by Nalini Singh
Elena nodded.
“But she wouldn’t come.” Harrison’s voice was anguished. “In spite of how Simon let Nish and Terry use her even after they got together, he had her convinced he loved her. I knew she’d die if I didn’t get her out, that they’d use her up and break her, but she refused to come. I was desperate, so . . .”
The world hung in the air, a thin glass bauble.
“So I called her father,” Harrison finished softly.
Elena went motionless. “You know the identity of Lucy’s father?”
“She’d said a few things about him at the bar, kind of offhand, even a little angry—but I remembered, because I thought it must make for interesting family dynamics with her wanting a vampire boyfriend. I put the pieces together and tracked him down. He was out of his mind with worry. I told him where he could find her.”
“You didn’t wonder when Nishant Kumar and Terence Lee were murdered?”
“That was ten months after her father took her back. I stopped hanging with them after Lucy, but I heard they were mixed up in the designer-drug trade by then. I figured it must’ve been a gang hit.”
Ten months was a long time between action and reaction. It spoke of patience, of justice served cold. “Did you ever hear from Lucy’s father again?”
“He sent me a funeral card in the mail nine months ago,” Harrison said, tears clogging his voice. “Lucy died. Drug overdose two months after she got out of rehab.”
Wishing she were wrong about Lucy’s identity and knowing she wasn’t, Elena carried it through. “You go to her funeral?”
“No, I was in Alaska that week to gather data for a small business deal Andreas was considering, but I called with my condolences,” Harrison said. “He thanked me for giving him three more months with his daughter, said she’d been his sweet girl again for weeks, that they’d cried together and figured out their problems.”
Elena frowned. What could’ve pushed Lucy’s father from gratitude to wanting to murder Harrison?
Then her brother-in-law said, “I told him I was so sorry I’d ever introduced Lucy to Nish and Terry.”
The hammer fell. “What’s her father’s name, Harrison?” she asked on a whisper, because she knew and she wished she didn’t. Hunting a friend was the worst thing that could be asked of a person. It was why Slayers walked the periphery of the world. It was why Archer had only become her friend after she was beyond the Guild’s reach.
Her eyes stung.
42
Sara went silent on the other end of the line when Elena told her what Harrison had confirmed. “Archer’s dead,” her friend finally said.
“I sent Santiago a message before I called you. He’s rechecking the file.” She was so tired, her back screaming from the weight of her wings—and her mind reaching out to Raphael’s only to hit a blank wall over and over again. “Lucy must’ve been her street name.”
“No, that’s what Archer called his wife. First name was Sabrina, so I always thought Lucy must be her second name.”
A grieving daughter taking her mother’s name to hold on to her? It made an awful, sad kind of sense. “There’re no missing pieces, then, Sara, no facts that don’t fit. It all leads back to Archer.”
“It could be another one of us.”
Sara’s words were a punch to the solar plexus. “Was he close to anyone else in the Guild?” Elena asked, well able to see one hunter taking vengeance for another who hadn’t been able to survive his grief.
“You know how it is with Slayers.” Sara’s voice was thick with withheld emotion. “He and Deacon went out for a beer now and then, and I invited him over for dinner as much as I could without it rubbing him the wrong way. I’d say we were his closest friends in the Guild.”
Deacon was very much capable of taking vengeance on his friend’s behalf, but he would’ve never slit Harrison’s throat where Maggie could’ve found him. Deacon was father to a little girl of his own—more, the last time Elena had brought her niece over, he and Zoe had given an ecstatic Maggie the plastic tools Zoe had outgrown, spent long minutes showing her how to use them.
Maggie idolized her “big sister” Zoe.
Had Deacon been hunting Harrison, he’d have taken Harrison in some dark street where no children would stumble on his body.
“Since I know it wasn’t you or Deacon, we’re looking for a dead man,” Elena said flatly, just as a message lit up her phone. “Hold on a sec. It’s V.”
I contacted Najat about security footage of the night Harrison says he met Lucy. It was a shot in the dark—nearly all businesses wipe footage after a couple of days. But you have the luck of the Irish, Ellie.
They had a big bar fight there the same night—it was hours later, but they had to keep the entire day’s footage because one of the participants decided to sue the bar. Link will take you to it. It’s cued to the right place, and I’ve speeded up a few sections so you can watch it quicker.
“Sara, I’ll call you back.”
“I’m going to call Santiago, ask him to pull up everything he has on Archer’s death,” her best friend said before hanging up.
Elena clicked on the link, and there was Harrison waiting at the bar, dressed in jeans and a casual navy shirt. Lucy walked into frame seconds later. She was wearing a cute sparkly dress of gold that came to her upper thighs, her hair healthy and shiny, and her body language welcoming. She could’ve been any young woman on a night out who’d spotted a man who interested her.
Elena saw Harrison flush at Lucy’s greeting and get that look men got when they couldn’t believe a pretty woman was hitting on them, but credit to her brother-in-law, he kept it to conversation. At one point, Lucy touched his arm, but he pulled off her hand in a gentle but firm way, and she actually saw his mouth form the words: I love my wife.
“Okay, Harrison. Many brownie points for you.”
The rest was exactly what Harrison had described. The other men arriving. Conversation. Photos taken. Harrison leaving early.
On-screen, an unknown man bought Lucy a drink in fast-forward and she drifted away with him. Her flirting was . . . aggressive. Frantic in a way. It made Elena sad. Archer’s beloved daughter was searching for a way to exorcise her grief, but she was doing it in all the wrong places and with all the wrong people.
Had it been a man like Hiraz Weir whom she’d run into that night . . . but this was the past. Not the future, subject to change.
Nishant Kumar eventually went over and lured Lucy back from her admirer. From that point on, she stayed with him, Acosta, Lee, and Blakely until all five walked out of the bar—with Lucy snuggled up against Kumar. She looked sober and conscious of her decision, her face set in deliberate lines. Elena slowed down the footage but saw no indication of coercion or drug use. Steady gait, sharp eyes, active in conversation with the men.
A message popped up on-screen: I ran facial recognition on the rest of the footage for you. These five never come back.
Shutting it down, Elena stared out at the city. It was all so pointless. Lucy had been grieving and going off the rails, even courting her hunter father’s disapproval by trying to hook up with vampires, but she shouldn’t have had to pay for that with her life.
A shadow against the wall, swinging so softly.
A single cherry red high-heel lying sideways on checkerboard tile.
A beloved life lost to grief.
Swallowing back the deluge of memory, Elena called Santiago, who managed to conference-call Sara so the three of them could talk at once. The detective had spent the time since Sara’s initial call gathering his files. He had plenty for them, but the gist of it was that the body found in Archer’s car had been too badly burned to offer viable DNA. However, it had been of the right height and ethnicity—as per the forensic anthropologist.
“Guild paid for the bone doc,” Santiago added. “Her report ma
de me feel better about closing the case despite the weird things I’d noticed.”
“What?” Sara asked.
“It was a crash, no doubt about it,” the detective said. “Car wrapped around the center of the gas station like a tin can. Limited skid marks, but there was a ton of rain that night, and it was possible the hunter skidded across the road and his brakes couldn’t get enough traction.”
Rasping sounds as he no doubt rubbed at his bristled jaw. “But here’s the thing—that car went up like a tinderbox, rain or no rain. I had the fire guys look at it, and they said with the gas station going boom, there wasn’t much they could do to find other accelerants if they’d been present. We did manage to discover that the vic was carrying burnables—possibly clothes in bags. Like he was going to donate them.”
“Convenient,” Elena murmured.
“Yeah,” Santiago continued. “But, while suicide was an option because of the shit luck in his personal life, I had no reason to think ‘body substitution.’”
Elena caught something in his voice. “You know what body.”
“When Sara told me maybe Archer’d come back from the dead, I spent a coupla minutes looking up this odd case I remembered from back then. Two of the guys telling ghost stories in the squad room about how bodies had started to get up and walk away from the morgue and how maybe a sleep-deprived doctor had accidentally ruled a vampire dead.”
“A body was lost from the morgue?” Sara swore under her breath.
“When I looked it up, what do you know—same ethnicity as Archer, same height, around the same weight even. Could’ve been the body in the car, but no way for us to know that. Your guy had no metal in his bones, and neither did this missing stiff—and here’s the kicker, the morgue body was never recovered.”
Elena had no uncertainties any longer when it came to the name of the assailant. Everything fit. And the wait for the right type of corpse would explain the delay between Lucy’s death and the start of Archer’s vengeful spree. The problem was they didn’t know enough about Lucy’s time on the streets to guess who he might go after next—and Beth and Maggie remained in his crosshairs. All a man of his training needed was a single slip in their protection, a single opportunity.
She, Sara, and Santiago hung up after deciding to activate their separate intelligence networks to be on alert for Archer’s name and face. Elena told Jean-Baptiste and Beth who to watch for, and she warned Jenessa. In the grip of a fever of revenge, Archer might decide that she’d led his daughter into life as a prostitute. The young woman was in a hairdressing salon with her mentor, and Elena got that mentor to lock the door and close the salon by promising to cover her lost profits for the day.
Thankfully for Jenessa’s dreams, her mentor appeared more excited at the intrigue than put out. Especially when she heard that her student lived with a senior Tower vampire and that he’d be by to pick her up.
Flaring out her increasingly heavy wings afterward, Elena decided to take flight. She didn’t know where she was going, Archer a phantom who’d left no trail that Vivek could find, but she ached to fly. According to a message Dmitri had sent her during the call with Sara and Santiago, Raphael was on his way back. Maybe she’d fly toward him as far as she could, and then she’d wait.
For one last flight with her archangel before her wings failed.
It wasn’t to be.
The phone rang in her pocket. “Ellie?” Ashwini said on the other end. “We’ve got two more bodies.”
* * *
• • •
So many owls surrounded her that Elena had to push through them to get to the dead, the birds’ bodies soft and warm against her. She wondered if Cassandra was trying to help her cheat destiny. Is this it? The broken blade? The mourner?
No answer, but the owls didn’t move. Elena continued on, her skin flushing hot then cold. Should she back off? Would that throw a spanner into the mechanics of destiny? Or would it alter the future in the worst way, leading to Beth’s and Maggie’s murders at Archer’s hand?
No, she had to finish this, eliminate the threat. And it wasn’t as if she was alone. Her three Legion shadows were waiting on the roof—even Archer couldn’t take on four trained fighters at once. And while her wing muscles might be sluggish in responding to her commands, warning of imminent failure, she had plenty of feathers left. Nowhere close to losing her last one.
She reached the first of the dead.
The small, pudgy vampire had been killed in his combined convenience/pawn shop in a seedy corner of the Quarter and his body found behind the counter by a regular customer. It was a miracle the customer hadn’t decided to rob the place. The corpse was so fresh that the blood was tacky rather than dry and encrusted.
“Spine bisected at the neck, hands cut off.” Janvier rose from his crouch beside the dead vampire. “And we’ve got a connection to Lucy.”
“How?”
“She pawned her jewelry here,” Ashwini explained. “Was easy to check the records after you gave us her legal name.” She pointed at a small laptop that sat open behind the grill that should’ve protected the shopkeeper from harm. “He demanded official IDs and recorded every transaction. Gave a fair price, far as I can tell.”
The same records had probably led Archer to his door. “When did she pawn her things?”
“Roughly two weeks after she first met Kumar and crew.”
A time when Lucy would’ve had access to other funds—she couldn’t have drained her bank account dry that quickly. A memory flared at the thought, of Jenessa saying Lucy had no bank account. It hadn’t struck Elena as odd at the time because Lucy had been on the streets working in a cash profession—and unlike Jenessa, she’d been an addict.
“She always gave me the rent money,” Jenessa had said. “But anything else, she kept in a jar until she wanted to spend it. She didn’t trust banks.”
However, now that Elena knew Lucy’s true identity, her cash existence took on another cast. As the daughter of the Slayer, she must’ve known her father might be able to track her if she accessed her accounts. “She made a choice to pawn her jewelry rather than go home or ask Archer for money.”
Anger or wild grief, they would never know Lucy’s motivations. “But it’s a choice Archer will never accept.” To do so would be to accept that Lucy had made conscious decisions along the way to her descent into darkness.
That didn’t nullify her suffering or in any way excuse the abuse she’d endured—what Kumar and the others had done to her was unforgivable—but it also didn’t mean that her every action had been coerced. Kumar and Lee’d had money. They’d had no reason to force Lucy to pawn her jewelry.
Also, she hadn’t been a prisoner under the vampires’ control—it had been very early on in her life in the Quarter, probably while Kumar and Lee were still grooming her. She’d shared an apartment with Jenessa at the time, been free to come and go as she pleased. Logic said she must’ve made the decision to come to this pawn shop on her own. “Who’s the second victim?”
Ashwini’s eyes flashed. “Owner’s wife, I think. In the storeroom.”
Elena followed Ash to the small doorway just as Santiago arrived. A woman’s body lay crumpled inches from the door, her head separated from her neck. A gold wedding band twinkled on her left ring finger. “I don’t have a scent. She’s human.”
Ashwini swore. “Why the hell would Archer kill her?”
“Probably ’cause she saw his face.” Santiago pointed to a security mirror that would’ve given the woman a view out front even while she was in the storeroom. “He’s got no reason to think he’s already been made.”
Simon Blakely, Eric Acosta, Nishant Kumar, Terence Lee, even Harrison, Elena could’ve allowed that Archer’s vengeance had been justified. He’d skirted the line with Harrison, but in his grieving mind, Harrison could’ve been the reason behind all the others.
&
nbsp; But these victims, especially the woman . . . they’d just been going about their lives, running a small business. Lucy had come to them, not the other way around. The owner hadn’t even cheated her. Archer’s lines had shifted, his justifications no longer explicable or excusable.
“Your boy’s a loose cannon,” Santiago rumbled in an unknowing echo of Elena’s thoughts. “He’s so angry he’ll find reasons to keep killing.”
“Yes.” Drawing in a deep breath, Elena ignored the noxious scents that wanted to slide into her nostrils and focused on the iron richness of blood.
Sugared doughnuts and cold winter rain.
Vampires could have peculiar scents to her hunter-born nose, but this took the cake—or the doughnut, she thought with black humor. Returning to the body of the shopkeeper, she knelt, closed her eyes, then inhaled the scent directly from the gaping wound at the dead vampire’s throat. His head was only attached to his body by a flap of skin at his nape.
Yes, he was the sugar and the doughnuts and the icy stab of rain against the skin.
Opening her eyes, she took in the violence around them. The sprays and smears of blood on the walls and on the floor. The footprints in blood that led to the back door. Archer hadn’t run this time. No, his stride had been confident but unhurried.
Child of mortals. The broken blade is close. Your destiny nears.
Heart jerking at the distress in the old voice, Elena stared directly into the eyes of an owl as she said, “I can track him.” Ashwini was a gifted tracker, but she couldn’t pursue by scent; what she did took time and patience. They needed to move fast, follow the scent before it dissipated—and once and for all eliminate the threat to Beth and Maggie.
Archer was smart, had probably already thrown his bloody clothing in the trash. But given the recent nature of the kill, he was unlikely to have had enough time to shower. And it was hard to strip away every tiny speck of blood. Droplets got in hair, or in the inside shell of the ear, and his weapon would need careful cleaning to remove all traces.
