by J. R. Ward
There was a long pause. And then Helania shook her head again. “Not really, no.”
“I’m really sorry you had to see that.” Butch’s eyes stayed steady on the female, even as his pen jotted something down. “I know it’s been tearing you up. My victim really suffered when she died. Can you tell me what her name is?”
“I don’t know her,” Helania said sadly. “I just . . . I was worried because she’d been down there with that male for so long.”
“Of course you were worried about her. Females have to look after each other.”
The hood of the cloak nodded. “That’s how I feel. It could have been me.”
“I know. It’s dangerous here. Dangerous everywhere.” The Brother leaned forward earnestly. “I know it’s hard to trust us. Even with the black daggers I’m wearing, you don’t know him or me from a hole in the wall. But I just want you to know that she’s my victim now. I’m going to take care of her, and the way I do that is by finding out what happened to her and making sure whoever killed her is taken care of. The way you can continue to help her is to tell me whatever you know. No matter how trivial or inconsequential you think it might be. And the sooner you do that, the better for her.”
There was another long silence, and the background thumping of the music rose to fill the void. Meanwhile, Boone tried not to interrupt. Fidget. Be an ass.
“You can trust us to take care of her,” Butch reiterated. “We’re all on the same team.”
“What will you do if you find the killer?” came the soft inquiry.
“When,” Butch corrected. “It’s when I find them. And whether they are a human or one of us, they will get what they deserve, I promise you.”
After a moment, a pair of shaking hands rose to the hood that covered Helania’s head. As she drew the fall of black fabric back, Boone gasped before he could hide his reaction. Her features were fine to the point of being delicate, her yellow eyes rounded, her brows arched, her bow-shaped mouth and her pinpoint nose balanced perfectly in the oval of her face. Her hair was long and wavy, streaked with blond and red, and her skin was darker than his.
She was . . . astounding.
“I can’t stop seeing her,” Helania whispered. “Every time I close my eyes, I . . . I see her hanging from that ceiling. That hook . . .”
“I know.” Butch put a fatherly hand on her knee. “It’s really terrible. But together, we can do something about it.”
Those yellow eyes lifted to the Brother’s. “You won’t let him get away with this.”
“No, I won’t.”
“I’ve been looking for him, you see.” She nodded toward the open area where the club’s members were. “I know he’ll come back here.”
“Because he’s killed before.”
That yellow stare went to the floor. “Yes.”
“How did you know about the other deaths?”
“There was more than one?” she asked with surprise.
“Yes.”
“Oh, God . . . well, I only knew about the one other.” Her lids lowered. “That female’s murder was all over the species’ groups on social media. It made everyone uneasy.”
Boone spoke up. “So that was why you were looking out for the victim last night. Even though you didn’t know her.”
“Everyone’s nervous,” Helania said. “Who’s a vampire, that is.”
“Which is understandable,” Butch murmured. “Now, the male or man you saw with my victim. Had you seen him in the club before?”
“I think I have. I’m not sure, though. It’s dark and there are so many people.”
“What’s he look like?”
“He’s enormous. Black sunglasses. Black skull cap pulled down low. Black leather clothes—although that’s not saying much.”
“Could you identify him if you saw him again?”
“Maybe. But I never got a good, clear picture of his face. His hat and glasses covered a lot of his features, and again, it’s difficult to see in there.”
“How about his scent? Would you recognize that?”
“I don’t know.” Helania touched the side of her nose. “I followed the blood, not him or her.”
“So you saw the male with my victim. What were they doing?”
A blush flared in her cheeks. “What people do here. Kissing. You know.”
Boone’s eyes focused on her mouth and refused to be redirected. In all of his life, he couldn’t remember being so captivated by a member of the opposite sex. He was liable to forget why he was sitting this close to her, and that would be unacceptable.
Kicking himself in the ass, he shifted in his seat and thought of the dead body he’d seen on the Brother’s phone.
Butch was nodding. “And do you remember what time it was when you noticed the female leave with him to go to the lower level?”
“Not really.” Helania’s stare moved over to Boone—and what do you know, he felt like he’d been put under a heat lamp. “As I told him, I saw the male take her downstairs. I stayed on the main floor until I scented the blood. It was so faint that I wasn’t sure whether I was imagining it. But then I thought about that female alone with that male and I got worried so I went looking for her.”
“How long was it between when you saw them leave together and when you went to check on her?”
“Like, an hour or more. But I couldn’t say for sure.”
Butch took down some notes, mostly without looking at his notebook. “Did you see anyone else down there? When you found her?”
“There was no one.”
“And you were all alone?”
“That’s right.”
“Any idea about what time this was?”
“It’s hard to say. I wasn’t keeping track. I had already been at the club for a couple of hours when I saw him.”
“Did you come to the club with anybody last night?” After she shook her head, Butch said, “Can you give us the names of some people you talked to while you were here? You know, anyone who could give us a clue about when you arrived and when you left?”
Her jawline tightened. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
“Nothing at all. I’m just wondering if someone else might have glanced at their watch or their cell phone while they were talking to you so we could get a time frame going.”
“I didn’t talk to anyone. I never do.”
“So why do you come here?”
Helania’s eyes flared with anger. “I am of age and no one’s sehcluded female. I can go where I wish.”
“I’m sorry.” Butch touched the center of his chest in apology. “That came out badly on my side. And I did not mean to suggest that you were involved in hurting her.”
“Are we finished?”
“Sure, we can be finished.” The Brother flipped a page over and wrote something. Tearing the sheet off, he offered it to Helania. “This is my number. I’m going to stay in touch and I want you to do the same. I’m assuming that the number you called into the service from is your cell—and that we can reach you on it?”
Helania leaned forward to take the page, her narrow wrist flashing out of the voluminous sleeve of her cloak. “Yes, it is. And yes, you can.”
“I called you a number of times tonight.”
“I was here and I have it on mute.”
Butch nodded. “If you remember anything else, you let me know.”
Helania tucked the paper somewhere in her cloak. Then she got up from her chair, and Butch did the same, and some things were said. As Boone rose to his own feet, he didn’t track the conversation. He was too busy willing the female to look at him one last time.
And then she did.
Citrines. She had eyes like those sunshine gems, deep and mysterious . . . tantalizing. It was so easy to get lost in them.
“My name is Boone,” he blurted. Which was stupid. Like he hadn’t told her before. Twice. Or had it been three times, for godsakes.
She just nodded. Or at least he thought she did. Then she p
ut the hood up over her spectacular hair and walked into the club, her slight body disappearing into the crowd.
She should be leaving, Boone thought. Not going back in there.
“Come on,” Butch said. “We’ve got to drive over to Havers’s next. Before we hit your cousin’s just before dawn.”
It was a moment longer before Boone could turn away, and as they exited the makeshift club, he felt like he had left something crucial to his well-being behind. The urge to turn around was nearly overwhelming.
He told himself that at least she knew how to point a gun at someone.
They were almost halfway back to the car—and yup, Butch had been right, the R8 was still where they’d left it—when the Brother stopped in the middle of the street. Boone went a couple of steps farther and then pivoted around in the snow, expecting the Brother to be checking his phone for a call or a text.
Wrong.
Those hazel eyes were locked on Boone. “Watch yourself, son. She could be in on this in a small way, in a big way. You don’t know.”
“What?” Boone frowned. “She called us about the body. And you told her she wasn’t in trouble.”
“Anything I said back there was to get her to talk. Don’t confuse interrogation with sincerity, even if the person we’re talking to takes it that way. The first rule of homicide is you don’t trust any witness, person of interest, or suspect until you have corroboration or evidence that proves their story to be true. No matter what someone looks like.”
“But why would she have called us if she were involved in the killing?”
“Not our problem at this point. We just need to stick to the facts.” Butch motioned over his shoulder. “That female phoned the emergency line the night our victim was strung up by the back of her skull like a side of beef with what probably was a meat hook. That is the only thing we know for sure about anything right now—”
“She didn’t do it.”
Butch shot over a spare-me-grasshopper look. “How do you know that? Because of the color of her hair? Or was it those eyes you kept trying to catch.”
As Boone stomped his boot in the snow and cursed, Butch shook his head. “Look, I’m not calling you out or anything. This is the first time you’ve been in this situation, so it’s not a surprise you require training. I just need you to keep your head in the right place. I’ve seen a lot more than you have when it comes to this kind of shit. I strongly urge you to take my advice—and if you can’t? It’s no harm, no foul, but you will not be involved in this investigation. Are we clear?”
Boone opened his mouth, intending to bring up how rattled Helania was. How she was clearly traumatized. How she . . .
. . . had beautiful citrine eyes and hair he wanted to run his fingers through.
Clamping his piehole shut, he kept a string of curses to himself.
“Hey,” Butch said, “losing focus happens to everyone. Especially if you’ve never done this before. I just need your game head on, okay?”
When Boone nodded, the two of them started walking again. And as he shoved his cold hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, he decided that he knew one other thing for certain about Helania. Aside from the fact that she was absolutely, positively, not the killer.
He was going to see her again.
One way or another.
• • •
The race’s medical facility was across the river, the sprawling subterranean maze of treatment units buried beneath a farmstead’s flat fields and forested perimeter. There were four entrances to the place; one in the actual old farmhouse—which formed a front for the operation to the human world—and then three other kiosks scattered throughout the acreage in the pine trees.
As Boone materialized in front of the western kiosk, he had no familiarity with the medical center. As an aristocrat, prior to his joining the Brotherhood’s training program, he’d been used to Havers coming to the house if anyone needed a healer. Now, as a trainee, he was treated by the Brothers’ private staff in their own clinic. Plus, if memory served, this was the new, improved facility that had just been opened after the raids.
Butch re-formed next to him and entered a code on a keypad next to a solid steel door. After the lock clicked free, the two of them entered a narrow room, the focal point of which was a set of closed elevator doors.
“You ready for this?” the Brother asked.
“Yes,” Boone answered, even though he wasn’t sure he was.
Butch hit the single button on the wall to summon the lift. As the doors opened, the two of them got in and then it was a case of the Jeopardy! theme as they descended. At the end of their little trip down into the earth, he and Butch stepped out into a sparkling-clean corridor. Looking left and right, Boone saw all kinds of signage, but none of it indicated where they needed to head.
“We’re going this way,” Butch said grimly. “It’s a haul.”
Boone fell into step with the Brother, and they were silent as they went along, taking corners and cruising down straightaways. There was no reason to ask how Butch knew where the morgue was, and the fact that that particular part of the facility was out of the way seemed appropriate given that Havers and his staff were all about preserving life. It also made sense that there was no signage for it. Unlike the various directives and arrows that were posted about Radiology, Outpatient Surgery, Emergency Services and the ilk, there was not a thing about where the dead were taken and stored.
You had to imagine that discretion was on purpose. No reason to remind patients and families that sometimes people didn’t leave through the front door, so to speak.
And on that note . . . his father’s remains had been taken here.
Had been cremated here. At Boone’s request as next of kin.
After about five more minutes of heel-toeing it, Butch took them around a final left-hand turn, and that was when the faint, fake-sweet aroma of formaldehyde bloomed in the air. Sure enough, up ahead, a set of unmarked double doors appeared, and Boone knew they’d found their destination.
As they came up to the morgue’s entrance, Butch jumped ahead and held open the way in. Boone, on the other hand, stopped short. And couldn’t go any farther.
“What’s up, son?” the Brother asked quietly. “You okay?”
It was hard to say the words out loud. Much less to a male he respected. “Is it . . . is it wrong that I didn’t ask to see his body?”
There was no reason to specify the “he” he was talking about.
“No, Boone. It’s not wrong. Some things are better if they aren’t seen.”
“I had him cremated here.” He focused on the Brother. “I just didn’t want him to come back again, you know? I didn’t want . . . that. Even though I’m only being paranoid, right? I mean, no one’s reanimated for a second time after . . .”
After they were popped in the frontal lobe at point-blank range by a bullet filled with water from the Scribe Virgin’s sacred fountain.
Somehow, he was not capable of putting all of that into words. The good news was that the Brother didn’t seem to need it spelled out for him.
“You did the right thing,” Butch said quietly. “Whatever makes it easier on you is the right thing.”
“None of this, as it turns out, is easy. Not while my sire was alive, and not now that he’s dead. My fantasy did not pan out the way I thought when I was being young and vindictive.”
“Grieving a complicated relationship can be even harder than one that worked for you. Do you want to wait out here while I—”
“No, I’m coming in with you.” Boone took a deep breath and braced himself. “I’m going to be a professional about this.”
Striding through the open door, he looked around at a carpeted room that was office-like rather than holy-fuck-dead-body clinical: There were desks with laptops, and floor-to-ceiling shelves of vertical, coded files, as well as a conference table that had some photographs laid out on its smooth surface. He didn’t want to look too closely at them.
“Does he do the autopsies himself?” he asked. “Havers, I mean?”
“Yes, I do.”
Boone turned around. The race’s longstanding healer was entering from the corridor outside, his tortoiseshell glasses, bow tie, and white coat like something out of an Ivy League medical school. Maybe from the turn of the previous century.
“Rexboone.” The male came forward and offered his palm. “My sincerest condolences with regard to your sire’s passing. I knew Altamere very well and always found him to be most enjoyable company. He will be sorely missed.”
Boone shook what was extended to him and made what he hoped were appropriate murmurings of thanks. The fact that Havers had a high opinion of Boone’s father made sense. The race’s healer was a member of the glymera, and right up Altamere’s alley: Wealthy, well educated, from a good bloodline. No wonder they had gotten along.
“If you are prepared to accept the urn,” Havers said, “I have it ready for you.”
Boone blinked. “Ah . . . yes. Thank you. I’ll take it.”
“Very good. After we have concluded our present sad business, then.”
Havers turned to Butch. There was some talk about the victim, and then Butch signed a form of some sort. Meanwhile, Boone was aware that his heart was pounding and his mouth was dry—although not about the murder.
But come on, like he expected Altamere’s ghost to pop the top off his tin can, come down the hall from whichever shelf he’d been put on, and be all pissed off at the whole cremation thing?
Ashes were so much better than a corpse in a tuxedo showing up at Last Meal and asking for another round of scotch—
With a silent curse, Boone forced himself to refocus as Havers opened one half of the inner set of double doors. The formaldehyde smell quintupled. As Butch entered the examination area with the doctor, Boone made himself follow along. He didn’t make it much farther than just inside the doorjamb.
There were four workstations in the floor-to-ceiling tiled room, each of them dominated by a waist-high, stainless steel slab that had a fauceted sink at one end, a drainage hole at the other, and a system of metal tubing and electrical wires underneath. Rolling tables were in place for what he guessed were instruments and tissue samples, and the hanging scales for weighing organs and wall-mounted light boxes for X-rays and imaging test results meant you could do everything in one place.
