Blood Truth

by J. R. Ward

  Except . . . now that he was in the same room with her? Instead of being let down by what he looked like—some off-center part of his nose ruining what she’d assumed was aquiline perfection, a bad cowlick in a weird place making the shape of his head wonky, his shoulders less wide, his chest flatter than her fantasies had projected—she had to force herself not to stare with fixation.

  Fortunately, he was talking to the Brother now, apologizing for being late. And the Brother was forgiving him, albeit with a stern tone.

  Girl, you need to get yourself together, she thought. Right now.

  Focusing on the low-slung table in front of her, she discovered there was a collection of crystal animals on it, the bears and the bunnies and the deer and the squirrels all fat-bodied and round-faced, the firelight coalescing inside the perfectly smooth globes of their bodies and features, making that which was glass seem to be made of water.

  Boone’s reflection was in every one, like a kaleidoscope of the male, but it was all a distortion of the real thing, parts of him expanded and compressed by turns.

  Was she just lonely and turning him into a fantasy? Although, if you had to ask that question . . .

  Helania didn’t want to look at him again.

  But she couldn’t fight the impulse.

  And wondered what else she would not be able to deny him.

  TWELVE

  Amazing how knowing someone meant you could read their vibe so well.

  For example, as Boone glanced at Butch, he could tell the Brother was annoyed. It was less the expression and more the aura of the male, a bad smell that emanated from him as he sat on the sofa. Was it because of the whole being-late thing? Or the number of texts and calls that had been unanswered as Boone had gone over to the club?

  Whatever, it couldn’t possibly be because he was excited to be breathing the same air as Helania and the Brother had picked up on it.

  Nah. Boone was super cool. Super chill.

  He coughed a little.

  “Do you want to take a load off,” Butch said dryly. “Over here with me. On the sofa.”

  This was not a suggestion. A hey-wouldja. A how-’bout. It was more do-what-I-say-or-I’ll-break-both-your-legs.

  But at least the Brother wasn’t kicking him out. So bonus.

  Boone scrambled across the room and threw himself down on the cushions like his ass was putting a brushfire out. He crossed his legs. Uncrossed them. Then played I’m-looking, I’m-not-looking with Helania. He was pretty sure she’d glanced at him when he’d come in, although if she had, she hadn’t stared at him for long.

  But what she had done? Smiled at his stupid joke. She had actually laughed a little, too.

  In the back of his mind, because he was insane, he decided this meant they were totally compatible and destined to be together forever.

  Yup, one lift to her lips and an awkward giggle were totally signs of eternal passion and happiness.

  Annnnnnnnd on that note, he had to ease back on his fantasy life.

  As she sat in that armchair, wearing normal street clothes, her hair pulled back into a braid, her citrine eyes down on some Baccarat crystal figurines, he had no clue whether she cared he was there. If she had even thought twice about their conversation early that morning. If that smile had been nervousness or actually about him. He couldn’t read her at all.

  It was good to remind himself that just because the four minutes they’d had on the phone together had been a game changer for him did not mean that those two hundred and forty seconds had registered in the same way for the other party to the call.

  “So the reason we’re here,” Butch said to her in that even tone of his, “is because I’d like you to listen to a previous call into the emergency dispatch number. Will you let me play it for you?”

  Helania shifted in the armchair she was sitting in, repositioning the parka in her lap. “All right.”

  The Brother pushed a crystal bunny back and put his cell phone face-up by its front paws. A moment later, a voice Boone recognized instantly came out of the speaker.

  I—I want to report a death. A murder . . . a killing. At Pyre’s Revyval downtown. It happened the night before last. A female. She—she was found on the lower level by friends. She was taken . . . out of the club by them . . . she was dead . . . Indecipherable sounds. She had been . . . she had been hung by the neck in a storage room and—

  Boone’s hand shot out and cut the recording off. “That’s enough.”

  As the Brother’s eyes whipped toward him, he shook his head. “She knows what the message said. She doesn’t need to hear it again.”

  Over on the armchair, Helania wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed her lids closed, the color in her face draining away until she was pasty white.

  Butch took out his spiral notebook. “Was that you?”

  Boone had to stop himself from snapping at the Brother. Of course it was her, damn it—and Butch knew that.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “It was me.”

  As Butch’s phone chimed with a call coming through, the Brother silenced it and made a note for himself. “Can you tell us about what happened that night?”

  When Helania did not respond, Butch said, “You’re the only thing we have to go on at this point. In two out of the three deaths down at that club.”

  She opened her eyes. “So there were a total of three?”

  “Yes. The first was a human, about a year and a half ago. We’re doing what we can to track that down.” Butch’s phone rang again, and he silenced it a second time, slipping the thing into the breast pocket of his sport coat. “I know this is hard, Helania. I know—”

  “No,” she said roughly. “You do not know.”

  “Then explain it to me.” Butch put his hands together as if he were praying. “Please.”

  The quiet that stretched out seemed to last forever. But then Helania opened her mouth—

  The knock on the parlor door was loud, a demand.

  Butch cursed and got to his feet. “Will you excuse me? I’m going to make this go away.”

  As the Brother strode over, you had to pity whoever was outside the room. But that drama wasn’t what Boone was interested in.

  Left alone with Helania, he focused on her. “I’m sorry you had to listen to that recording.”

  He wanted to take her into his arms. Protect her from anything and everything. But they were strangers.

  Butch ducked back into the parlor. “Boone? Could you come over here?”

  With a nod, he got to his feet and went across. “What’s up?”

  The Brother dropped his voice. “Havers wants me to go to the clinic. A family has come forward with a missing persons on a female fitting the description of our victim. He wants me to handle the possible ID of the remains. We’re going to have to reschedule with Helania—”

  “I can talk to her.” He hurried on before the Brother could hell-no him. “I’ll even record the session on my phone. Listen, she’s been through enough. She doesn’t need to come back here just because you don’t trust me to remain professional.”

  Butch glanced around Boone’s shoulder. “Okay. But stick to the facts.”

  “I promise. I won’t let you down.”

  Butch nodded and went across to Helania to take his leave. And then Boone was closing the door behind the other male.

  Taking a deep breath, he sat on the sofa where the Brother had been. “Are you okay talking to me about this?”

  It was a while before she answered, and in the silence, he turned things into a multiple choice situation: A) Fuck no, I don’t want to be alone with you; B) Are you insane, I have to go; C) Do you have any idea what you’re doing, or are you just winging this?; and D)—

  “Actually, I’d rather do this with you.”

  Okay. Wow. His D) had been more along the lines of I’m not a celebrity, get me outta here.

  “With your permission, I’ll start recording on my phone?” See, he could be professional. “It’s ju
st so Butch can listen, and this way, maybe you can be all done with this.”

  “I thought the room was recording it?”

  Boone looked around and saw security stuff everywhere. Duh. “Well, this is just an extra belt and suspenders thing, then.”

  “All right.”

  Boone put his phone on the coffee table, and when he was sure it was working, he sat back. “Can you tell me what happened? And take your time. I have all night.”

  • • •

  Helania stared at the phone because it was easier. She could tell the thing was recording because a little counter at the top of the screen was marking passing seconds that would turn into minutes.

  This may well be a waste of time, she thought, given that her voice seemed to have left her. She really did not want to talk about the nightmare that had unfolded eight months ago and was still very much with her. But she had called the Brotherhood for help. What had she thought was going to happen?

  More to the point, if she wanted to stop whoever was killing females . . .

  “My sister, Isobel . . .”

  As that name left her lips, she was suffused in sadness, and found herself falling silent again as memories came to her.

  She cleared her throat. “Isobel was not like me. She was outgoing—she liked to be with people, and people liked being with her. She had a boyfriend, and she went to Pyre with him a lot.”

  Boone frowned. “Tell me about the male.”

  “She was happier with him than I had ever seen her before. She had had boyfriends from time to time, but he was different. Her eyes sparkled whenever she talked about him.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t know.” Helania shrugged. “I never met him.”

  As Boone’s face settled into a mask, she shook her head. “It wasn’t him who killed her. I know Isobel, and she never would have been with someone who was abusive. Besides, she was giddy whenever she spoke about him. She couldn’t wait to see him.”

  “Was he of the species?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “How long were they together?”

  “She first told me about him a couple of months prior to her death, but I had the sense she had been seeing him for a little while before then.”

  “How long is ‘a little while’?”

  Helania took her parka off her lap and put it on the floor beside the chair. “Let me think . . . she mentioned him sometime in February last year. But her mood picked up around the human holidays before then? So I think they first started seeing each other maybe in December. But it’s hard for me to say for sure. She was always really social and out most nights with her friends anyway. Again, though, something changed around the holidays last year. She was different. In a good way.”

  “Are you close to any of her friends?”

  “Not really.” Helania shook her head. “I usually stayed home.”

  And didn’t that sound lame to her own ears.

  “Do you think any of Isobel’s friends might be willing to talk to me? About the boyfriend?”

  “Again, I didn’t spend a lot of time with them, but her social media is still live because I haven’t had the heart to delete her Instagram or Facebook. Some of them have to be on there and I could contact them.”

  “That’d be great.”

  Boone smiled a little, and the subtle movement made her focus on his lips. He had a really nice mouth, she decided, a full bottom, a peaked top. It looked soft—

  “So, Isobel had this boyfriend,” he said, “and as far as you knew, they had a good relationship.”

  Okay, she totally and completely needed to stop with the mouth thing. “Yes.”

  “And she would meet him at Pyre. Was there anywhere else they would go? Would she stay over at his place?”

  “No, not really. Not often, I mean. Mostly she was at our apartment during the days.” Helania looked down at her hands. “I think she felt as though she had to look after me. It was a throwback to when we were younger.”

  Back in the era when Helania had been different and at a disadvantage. And Isobel her champion.

  “Your sister sounds like a female of worth,” Boone said softly.

  “She was the very best person I’ve ever known.”

  As she said the words, she realized something. For Isobel to be dead and her to be the one who lived? It seemed like a waste, and that was part of her guilt.

  “Tell me about the night she died—”

  “Killed,” Helania corrected. “The night she was killed.”

  Boone nodded gravely. “Tell me what happened. And as I said, take your time. I don’t care how long you need. I will sit with you until dawn if we have to.”

  “It brings it all back, you know.” Abruptly, Helania felt like she couldn’t breathe, and she sat up straight, as if that would give her lungs a little more space to expand into. “It brings back . . . everything.”

  While she struggled with her emotions, Boone just sat on the sofa beside her chair, his eyes steady, his body still. And in the end, his calm presence was the only thing that made it possible for her to go on.

  Inhaling deeply, she sighed out the words. “It was four in the morning when I found out. But at least I still had time to get to her.”

  “At Pyre?”

  “No, at the house where they brought her. After she was found at Pyre.” Helania tangled her fingers, knotting them and then forcing them to release. “She had these two friends who she saw all the time. One she met in nursing school. Another was somebody she’d crossed paths with out in the scene. They were the females who went looking for her that night—and one of them found her.”

  As Helania teared up, Boone held something out. A handkerchief. And of course it was monogrammed, as befitting his station. She wanted to tell him no-thank-you, but she couldn’t stand the crying. For godsakes, if she couldn’t handle speaking about Isobel’s death without losing it, how in the hell was she going to be strong enough to find the killer?

  Accepting what he offered, she put the soft folds to her cheeks. “Thank you.”

  “Would you like some water?”

  “No, I just want to get through this.” She took another deep breath and backtracked, names and faces jamming in her head, syllables getting twisted in her throat. “That night, Isobel . . . Isobel and her two friends went to Pyre. From what I was told, her friends lost track of her in the crowd at the club. When it was time to go, they couldn’t find her and tried her phone. They told me they even went down to the lower level, but they didn’t see anything or scent anything out of the ordinary. They went home, thinking she’d gone to their place, and they were worried when she wasn’t there.”

  “So how did they find her?”

  “One of them went back. She broke into each of the storage areas, and that was where . . .” Helania pressed the handkerchief into her stinging eyes. “That was where the female found Isobel hanging from a hook on the ceiling. Her throat had been . . . cut. She was stiff, I was told. Cold. The—ah, the one who found her called the other friend. Together, they removed her from the scene. There are so many humans at that club, as you know. They couldn’t leave her, especially with the dawn coming.”

  “Of course they couldn’t.”

  Helania glanced down at his phone and watched the numbers go up for a little bit. “I will never forget what the knock on our apartment door sounded like. Four a.m. Knocking. I knew something bad had happened because no one ever came to see us. Isobel always went out. Anyway, I went to check the peephole . . . there was a female on the other side and she was crying. I opened the door, and she all but collapsed into me. It took her three tries to get it all out, and I don’t know whether that was because I couldn’t hear right or because she couldn’t speak right. The next thing I knew, we were driving across town. I don’t even remember what kind of car it was, but good thing she had it, as we were both too upset to dematerialize.”

  Glancing up from the phone’s counter, she focused on
Boone’s face. “I could smell my sister’s blood in that car. It was what they had used to move her.”

  Boone squeezed his eyes shut and cursed. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “I just kept thinking, she can’t be dead. She can’t be dead . . . she can’t be dead. It just seemed—I mean, Isobel was the most alive person I knew. How could anyone like her not be breathing?”

  Helania folded the handkerchief and dabbed at her face. As she breathed in, she caught the whiff of a delicate smell, as if the square of fine cotton had been handwashed in something as gentle as it was expensive.

  She continued, “It was a proper house that we went to. A nice house, not as fancy as this by far, but set back from the road with lots of bushes and an attached garage.” She blinked and saw the place clear as moonlight in her mind. “It was clean inside, and the furnishings were all new and fresh. Isobel . . . she was on the floor in the living room, wrapped in white. A sheet, it was. Like a mummy. They had laid her out on the hardwood floor. The scent of her blood was more intense, and even wrapped up like that, I could see a red stain spreading on the back of where her neck was.

  “Her friend, the one who found her, and I washed her for the Fade Ceremony. The other friend hung back and watched. At nightfall, the three of us took her out to a state park that has a lot of very hidden places in the woods. It was early June, so the ground was soft. The friend who found her and I had shovels. We dug down ten feet. It took us hours. We put her there. I don’t know who cried more.” Helania held up her palms. “I tore my hands apart.”

  Boone leaned in. “You have scars.”

  “I wanted to remember Isobel.” Helania drew in a long and slow breath, and stared at her right palm. “When I got home, I put my hand in salt water. As a tribute.”

  She traced the network of ridges that crossed where her lifeline was, running her fingertip over the remnants of all those blisters. As a vampire, any wounded skin on her body didn’t merely repair itself but regenerated, so that ordinarily, she could never find any traces of any injury.

  If you were to bring a wound or broken area of flesh into contact with salt, however? You had those scars for life.