasn’t much in the fridge but it wasn’t spoiled or old. No sign of Thena’s notebook computer, but she traveled with it, so that could easily explain the absence.
“It looks like they went off for a sex vacation. Or to visit a sick great aunt,” she said. Nothing amiss but the anxiety remained.
There was no need to panic. Not yet. Thena had sounded fine the last time they spoke. If there had been something going on, she would have told Rowan.
“Let’s keep looking,” she told him as they headed back to her car. She had more people to check while the search for Thena continued.
* * *
Rowan pulled into a lot across from her destination. Naturally David tried not to be obvious in the way he scanned the rather dicey nature of the area.
“You’re quite possibly going to need backup. Why don’t I just go in with you, hang back and keep my head down while watching your position?”
“I can handle anything stupid enough to try and test me. I’ve done this a minute or two, you know,” she told him. And perhaps if she got to punch some people she’d feel like she was accomplishing something instead of just being mad and wandering around.
He harrumphed, but said nothing more than, “I’ll wait then?”
“No. Go follow up with the university.” And by that she meant for her valet to hack the system and see if Thena’s husband, Martin, had taken official vacation time or if his work emails said anything about his possible location.
“Shall I take your blade with me? If you’re going to be in public, I mean.”
Rowan shook her head. “I got this. Text me if you find anything out. I’ll see you at home in a few hours.”
She got out before he could say anything else, and headed into the less than shiny casino just beyond.
Las Vegas was so much more than the shine of the Strip with its luxury hotel casino properties. The casino she’d entered wasn’t just old-school Vegas, it was beaten up and cigarette stained, full of old men in leisure suits holding the handbags of old women who sat at slot machines with giant cups of nickels at their right hand.
The bars had drinks strong enough to burn your esophagus and get you pretty drunk after just one. The servers were all female, all stuffed into leotards and short skirts.
They looked as tired as the carpet at her feet.
Through the dark casino floor, she passed them, the lost, the broken down and forgotten. But it wasn’t all bad. For some, the lure to the Kingpin was that it had been their place. Probably for decades, judging by some of the contented faces she saw.
At a back door at the end of a hallway, Rowan handed a chip to the cocktail server, who then pulled out a key and let her into the behind-the-scenes world of a casino.
She headed past various employees, a costume shop counter, a break room of some type and at last, the locker room she knew Heather would be waiting in.
Heather had worked at the Kingpin for twenty-three years. She also happened to be an acolyte to Brigid and as such, had a reverent look in her eye when she stood, expectant.
Brigid filled Rowan then, but instead of taking her over, She urged Rowan forward. Close enough to caress Heather’s shoulder and kiss the top of her head. This too was her responsibility.
“I apologize for interrupting your work,” Rowan told her as she sat on a long wooden bench bolted to the ground in front of a wall of mirrors, makeup tables and lockers. She indicated Heather do so as well.
The acolyte had a flush on her skin and her energy had gone softer and more relaxed. “Be at peace,” Rowan said quietly, brushing a hand over Heather’s.
“Thank you, Vessel. Thank you for your words and your blessings. What do you need of me?”
Rowan gave her an edited version of what had happened, enough to underline her concern and orders to be extra vigilant at the ranch that served as a shrine to the Goddess and the home of two dozen acolytes who served Her. And Rowan, as Her Vessel.
It wasn’t an armed camp. The acolytes had some basic self-defense training but they weren’t super soldiers. Rowan employed a small rotating team of guards who were actually super soldiers who’d die before they let any harm come to those who lived and served at the ranch.
“I’ll discuss this with the rest when I return home after my shift. Should I tell the guards as well?”
Rowan shook her head. “I’ve been in quick contact with them and I’ll follow up when I leave here. I just wanted to see you and tell you in person.” And to see herself that Heather was all right and to press the point for everyone at the ranch to be extra vigilant.
“Won’t you come back with me to the house? You have rooms there and we’d keep your location quiet. Your husband would be welcomed as well,” Heather added.
These women softened her. Kept Rowan’s heart from becoming a bullet. They trusted her with an assurance she didn’t feel worthy of. But they did and she would do all she could to be worthy.
Rowan would never endanger them that way. That was why she’d come here to deliver the message instead of possibly leading anyone to the ranch. Those women and that ground were sacred to her. If she had to flee, she’d choose anywhere else.
“I appreciate the offer very much, but I’m all right. You know how to contact me if you need anything. Please let everyone else know that too. I’m doing my best to catch the people responsible, but if you see something that makes you suspicious or uncomfortable, listen to your gut and contact me. I’ll be there. I’m avoiding a visit until I know you’ll be safe.”
“You honor us, Vessel.”
It was so the other way around, but if Rowan said so, Heather would say it back and then it would go on and on in a gratitude spiral until Rowan got agitated.
Rowan inclined her head slightly to accept the compliment before leaving.
Chapter Four
Rowan wanted to avoid the security risk of taking a cab back to the house and possibly being followed so she figured she’d grab one, head to Clive’s office and let him shuttle her somewhere. Once he got to be in charge of her for a little while, he’d feel better and she’d probably feel less like the worst wife on the planet.
Somewhere down deep she might want to check in on him too. Make sure he was okay. He’d done a lot of transatlantic travel because of her in the last several months and managed to balance his responsibilities as he had. But she knew he’d put a lot to the side for her and s
he knew it took a toll on him even if he’d never in a million years admit such a thing.
Die Mitte, the casino and hotel the Vampire Nation ran, sat at the center of the action on the Strip. Luxurious didn’t begin to describe it, and in some places it was so over the top she sneered. But it was where Clive worked. Where he’d lived until only very recently, though certainly he’d spent plenty of time at her apartment once they’d gotten serious.
Vampires loved ostentatious shows of wealth. It was their jam and as much as it made her roll her eyes, she accepted it, knowing it wasn’t going to change. So she swept past the priceless art, across marble floors, feeling the bond with her husband in her belly, side by side with Brigid’s fire bright energy. Weird, but Rowan had learned to roll with the punches very early on in her life and these recent changes made her stronger, happier.
* * *
Several new guards stood at the private elevator bank. Rowan approved of this new measure. Given the rise in hostilities and the body count, she was pleased Clive took safety seriously.
She’d only have to kick his ass if he got killed or maimed in some way otherwise so it paid to keep him wary of her reaction. That and she derived a great deal of pleasure in poking at him enough to make that mask of his slip. The cool, unflappable British fell away and the man beneath, one only she saw, was revealed. Every bit as feral as she.
The guards saw her, tipped their chins down enough to show respect not only for the wife of the Scion, but the Hunter she was.
They keyed in a code and, as the doors slid open, they were careful to keep their stances ready for action but their gazes averted enough to show respect to her until she’d gotten onto the elevator and punched her floor selection.
* * *
Clive had been alerted the moment she got out of a cab out front. He’d felt her approach and had reveled in it a little. Their blood bond was very new, something he hadn’t been sure would ever happen between them, given her experience with Vampires.
