by L. J. Red
“What do you want?” he growled, pulling the door open and glaring down at me.
“Just to see your lovely face, Kyran,” I said, smiling sweetly.
He sneered. “Bullshit,” he said.
Perhaps he was still smarting from what Alexandra had done or from the face-off with Valerian. Either way, for the first time, he didn’t go on trading insults. “Just tell me what you want, Tiana.”
“What do you know about the dead humans,” I said, starting soft.
“I told you already,” he snapped. “I didn’t have anything to do with them.”
“But you knew them, right?”
“No. Why would I know a human?” He sneered.
“You didn’t know them? Didn’t even meet the blood donors, huh? What, you teetotal now?”
“I fucking saw them around the place, sure,” he growled. “But I don’t socialize with humans.”
Liar, I thought. “So, you saw them around… like at one of your parties?” I asked.
“They’re not my parties,” he snapped.
“But you do go to them.”
“Everyone goes to them.”
“Valerian doesn’t,” I said.
“Valerian has a stick up his ass,” Kyran snapped. “Are we done here?”
“Sure,” I said, slowly pulling the scarf out from where I’d tucked it behind my back and looping it around my neck. I caught the way his eyes very obviously fastened on it and the widening as he realized whose scarf it was. Gotcha. He snatched his eyes back to mine and read the satisfaction in them.
“You’re a liar, Kyran,” I said. “Are you a murderer too?”
He growled. “How am I a liar?”
“Because Oliver and Sevda weren’t the only blood donors you knew. Michelle was one as well.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, but this time he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Don’t bullshit me, Kyran. She was here. I know she was with you at one of your parties.”
“So what?” he said. “We get new people coming in all the time. Humans love spending a night with vampires.”
“Just the night?” I asked. “I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it was just a night.” I stepped closer to him. “Because she’s missing, Kyran.” There was no surprise in his eyes. He already knew she was missing. What the fuck had he done to her? “Where is she?” I growled. He glared at me, his frown deepening into a black expression.
“I don’t fucking know, all right? Yes, I saw her at one of the parties. Yes, I recognize the fucking scarf; she was always wearing it.” He broke off abruptly.
“Always? You know ‘always’ implies more than once.”
“Once, twice, a couple of times. Whatever.” He shrugged but the motion was tense. “I don’t know where she is and I didn’t do anything to her or the other humans.”
“I don’t think I believe you, Kyran,” I said, staring up at him.
He growled and I saw his fingers clenched on the doorjamb but he didn’t move to strike me. Interesting. Someone was holding his leash. “I don’t give a shit what you believe,” he snapped. “You don’t matter. None of this matters. No one is gonna find out who killed those humans. No one cares.”
“I care,” I snapped.
He sneered. “And what are you going to do? You’re just some witch chick Valerian dipped his dick into one time.”
Anger fizzed through my veins. “Careful, Kyran. You don’t want to push me.”
He laughed bitterly. “You think it’s you I’m afraid of? Valerian put out a warning. If anyone touches even a fucking hair on your head, he will gut the vampire responsible. He’s gone completely overboard this time and the queen is on the warpath about those dead humans. She was mad enough when she found out about what Gloria did to you. I’m going to fucking keep my head down. So you can get lost,” he said, stepping back, and before I could shove my foot in the door, he had slammed it shut in my face. I felt his presence receding rapidly away, flickering with vampiric speed out across his rooms, through a back door, and away from me.
I hissed in frustration. He was hiding something, I knew it, but was he hiding a murder? I didn’t like him and he’d never liked me. Was my dislike for him affecting my judgment? Hell, you could say that about this entire case. Still, it didn’t line up. I could see Kyran going crazy at a party, taking things too far, drinking too much. He could have killed Oliver, but Sevda? The room cleared out, the fear before her death? Why would Kyran do that? What secret could she have found out about him? And then there was Michelle. Was she dead? Could he have killed all of them the same way? He didn’t seem out of control, rabid. He was a fucking pain in the ass, sure, but he’d been holding back just then, not attacking me. Clearly he still had control.
None of it made any sense. My thoughts kept tangling on what he had said about Valerian. What was he doing staking a claim? Like he owned me? I didn’t fucking want his protection. I turned around, distracted and angry, and pulled up short at the sight of Queen Alexandra standing at the end of the hallway. I sucked in a breath as she glided toward me. “I do hope you are finding answers as well as sending my vampires running,” she said. Her eyes flicked over me, the red scarf at my throat. She didn’t hesitate and her expression didn’t change by a single flicker of an eyelash. Did she not recognize it? Or was she just better at lying than Kyran?
I gathered my thoughts. “It’s not easy to investigate when you destroy all the clues,” I said.
“Destroy?” She raised a delicate eyebrow.
“Sevda’s room. It’s stripped bare.”
“Yes, the police came and took everything that belonged to her.”
“Including the mattress?” I asked.
“Some kind of parasite,” she said, drawing her lips back from her teeth. “Bedbugs I believe they are called. We didn’t want them to spread. We had to take drastic measures.”
“Bedbugs,” I said flatly.
“Indeed, I have the invoice for the exterminators if you’d like to see it?”
I shook my head. I was sure she really did have an invoice. She was nothing if not meticulous. That didn’t change the fact that she was lying through her fangs. She took another step closer to me and I was suddenly very aware that we were the only two people in the hallway and that I could feel the pressure of her vampire powers tickling at my throat and along the skin of my forearms.
“You are so like your sister, in so many ways.” She raised a hand and hovered it above my skin. I could feel the tension between us, the magic of the dead rising off her and from me. I felt it ought to be visible in the air between us, like smoke or steam. “You’re growing into your powers,” she said.
I jerked back. “How do you know that?”
She smiled enigmatically. “I have lived for centuries, little witch. I know many things. Did you know there was a time when a death witch held a place of pride in a vampire court? I had once considered your sister for the position.”
I stared at her. This was the first I was hearing of it. “What are you saying?” I asked.
“I would like to offer that position to you.”
“No thanks,” I snapped.
“You should not be so quick to refuse,” she said. “Power such as yours should not go to waste.”
“I’m not wasting it.”
“On your little cases.” She smiled. “You could continue doing that, you know. A real office, perhaps an assistant. The resources to really make a difference in the world.”
I stared at the glitter in her eyes. She didn’t care about making a difference in the world; she was just telling me what she thought I wanted to hear. Selling me on the idea, just another kind of vampire seduction. My skin crawled. I had to get out of here. “Your employees aren’t doing so well right now,” I snapped. “I think I’ll give it a pass, thanks.”
A flicker of darkness entered her gaze. “There will be no more killings,” she said. “I have seen to it. Any vampire who step
s out of line will be punished.”
“Yeah, sure. I bet a slap on the wrist from you is really going to stop them.”
“Slap on the wrist?” she repeated with a smile that was entirely frigid. “Perhaps not.” She leaned forward. “But burning to death in the sunlight should warn the others.” I jerked away from her.
“You’d kill a vampire over this?” I said, shocked.
“Of course,” she said. “I cannot have my vampires going around murdering humans. As you said, the attention will only cause bad press. And I will do whatever it takes to keep them in line,” she said and glided past me, her fingers brushing against my shoulder for a bare second, the touch so cold it chilled me right to the bone.
Chapter 28
I left the vampire court and went straight home, Alexandra’s weird job offer lingering in my mind. Why had she sent Valerian to me in the first place? If you thought about it, it didn’t really make any sense. She owned the police. She had to, otherwise Violet’s death and my attack wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Had she burned all her bridges covering those two incidents up? Detective Pierce had implied she was skating on thin ice. But still, why bring me in? An outsider who hated vampires. I was motivated to solve the case, sure, but the deeper I dug, the more I wondered if she wanted this case solved at all.
I dragged my tired body up the stairs, then paused outside Michelle’s door. I needed to find out where my friend was. She would have to forgive me for the invasion of privacy. I picked up my lock picks from my apartment. With them, it was a work of seconds to jimmy open her door.
Michelle’s apartment was slightly bigger than mine. She had an extra bedroom that she had turned into an office, the walls lined with books. Some of them copies of the same textbooks from the coven, other stuff that I assumed was related to her graduate studies, spread out over her desk. Printed pages and handwritten in a tightly written scrawl. I picked up a piece of paper.
… Magic use in early sixteenth century Hanover was strictly regulated by the Witch Consuls of the day. However, the authorities would turn a blind eye toward common practices such as food preservation, communication, and industrial spells…
I put it down. Riveting stuff, I thought wryly.
There was no folder neatly labeled with “top secret shit”, or suspicious-looking muddy footprints in the middle of the floor. Unfortunately, real-life was never so easy. Her laptop was missing. That was unusual, but the charger was gone too; perhaps she had taken it with her wherever she’d disappeared to. I still couldn’t bring myself to believe she was dead. There had to be another reason for the void around her.
I left the office and poked my head into the bedroom. Nothing was out of place. Her entire room was neat as a pin. Unnatural I would say, only, thinking of her tidy desk in the coven office, I realized that was Michelle’s natural state. The complete opposite of me. I checked under the bed for suspicious shoeboxes full of secret notes, or maybe just sex toys, but I found nothing. The drawers to the bedside table held just a couple of old keys, tissues, sleep masks, and some all-natural sleeping pills. The bathroom had no suspicious medication in the cupboard and the kitchen had nothing but some food that was going bad in the fridge. My stomach grumbled and I remembered I hadn’t eaten all day. I grabbed a Tupperware, took out the stuff that still had some time on it, and threw the rest in the trash bag, which I tied up and placed by the door to take with me. What? There was no point letting the food go to waste.
Her living room didn’t serve half duty as an office like mine did. It had a couch, much nicer than mine, and a little dining room table tucked against the wall. More books in here but brighter covers, not so many textbooks, and a flat-screen TV in one corner. Her plants were dying.
I turned around and went back into the office. Okay, so she hadn’t left anything useful to tell me where to go, but she had taken her laptop with her. Maybe that wasn’t the only electrical device she kept on her person.
Michelle, being Michelle, had a small filing cabinet in the corner, and each file was neatly labeled. I pulled out the one marked ‘cell phone’. I sorted through until I reached the letter she had received when she opened her account, and bingo, she’d written her account passwords on the letter by hand. Terrible security.
I shoved the cabinet drawer closed, picked up the Tupperware and the trash bag, and went back to my place.
I grabbed a fork and began eating her leftovers cold while I tapped away at my laptop. Most cell phone companies would offer you some kind of tracking data for a lost phone if you had the right permissions turned on. Michelle didn’t, but with her logins I was able to use some of the resources I had as a PI to request the last ten days’ worth of GPS tracking. It would take a while to compile the results.
I dragged my depressingly slim case folder toward me, rereading everything I had on Sevda and Oliver, trying to work out how Michelle fit into the picture. Frustrated, I worked on it deep into the night. I must have fallen asleep at the desk because the next thing I knew, someone was running their fingers softly through my hair. Halfway through sleep and awake, I only registered the presence as familiar and I hummed softly, enjoying the feeling.
Then my brain finally came online and I shot up fast enough that I pulled something in my neck. “Fuck,” I said, bringing my hand to my shoulder and squeezing the muscle. I carefully turned to the side. Valerian was perched on the desk next to me, his hair tousled, points of color in his cheeks, looking like he had in the dream. He’d fed before coming here.
“How long have you been here, creep?” I said, my voice croaky and dry.
“You’re going to get a cramp sleeping on the desk like that,” he said, not answering my question.
“I’ll give you a cramp,” I said. He didn’t even grace that poor response with words, just raised an eyebrow at me. “Shut up,” I said.
I shoved away from the desk, feeling far too sleepy to deal with him. “So now I’ve given you an invitation, you’re just going to feel free to turn up whenever you like?” I asked over my shoulder, making a beeline for the coffee machine.
“Pretty much,” he said, and I swore I could hear his fucking smirk in his words.
I filled the coffee machine and turned back to him, leaning on the counter.
He stretched out his legs in front of him, crossing them loosely at the knee. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten to this point, Valerian, solid and real, in the middle of my apartment, muscled thighs and broad forearms crossed over his chest. His eyes were dark as he took me in, much the same way I was looking at him.
What did he see when he saw me, I wondered. Compared with the other humans who hung around vampires I was nothing special. Sevda had been a stunner, Oliver handsome in that fresh-faced and youthful way. Michelle was far prettier than me. Even slippery little Eve was a looker. And here I was. All attitude and bruises. And yet when Valerian looked at me like that with that light in his eyes…
He unfolded from the desk and prowled toward me. My breath caught in my chest and my muscles locked. I couldn’t deny the reaction I had to him, but our history was too painful to simply be swept aside.
He rested his broad palms on the countertop and looked down at me. “Why did you do it?” I asked. “I was hurting, I was angry with you for not telling me about my sister. I was stupid. I got drunk. I was off my game. I shouldn’t have gone to that party. But why…” I broke off, then forced myself to continue. “Why did you take advantage of me? Why did you bite me and drain me and then leave me to die?” It didn’t make any sense. My eyes were filling up with tears, the sight of him blurry. “If you hated me you could have just let me go. If you hate me so much, why are you even here?”
I realized his muscles were all tense, locked as if he were fighting against invisible bonds. “There’s so much you don’t know. Nothing is as it seems, Tiana.”
I shivered as he repeated the words my sister had said to me in the dream. I wanted to believe there was some reason for what he had done, something that
could explain it. He leaned forward over the countertop and the air around us charged just as it had every time we were close. I wanted, I wanted so much. I had spent so long denying myself. Every lead in this case had turned to frustration. Everything else in my life was wrong, I was behind on rent, constantly running myself to exhaustion. Could this one thing go right? Could I just take what was offered without worrying about the consequences? Without entangling my heart a second time? I wanted this, I needed this. And I couldn’t hold back any longer.
I arched up and met his lips in a kiss.
Sensation flooded my senses, his lips firm and hard on mine. His hand came up to cradle the back of my head, as he took control of the kiss, pulling me close, and all around us the world felt like it was on fire. His chest was pressed to mine, the friction of his front against my breasts drawing my skin tight, nipples hard. Desire looped out between us and flooded my insides. I was hot, gasping into his open mouth, our kiss slick, his lips unforgiving, the kiss an onslaught, eroding my walls, eroding my control. Fuck, I canted my hips, knocking them into the counter, and clenched my core tight. I felt needy, desperate, resonating with want.
The half world rose, unbidden, and I saw it shining through closed eyes. Light edging our bodies just like last time, I felt it in my blood with every beat of my living heart and his cold one. Death magic rising off my skin and his.
This was something new, something I had never experienced before. We had never called power through our kiss. And yet it was undeniable. I felt the blood in my veins resonate with his. It felt good, it felt wonderful and I never wanted it to end. Glorious, incandescent, perfect, a shining, glowing… ringing?
That same jarring, pickaxe noise broke its way into my mind just like before and I tore myself away from Valerian’s kiss, still dazed with desire. It took me a minute to realize the noise was my cell phone yet again. I stumbled away from Valerian, over to my desk and stared at the caller ID. Detective Pierce, again? For fuck’s sake. I raised the phone to my ear, staring across the room at Valerian. His eyes were stained dark with lust, and I felt a shiver right through my bones.
