by Chloe Neill
“Bottom-line it for me,” Ethan said.
“Someone cared enough to be very careful and very specific about the thing addressed here. I’m just not yet sure what that ‘thing’ is. But you’ll be the first one to know.”
Ethan’s phone rang, and he pulled it out, checked the screen. “Give us a minute, would you?” he asked, and Paige and the Librarian nodded and disappeared into a row.
“It’s Gabriel,” Ethan said when we were alone, and pressed a button. “Ethan and Merit.”
Gabe didn’t waste any time. “I need a favor.”
Ethan’s brows lifted, and he put his hands on his hips. “I’m listening.”
“I’ve got an address for Caleb, but I can’t get away to check it out. I’ve got obligations as Apex related to the death, the wake.”
Ethan lifted his brows again, and I could guess the line of his thoughts: Why did an Apex have obligations to a member who’d defected? I didn’t doubt Gabriel was grieving; we’d seen it last night. But the Pack prided itself on loyalty. We simply didn’t have the entire story.
“If you could take a look, or get your people to take a look, maybe you’ll find something that ties him to the sorcerer, to the vampire. Something that explains why he was killed.”
“We’ll take a look,” Ethan said, nodding at me. “The address?”
Gabriel read it off. “I understand it’s near Hellriver. So be careful.”
In the 1950s, Hellriver had been “Belle River,” a pretty suburb near the Des Plaines River. That changed forty years ago, when an ugly chemical spill sent most of the neighborhood packing. The houses, churches, and stores were still there, but Chicago hadn’t been able to get the funds for a cleanup, and nobody wanted to live in still-toxic Hellriver.
“We always are. How did you find the address?”
“Damien made some calls. Caleb may not have been a Pack member, but he still had friends inside. It’s not supposed to work that way—defection is defection—but I can’t stop what I don’t see.”
“And now you can see it,” Ethan said.
“Yeah. We’ll be having some discussions about that.”
“Good luck to you,” Ethan said. “We’ll take a look and let you know what we find.”
“Appreciate it.” There was a thunk on Gabriel’s end. “Goddamn whelps. Somebody pull those assholes apart! Later,” he said into the phone, and the call ended.
“Sounds like he’s having fun.”
“If Mastering vampires is akin to herding cats, mastering shifters is akin to herding bull elephants.”
“So you’re saying you don’t envy him.”
“Not in the slightest.” He put his phone away, looked at me. “Are you up for a field trip?”
I smiled. “As long as I can take my sword. I’m curious to learn more about our defecting shifter.”
“You aren’t the only one, Sentinel,” Ethan murmured. “We should probably warn Luc we’re going.”
“Why? What could happen at the house of a dead shifter beside a toxic neighborhood? I’m sure everything will be fine.” I didn’t bother to hide my sarcasm.
“We’re clear,” he called out, and Paige came back with a thin black easel. She set it up, then placed the poster in the crossbar.
“Unfortunately,” Ethan said, “I won’t be able to volunteer Merit quite as early as I’d imagined. Gabriel has a lead on the shifter who was killed, and he’s asked us to check it out.”
“No worries,” Paige said with a smile, and she probably meant it. “I’d like the chance to take a look before I assign anything to Merit.”
The Librarian came back to us with a tablet and cord in hand. He plugged it in, arranged it on the tabletop for Paige to use. “Thank you, Arthur.”
His cheeks flushed with pleasure. “You’re welcome,” he said, then put his hands on his hips, surveyed the setup.
“I think we’re good to go here,” Paige said.
“Excellent,” Ethan said, putting a hand at my back. “We’ll get to our business with the shifters. If there are any developments—if you learn anything—please let us know.”
“We will,” Paige said, settling herself into a chair. “And good luck.”
“I’ll grab my sword,” I said when we’d left the library and were back in the hallway again.
“I’ll advise Luc of the call, the trip. Meet you in the basement.”
And we went our separate ways.
CHAPTER SIX
FOUR ON THE FLOOR
Despite our plan, I met him on the first floor near the staircase, just leaving his office, a glossy box in hand. “What’s that?”
“A gift for Gabriel, should we end up at Little Red.” He opened the tabs on the box, showed me the neck of a bottle of what looked like good Scotch.
“Excellent. This is random, but don’t you think Paige is just gorgeous?”
We took the stairs to the basement. “I don’t think there’s a way I can answer that question without incurring your wrath.”
I smiled at him. “As long as you don’t touch her, I’ve got no problem with your agreement. I don’t think her attractiveness is debatable. And if you do touch her, I’ll slice your fingers off and feed them to a River troll.”
“River trolls are fruitarians.”
“Not the point.”
He chuckled, keyed in his code, opened the door to the garage. “No, I suppose not. Regardless, I only have eyes for you, Sentinel. Well, you . . . and her.”
I looked in the direction of his gaze, half expecting to find a beautiful woman in the garage.
But there was no woman. Instead there was a gleaming white, two-door convertible with sporty wheels, deep vents in the doors, and another vent across the back.
Hands on my hips, I glanced at him. “And what is this?”
“This, Sentinel, is an Audi.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” I could appreciate good steel, fine leather, and impressive horsepower, but I recognized the model for one singular and important reason. “You bought Iron Man’s car.”
“He’s not even immortal.” The clear disdain in Ethan’s voice made me snort.
“He’s a fictional superhero. You aren’t in competition.”
“He’s a very mortal superhero outside that suit,” he said, looking over his car with an appraiser’s eye.
“You’ve apparently put some thought into that.”
“A man carefully considers his ride, Sentinel. And his rivals. This car will get us where we need to go, and it will do so very, very quickly.”
There was hardly a point in arguing with that. It certainly looked like a fast car, so I let the comment pass and walked around the vehicle, gave it a once-over. The car absolutely gleamed, its interior deep crimson leather, its soft roof made of fabric in the same shade.
I looked at him over the car from the passenger side. “You do have good taste.”
“Of course I do,” he said. “Shall we go for a ride?”
“I mean, I’m not going to say no.” I grinned at him. “Have you named her yet?”
The faintest flush of crimson rode his cheeks. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him blush before. “Sophia,” he said.
“A lovely name for a lovely woman,” I said, without much jealousy, and sank down into buttery crimson leather. “Let’s see what she can do.”
• • •
It would have been simpler to wonder what she couldn’t do.
Her engine rumbled like hollow thunder, and she practically flew down the streets of Hyde Park. I wouldn’t call myself a car person, but it was impossible not to appreciate the ride.
We drove northwest from Hyde Park to Hellriver, crossing the Des Plaines River and moving west.
Ethan had turned on a talk radio station, but switched it off again after a ten-minute dissertati
on on the Problems With Vampires. They included, to quote the speaker: (1) their penchant for violence; (2) their disdain for human authority; (3) their refusal to acknowledge humanity’s innate superiority; and (4) their lack of temperance.
I wasn’t entirely sure what the last one was about. Prohibition hadn’t worked in Chicago in the twenties, and it certainly wasn’t the law now.
Gabriel had been right about the shifter’s location. Caleb Franklin’s former home was only a few houses down from the broken chain-link fence intended to block access to Hellriver. Not that there seemed to be much improvement on this side of the barrier. The homes were dilapidated, the businesses boarded up.
“Here we are,” Ethan said, pointing to a single-story house. It was yellow, the small porch white. The paint on both was peeling, and the concrete sidewalk outside jumbled and split. The yard wasn’t fancy, but it was tidy.
We climbed out of the car, belted on our swords, and took the steps to the front porch. The neighborhood was quiet. I hadn’t seen a single human, or supernatural, but a dog barked in the distance, warning its owner of something ominous in the dark.
The building was completely dark, utterly quiet. I closed my eyes, let my guards drop just long enough to check for signs of life inside. But there was nothing, supernatural or otherwise.
“There’s no one in there,” I said after a moment, opening my eyes again. “No sound, no magic.”
“My conclusion as well,” Ethan whispered, then turned the knob.
The unlocked door opened easily into a small living room that smelled of must and animal.
We walked inside, and I pulled the door nearly closed behind us. “Nearly” so that passersby wouldn’t decide to investigate, but we could still make a quick exit.
The living room was marked by an enormous couch on the opposite wall. It was what I’d call the “Official Couch of the Seventies”—long, ruffled, and covered in cream velveteen fabric with orange and brown flowers.
There was a matching love seat, an end table, a lamp. No photographs, no curtains, no television or stereo.
“Not much here,” I whispered.
“Or maybe our shifter wasn’t into décor.”
The living room led into a dining room that was empty but for a small table with four chairs and two more doorways—a kitchen straight back, and what I guessed was a bedroom to the side.
“I’ll take the bedroom,” I said.
“Passing up the kitchen?” Ethan asked with a chuckle. “How novel.”
“As is that joke. Check the refrigerator.”
My excellent suggestion was met by an arched eyebrow. “He’s a shifter,” I reminded Ethan. “If he’s been here lately, he’ll have food.”
Ethan opened his mouth, closed it again. “That’s a good suggestion.”
I glanced back at him, winked. “It’s not my first night on the job, sunshine.”
Ethan humphed but walked into the kitchen while I slipped into the bedroom, a hand on the pommel of my sword. That the house seemed empty didn’t mean we shouldn’t be cautious.
The bedroom held a matching set of white children’s furniture—lots of curlicues and gilded accents. Probably from the same era as the couch in the front room. The mattress was bare, and there were no ribbons or mementos tucked into the corners of the mirror that topped the chest of drawers. Furniture or not, no child lived here.
The bedroom led to a short hallway. Closet on one side, Jack and Jill bathroom on the other with avocado green fixtures. No toothbrushes, no towels, no shampoo bottle in the shower. There was a spider the size of a smallish Buick, and I gave him or her a wide berth.
The next door, probably another bedroom, was nearly closed, and a soft mechanical throb seeped through the crack. I flicked the thumb guard on my sword, just in case, and pushed the door open with the toe of my boot.
It was another small bedroom. A ceiling fan whirred above a black double bed with more gilded accents, the mattress covered by a rumpled duvet and thick pillows. This was Caleb Franklin’s bedroom. And if the fan was any indication, he’d been here recently.
There was a closet in the far corner. It was empty but for a pile of dirty clothes on the floor. No shoes, no hangers.
I opened the drawers of the bureau and nightstand that matched the bed. The nightstand was empty; the bureau held a few changes of clothes. T-shirts, jeans, a couple of hoodies.
Had this been the freedom Caleb had wanted? The freedom to not care about material possessions? Had he found peace in this desolate neighborhood? And if so, why would anyone have bothered to kill him?
The bedroom’s second door led into the kitchen, completing the circle through the interior. I walked through, found a small storage closet behind it that led to an exterior door. There was a mop, a bucket, and a worn pair of snow boots.
I felt Ethan come in behind me.
“Some clothes in the bedroom,” I said, pulling open the door of a metal cabinet, finding it empty. “That’s about all I’ve found. What about you?”
In the answering silence, I turned around. Ethan had walked to the refrigerator, opened it.
It was absolutely stocked.
There were bundles of produce—carrots with the green tops still attached, glossy eggplants, heads of cabbage—besides piles of steaks and dozens of brown eggs in a carefully placed pyramid. There were blocks of cheese, a dozen bottles of water, a plate of what looked like profiteroles, and several bundles wrapped in aluminum foil. The scent of spiced meat wafted out. I’d have bet good money they’d been prepared by Berna, Gabe’s strong-willed and culinarily skilled relative.
“No processed foods in this man’s diet,” Ethan said.
“And a big appetite. Of course, he’s a shifter.” That meant he was an animal of some type, although we wouldn’t ask Gabriel. The animal variety was considered very personal among Pack members.
“So we have an empty house and a stocked fridge,” I said. “By all accounts, Caleb Franklin slept here, ate here, stored the barest necessities here. Didn’t seem to do much else here.”
“No,” he didn’t,” Ethan agreed.
I looked around. “Whatever got him killed, there’s no evidence of it inside.” I glanced back at Ethan. “You want to finish up in here? I want to take a walk around the yard.”
Ethan nodded. “I’ll take a pass. Be careful out there.”
I promised I would and walked back to the front door, then outside. I needed to think like him. He might not have had a Pack, but as the stocked fridge showed, he was still a shifter.
I hopped down the steps, walked around the house. There were shrubs in front of the foundation every few feet, and a few trees just beginning to bud around the edge of the narrow lot.
The backyard was small, bordered by the back neighbor’s chain-link fence, which was covered in brambles and vines. There were a couple more trees back here, as well as a cracked and peeling redwood picnic table. A swing hung from one tree, a simple wooden plank attached to an overhanging branch by a thick, braided rope, probably hung for the same child who’d once owned the white bedroom furniture.
I tugged on the ropes to check they were solid, knocked on the wooden seat. I gingerly sat down, pushed back in the soft earth with the toes of my boots. The swing moved back, then forward, then back again, the rope creaking with effort. I stretched out my arms and leaned back to look up at the tree limbs overhead.
The child would have played out here, the trees creating the walls of the castle only she could save. That was how I would have played, anyway. Our backyard had been empty of fun—no trees, no swings, no sandbox. Just the lawn my father paid someone to trim into a perfectly manicured rectangle.
I sat up again, head buzzing from the motion. That was when I saw it—a square piece of plywood stuck over the painted brick foundation. The plywood was new, still showing its price in brigh
t orange paint.
Maybe our shifter had a den, I thought. I walked toward it, knelt in front in the soft, new grass. There were no screws or locks; it had merely been set in place, propped up by a concrete block. I moved away the block, then the plywood, and peered into the crawl space. The ground beneath the house was packed dirt and dotted here and there with rocks and broken bricks. It smelled of wet earth.
The plywood had been larger than the void it covered, which was only about sixteen inches square. Big enough for pests to crawl into, but Caleb Franklin didn’t strike me as the type to care overmuch about something nesting down there.
The hole wouldn’t have been big enough for him to slip through. But maybe it was big enough for him to reach into.
With a silent prayer to whatever gods would keep the rest of the house’s spiders out of my hair, I braced my hands on the foundation and poked my head inside.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to darkness-inside-darkness—and just a moment more to spy the metal cashbox just inside the foundation.
If I’d been a child in my imaginary castle, this would have been my long-lost treasure.
I reached inside, fingers grasping at something stringy before my fingertips landed on cold metal. I found the handle and pulled it out just as footsteps echoed behind me.
I stood, dusted the dirt from my knees with one hand, and walked to the picnic table. I set the cashbox on top of it.
