“Fine,” I said, pulling power from the coin. “I release you.”
The hag growled and gained her feet. I eyed her loose grip on her sack.
“Liberare!” I cried, thrusting the coin toward it. The force tore the sack from her grasp and flipped it, releasing the trapped souls. They streamed away, like celestial eels into a great ocean.
“Nooo!” the night hag shrieked. “Come back! Don’t run away!”
The night hag grabbed her sack and ran after the streaming souls, leaping up in fruitless attempts to reclaim them. She soon became lost among the trees, her wretched cries trailing after her.
14
For the duration of the cab ride, I clutched my cane in both hands, my nerves taut in the beating middle and frayed at both ends. Fortunately, the cabbie wasn’t a talker. I had him drop me off where Seventieth Street met Central Park.
The day was cool and brisk, the sidewalks dotted with New Yorkers in hats and scarves. The street the night hag had given me was in one of the city’s wealthier pockets, though something told me I wouldn’t find the fae in any of the ornate towers facing the Park. That would be too obvious.
Opening my senses, I headed east at a fast walk, eyeing the passing buildings. Though none featured ethereal membranes or colorful auras, I began to pick up a low white noise after several blocks, like soft static. The static grew as I hastened my pace—then it receded. I backed up until I was standing where the static was at its peak. I found myself beside a stone staircase leading up to an emerald-green door. Somehow I had missed both just a few seconds before.
A subtle, intricate magic was at play, blending the edifice with the buildings on either side so it wouldn’t stand out. Only a steady eye brought the door into full focus. I moved my gaze up the narrow townhouse, counting four floors, each with a window and simple decorative balcony.
Yes, this was the place.
I climbed the steps. Finding no bell, I knocked on the door, the dense wood seeming to swallow the sound. But a moment later, the door opened onto a slight man in traditional butler’s attire, silver hair combed to one side. Though he appeared fully human, I immediately recognized him as a fae. His aura was calmer than Angel’s, tempered by age, but not weaker.
Definitely not weaker.
If he was surprised to see me—or anyone—at his door, the emotion remained folded in a drawer behind his placid face. I tried to peer past him, but against the light from outside, the space registered dimly, perhaps from another veiling. All I could make out was the beginning of parquet hallway, too wide, it seemed, to fit inside the narrow building.
The butler cleared his throat. “Yes?”
I decided to forego etiquette. “Where’s Angelus?”
“I’m afraid he’s not in, sir.”
“Where is he?”
“I couldn’t tell you.” His gray eyes, which seemed to eddy at their depths with ancient knowledge, gave up nothing.
“I need to talk to him.”
“It would appear so.”
“Listen,” I said, fighting to control my voice, “Angelus left a party with a friend of mine last night, and no one’s seen her since. Do you know anything about that?”
“Angelus isn’t in, sir,” he repeated.
His head turned slightly. Somewhere behind him a door opened, and an impossible number of voices spilled into the hallway before the door closed again. How many people were back there? Was Caroline among them?
“I’m sorry, sir,” the butler said, “but I must return to my duties.”
“No, wait.” I went to jam a foot against the closing door, but a force kicked it back out. A threshold.
“Good day, sir.” He closed the door.
I tried the knob then pounded on the door. When it didn’t open again, I descended to the sidewalk and peered up at the townhouse. If Caroline was inside, it would explain why my tracking spell had fizzled out as well as why her phone couldn’t receive a signal, the protective energies of the building breaking apart both.
I balled my hands into helpless fists. The defenses here were too complex for someone of my wizarding grade. Even the butler seemed to know this, regarding me more as a minor nuisance than a threat. I considered appealing to the Order to intervene, but I knew that had about as high a probability of getting a response as winning the New York lottery.
The pager in my pocket began to vibrate. Vega was probably ready to follow up on Arnaud’s bogus lead. I left the townhouse in search of a payphone, eventually finding one on Third Avenue.
“What’s up?” I asked when Vega answered.
“There’s a diner two blocks from Ferguson Towers called Firpo’s. How soon can you be here?”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“We have some new information.”
My heart sped up as I thought of Arnaud’s threat against her son. Neither Vega nor I could be seen poking around Ferguson Towers. “Well, ah, what about our interview with Sonny?” I stammered.
“That can wait.”
I looked around desperately, torn between keeping Vega and her son safe and finding Caroline.
“Croft,” Vega said sternly.
“Uh, fine. I’ll catch a cab here in a minute.”
She hung up.
I wheeled from the phone booth and found myself face to face with the blond blood slave. “Geez.” I pressed my hand to my slamming heart. “Do you have to sneak up on me like that?”
“Get her away from the Towers,” he said.
I was preparing to play dumb before realizing that, with his preternatural hearing, Blondie had heard every word on Vega’s end of the conversation. He reached into a jacket pocket and held up a smartphone, the crisp image of a young boy at play on its screen: Vega’s son.
“That was taken two minutes ago in a Brooklyn park,” Blondie said. “I hear his sitter has a bad habit of texting when she should be keeping an eye on him. All I have to do is give the word.”
I shouldered him aside and waved for a taxi.
“Don’t,” I said. “I’ll get her out of there.”
I found Vega in a booth in the back corner of the dimly-lit diner. She was talking to someone across from her, the back of the booth blocking the person from view. As I approached, a pair of wringing hands slid into my line of sight, then thick arms, and at last a hulking body, the squat head swiveling to face me. I pulled up short. What in the hell was one of Stiles’s henchmen doing here?
“Thanks for coming,” Vega said. “This is Rancho.”
When my eyes slid back to the henchman, the one who I’d dubbed the Mexican Wrestler, I half expected him to be reaching for a weapon. Instead, Rancho offered his right hand, his expression either fearful or earnest, I couldn’t tell. His palm was damp when we shook. Vega scooted over to make room for me, and I joined her opposite Rancho.
“So what’s up?” I asked, looking between them.
“Rancho has something to share,” Vega said. “Go on, tell him what you told me.”
“I’m not supposed to be talking,” Rancho said in a half-whisper, peering around the side of the booth. Besides being dimly lit, the hazy diner was empty. “If Stiles finds out…”
“Everything you say is confidential,” Vega said impatiently. “And I’m telling you that as an old friend.”
Rancho hunched his shoulders and pushed around his coffee mug with a finger. “I’m Stiles’s number two. I run security in the east towers and have a dozen guys patrolling for me. Every night around midnight, I do my own patrol. Make sure no one’s where they shouldn’t be, you know?” He wasn’t talking about the security of the residents, I understood, but the security of Stiles’s drug operation. His job was to keep Kahn’s sellers out of the east towers. “Anyway, I’m doing the tour of the lower levels. Pit Stop and Bones are down there.”
“The victims,” Vega told me. “Before they became victims.”
“Yeah, they’re not supposed to be down there,” Rancho went on, “but they’re whacked out pret
ty good, and I’m not gonna pick ’em up and carry ’em out, you know? So I keep going, and I’m getting this feeling like someone’s watching me. And I’m hearing things. Breathing. Something moving. But too big to be a rat, you know? And it’s bothering me, ’cause except for where my flashlight’s pointing it’s pitch black down there. So I give the room a sweep, and I swear to God, something’s moving just outside of my light, quick as fuck.”
“Did you get a look at what?” I asked.
“For a blink, yeah,” Rancho whispered. “Cause when my light forced it into a corner, the thing came at me. I mean, one second it’s back behind the pipes, and the next it’s almost on top of me. I caught a face, white as this coffee mug, and wild hair, and a mouthful of teeth.” Rancho arranged his shaking hands so he was holding an invisible gun. “I squeezed twice—bam! bam!—and got the fuck out of there.”
“Those bullet casings we found?” Vega said to me, raising an eyebrow.
“And he didn’t come after you?” I asked, the fact striking me as unusual.
“He?” Rancho shook his head. “That was no dude.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s why Stiles thinks it’s one of Kahn’s,” Rancho said. “Some of her runners are women. Stiles ordered me to go back down, to make sure I’d finished her off. But there was no way I was gonna have that thing come at me again. And just so you know,” he said, leaning forward to look me in the eyes, “I’ve dealt with some of the baddest mothers out there. Been stabbed, shot, bottles broken over my head—shit don’t scare me. But that thing in the basement…” His next breath rattled out of him. “I’m telling you, she wasn’t one of Kahn’s. She wasn’t even a person.”
Vega nudged my leg twice under the table, as though to say blood slave.
“So you lied to Stiles about going back down?” I said.
“Yeah, and the next day Pit Stop and Bones are torn to shit.”
I chewed on that for a moment. “Did any of your people see her come or go?”
“No one saw nothing,” Rancho said. “And we keep eyes on our doors twenty-four seven.”
I remembered the drain Vega had checked out in the boiler room and thought back to what I’d read about blood slaves lairing near their prey. I damn sure wasn’t going to say anything, though.
“I talked with Stiles earlier,” Vega said to me. “Son of a bitch is on a power trip. Isn’t going to let us take another look at the crime scene. Doesn’t want us anywhere near his towers, as he calls them.”
I felt the tension ease out of my shoulders. That’s a relief.
“But I sent Hoffman out to track down the plans for the buildings,” she said. “See if there are any other access points to the lower level.”
“While Hoffman is working on that,” I said quickly, “maybe we should head over to that interview in midtown.” And get both of us far, far away from Ferguson Towers.
“Wait,” Vega said. “Rancho’s got something else.”
The hulking man peeked around the edge of the booth again, then hunched his head even lower. “Stiles isn’t going to give you a week. He just wanted to let that get around so Kahn would lower his guard.”
“He’s planning something?” I asked.
“Yeah, and it ain’t gonna be a tit for tat. He’s going big.”
“How big?”
“Taking out Kahn big.”
“When?” I asked.
“Two nights from now. Man, if he knows I’m telling you this, he’ll waste me. But I’ve got a family in there. I’ve got kids to look out for. My baby girl just turned two. You should see her face when I walk in the door. Just lights right up. No judgment or nothing.” A softness took hold in Rancho’s coal-black eyes. “I’d die before I let her catch a stray bullet—or missile.”
I tried to picture the three-hundred pound monstrosity tossing a little girl up and down and blowing raspberries against her belly.
“Thanks, Rancho,” Vega said, setting a few twenties in front of him, probably out of her own pocket.
“I didn’t talk for the money,” Rancho said. “I’m talking because I need you guys’ help. I’m asking you to catch whatever the fuck that thing is and show it to Stiles. You know what he’s like, Ricki. Once he gets a notion, God and Satan can’t knock it out of his head.”
“We’re doing everything we can,” Vega said, her hip-check my cue to slide from the booth. “But keep the money. Buy something for your little girl. We may need you for more than just info next time.”
15
“Something wrong?” Vega asked from behind the wheel.
As we’d left the diner, I had caught two of Arnaud’s blood slaves watching from down the street. I had no idea whether I’d gotten Vega out of there fast enough. For all I knew, her son was now missing, his sitter searching the playground, calling his name in ever-growing distress. That would be on me. I let myself become too interested in Rancho’s story when I should have been urging Vega to leave. I guess my face looked as stricken as I felt.
“Just thinking about a friend,” I said, switching from one track of worry to another. “She left a party last night with someone, and no one’s seen her since. I can’t get her on the phone.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” Vega said.
I’d thought about that, especially with the Italian mob looking for her. “Maybe,” I agreed. “But could you check and see if anyone’s filled out a missing persons report on her?”
“What’s the name?”
“Caroline Reid.”
She pulled out her smartphone, making her steering more haphazard. After a few queries, much of it in police jargon, she said, “Thanks,” and hung up. “A report went out around noon,” she told me.
“Who filed the report?”
“Didn’t say.”
Probably her father. I considered having Vega relay the info about the fae house on East Seventieth Street to Missing Persons, then decided against it, my brain a switchboard of conflicting signals.
I massaged my aching temples.
“Goddamn Stiles,” Vega seethed. I turned to find her white-knuckling the steering wheel, eyes staring spears at the road ahead. “I knew he was gonna pull some kind of shit, but saying he’d give us time just so he could give himself an advantage against Kahn?” She faced me, a pair of fingers held up. “Two nights, Croft. We’ve got two nights to wrap this up.”
“Maybe this lead will turn into something.”
“Coming from Arnaud?” Vega snorted. “I may not know any vampires, but I know the type.”
“What do you mean?”
“A person of interest wanting to aim the spotlight anywhere but at himself. They give us bad info all the time. I’m much more interested in the building plans for the Towers, learning how that thing got in and out.”
“Were you able to find out anything about Sonny Shoat?”
“Yeah, the man’s a real prince.” She gave me a sidelong sneer. “For the last thirty years he’s been running a club near Times Square. A seedy joint called Seductions. Man’s been in and out of custody, mostly for drugs and beating up on his girls.”
I felt my jaw steeling. I could forgive a lot, but not preying on women or children.
“So we’ll go in there,” Vega said, “let him deny knowing anything, and then we’ll get back to figuring out how that blood slave accessed the tower.”
I was trying to come up with something to divert Vega from her plan when her phone beeped. She looked at a text message on the display, typed something back, and returned the phone to her jacket pocket.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“Just my sitter saying they’re back at the apartment.”
Kid’s safe, I thought, relaxing into the seat. But for how much longer?
Sonny’s graying hair hung like damp drapes around a gaunt, predatory face. Underneath a leather vest, he went shirtless, like the women he employed.
“A murder, you say?” He set a booted foot a
gainst his metal desk and tipped himself back, hands clasped behind his head. I could just make out his rat-like eyes studying us from behind a pair of sunglasses, his left lid jittering up and down. But it was his canines I was more interested in. Arnaud had sent us to another vampire. “No, don’t know anything about that.”
“It happened in the basement of Ferguson Towers,” Vega said in the monotone of someone just going through the motions. “The two victims had their throats slashed.”
Sonny’s narrow nose let out a snivel. “Sounds like you’ve got a killer on your hands.”
“No shit,” Vega said. “And you don’t have any information for us?”
“Why would I?”
“We’re following up on a lead,” she said.
Sonny dropped his chair and leaned over his desk. “Then you’ve been misled.”
“No kidding,” she muttered under her breath, cutting her eyes to me as though to say, Had enough of this dirt bag?
But before she could stand, I placed a hand on her forearm. Sonny wasn’t as pale as the creature Rancho had described, but I couldn’t ignore his long hair—or the fact he would have employed hundreds of women over the years, maybe even made blood slaves out of a few of them.
“I imagine the turnover in your line of work is pretty high,” I said.
“No flies on you,” Sonny replied with a tired smile, front teeth glinting gold. “Just when you get them pulling in real money, too. They forget who made them that money, you know?” He turned toward the closed door that led onto the club, a den of black lights, thumping music, and sinuous, sweating bodies. Detective Vega hadn’t been thrilled about having to walk through the club to get to the office. Neither had I, to be honest.
“Did any of them leave here with an appetite for blood?” I asked, raising a brow.
Sonny’s gaze snapped back to mine, his left eyelid jittering faster. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Blood Deal (Prof Croft Book 2) Page 8
