by Nalini Singh
Her resolve firm, Ashwini returned to the contents of the box. A small figurine of a cat chasing a ball, chipped in one corner, a white teapot with pretty blue flowers, and a pen from a chain hotel sat on top of a shoe box filled with stubs and papers. Setting the shoe box aside for the moment, Ashwini and Janvier went through the rest.
It wasn't much. More inexpensive ornaments that had meant something to Felicity, but that she'd been too embarrassed to bring into her new "home." Given what Ashwini knew of Felicity's nature by now, she was certain the shame and embarrassment had been fostered in her by another.
The woman who'd been cheerful and hopeful and bouncy as a bunny, the woman who'd had every intention of inviting her working-girl friends to tea in her Vampire Quarter house, wouldn't have felt it herself without outside pressure.
"That's it," Janvier said after removing two books from the box.
There were no notations on the dog-eared pages, no scraps of paper hidden within.
"Shoe box," she said, hoping against hope that Felicity had left them a thread to tug, a trail to follow.
"She didn't keep a proper grocery list." Ashwini showed Janvier how Felicity had scribbled herself a reminder to buy milk around a recipe she'd ripped out of a magazine. "But she was compulsive about her finances." Those documents were neatly bound by a rubber band.
"When you are poor," Janvier said, "you never forget the value of money, non?"
Ashwini ran her finger under the rubber band. "I was never poor, except for the time I was on my own." She'd always remember the day she ran from Banli House, racing from the terror of it in flimsy slippers not meant for gravel and tarmac. The soles of her feet had been bloodied lumps of meat afterward, tiny stones embedded into her flesh.
The pain hadn't mattered. She'd found the lonely dark of the road, waved a truck to a stop, and taken her life in her hands when she'd jumped into the cab. Better, she'd thought in her panicked and angry state, to die in freedom at the hands of a maniac truck driver than end up insane in the prison of Banli.
As it was, the driver hadn't been a maniac. He'd just been a lonely man who wanted some conversation on the road and who hadn't seen any reason not to give her a ride to her grandma's home out of state. Of course, Ashwini didn't have a grandparent out of state, but it had been as good a story as any.
"On your own at fifteen, cher," Janvier said gently. "I think you understand the meaning of poor."
Ashwini thought of how she'd begged her way into a dishwashing job at the diner where the trucker had dropped her off, her wages paid in meals. She'd slept rough in the woods nearby, moved on after a bare three days, afraid she hadn't run far enough. By then, she'd scoped out the drivers who patronized the diner, deliberately using her ability for the first time in her life to separate the good from the bad. And the good ones took her far enough away that she'd finally felt safe.
"The funny thing is," she said, her eyes on the shoe box, "I ran in the opposite direction to Felicity."
"A rural area?"
Ashwini nodded. "I'd seen a documentary, knew the big fruit orchards always needed fruit pickers." She'd timed her escape for summer, conscious she'd never make it in winter without the right gear. "I turned up and worked hard and lived in a barn or two to save money for winter. I snuck in after everyone else went home, snuck out before the farmers woke up."
"Will you tell me how you came to the Guild?" Janvier asked, his voice dark music that seduced and coaxed and made her feel alive.
Ashwini let the music sink into her bones as she opened the door into the past. "I was three months into my new life and out of work when Saki found me asleep in her parents' barn. She was the toughest woman I'd ever met"--all honed strength and patience--"but instead of kicking me out, she sat down on a hay bale and asked me why I thought this existence was better than home."
Janvier watched her with a quiet intensity. "You told her the truth."
"Yes." To this day she didn't know why, but that conversation had changed the course of her life. "She told me about the Guild, said my independence and resilience would stand me in good stead."
The choice had been easy; it was the first time in her life anyone had said she might succeed at something without having to alter her very nature. "It sounded too good to be true, and I was sure they'd reject me, but they didn't." Her defiant facade had cracked at the acceptance, left her exposed to Saki's keen eyes. That was when the other woman had taught her the first rule of the Guild: Your fellow hunters will always have your back. We will never use what we know about you against you.
"I was scared to return to New York to attend the Academy, afraid Arvi would put me back in Banli House. But . . . I missed my brother, too." Love was never uncomplicated; she could hate Arvi and love him at the same time. Once, she'd tried to tell herself that she felt nothing, but the lie had been too big to carry. "The Guild psychologist was the one who made sure I wouldn't be committed again. So I came home, did everything in my power to be a normal teenager."
"And your brother?" Janvier asked softly. "Did you see him on your return?"
Ashwini's mind flashed back to that instant so many years ago when Arvi slammed into the conference room at Guild HQ. She'd never forget the wild look in his eyes, his hair a tumble and his jaw shadowed with a coarse beard.
He'd stopped halfway to her, his chest heaving. "You're safe. Alive."
The agonizing relief in those words would live with Ashwini forever. "Yes," she'd whispered, her hand clenching on the back of a chair as she stared across the gulf between them. She'd wanted to run into his arms and she'd wanted to punch and scream at him, the equally powerful urges crashing up against each other to lock her feet to the floor. "I would've died in that place."
Arvi had flinched. "I was trying to save you."
"I know." Thanks to Saki, she also knew he'd filed a missing persons report on her, had hired countless private investigators in an effort to find her. Not only that, but he'd been personally talking to every bus driver and train conductor he could find, in the hope that someone might remember her. "Thank you for searching for me." It had been her fear, and yet to know that he had, that he hadn't simply written her off . . . it made her want to cry despite the confusion and anger inside her.
Arvi's expression had been stark. "There was never any question."
That was the only time the two of them had ever spoken of what he'd done by putting her in Banli House. "Yes," she told Janvier now. "I saw Arvi." Throat thick, she swallowed. "He'd looked for me," she said simply, unable to face the tangled knot of emotions incited by the memory. "But he didn't stand in my way when it came to the Guild, didn't try to reassert guardianship."
Safe from the threat of committal, Ashwini had narrowed her focus to her Guild studies, determined to forget the other part of her existed. Having learned the truth about Tanu and her mother by then--after confronting Arvi a month after her return--she'd seen her "gift" as a curse that had destroyed her family and she'd wanted no part of it. "I was nineteen before I accepted who I was, what I had inside me." It was seeing Tanu behind a locked door one day that had done it; she'd vowed she'd never be so trapped . . . and realized she'd imprisoned herself.
Janvier's smile was faint, his eyes dark. "So many years in so short a story. One day, you will tell me the rest of it."
Ashwini shrugged. "I was luckier than a million others."
"And the predators?" Janvier asked, tone quiet but shoulders tense. "You must've been a beautiful girl, tall and long limbed."
"More like skinny and dirty." Not that such things stopped the monsters. "I had a couple of close calls--ironically not from the strangers I was so vigilant about, but from two of the farm laborers I'd gotten to know over the summer."
One man had cornered her in a disused drying shed she'd thought to use for sleep, while another had grabbed her in the fields when she'd made a mistake and been the last one to leave. "But I'd been a cornered animal once before," she said to the vampire who had dea
th in his eyes right now. "I still had that feral strength in me, along with the knives I'd bought with my first bits of money."
Janvier's expression didn't soften. "These men didn't wish to make trouble for you after you hurt them?"
"They may have, but I hopped a freight train to another farm state the same night in both cases. I knew I couldn't win against them." The helplessness had grated at her, but her survival instincts had won out over pride.
"I feel a compulsion to visit these areas."
"No need. I went back when I was a fully trained hunter. Neither will bother another girl ever again." At Janvier's raised eyebrow, she said, "They're not dead, just . . . out of commission in certain bodily functions."
"Good." A slow, dangerous smile, before Janvier bent his head to the papers again. "The spreadsheets stop seven months ago, so she didn't do one for the last month Seth saw her alive."
"She may finally have become totally dependent on the bastard who killed her."
Eyes narrowing, Janvier passed her a ticket stub that had become stuck inside the financial documents. "Opera. Nothing Felicity could afford and the performance was in that final month."
Ashwini took it, eyes on the bar code. "Good chance we can track this."
Nodding, Janvier went back to the financial documents while she combed through the other pieces of paper.
"Her income goes down over the last five weeks of record keeping," he said a few minutes later. "Far as I can see, that's when she stopped doing her cleaning jobs."
Ashwini turned over the stub for an art house movie. No bar code. No way to chase down a single patron from six and a half months ago. Setting it aside, she said, "The sugar daddy convinced her to quit, but was generous on his terms." Paying for things but giving her no financial independence. "Seems like something an abuser would do."
"Controlling her under a veneer of devotion." Janvier's jaw muscles moved. "He has done this before. It was too smooth an operation."
"Yes." The realization that Felicity hadn't been the first, the other victims lost and forgotten, infuriated her. "Opera, art house flick, receipt for a designer dress--" She frowned, looked at the total. "Five grand, paid in cash." It must've been a prop, meant to draw Felicity deeper into the spider's web. Five thousand was loose change for an old, rich vampire.
"Either an old vampire uneasy with other methods of payment," Janvier said, "or a young one showing off."
"I'd go for old with how well orchestrated this was, how patient, but why limit it to vampires?" She raised an eyebrow. "Angels can be even more twisted." Nazarach had taught her that. "Could be an angel is behind this and the vampire who bit her is simply the one who did the dirty work."
"I'll do some discreet digging, see if any angel is known for tastes that might have morphed into this kind of ugliness." Opening a bank statement still in its envelope, as if it had come after Felicity last visited her apartment, he stopped. "She bought something at a store that's unusually high end for a woman with as little income as Felicity. Maxed out her credit card . . . and that card was paid off in full a few weeks later."
Ashwini glanced at the charge, saw the reference, and looked up at the billboard plastered on the wall of a building a block down. "A man's watch," she said, blood a roar in her ears. "She bought the bastard a gift."
Janvier followed her gaze. "He's cold, calculated. Banks can be worse than cops, so he made sure they wouldn't come looking."
"But a store like that," she said on the wave of her rage, "will have surveillance." Maybe, just maybe, the monster had been with Felicity when she bought the gift.
31
Four hours after his visit to the Quarter, Dmitri finished his call with Astaad's second--who had the bad taste to be sleeping with Michaela, but was otherwise sane--and walked up to the roof. He and Raphael needed to discuss the upcoming meeting with the vampire leaders.
As he'd predicted, the bloodlust had begun to cool the instant the order rippled through the vampire community. Seven of the leaders had contacted him already, the tremor in their voices barely hidden. "Please tell the sire I have taken care of the problem," had been the message of each, though the exact words may have differed.
It was too little too late. What Raphael needed from Dmitri was to know the names of the worst offenders, the ones who had encouraged the lack of discipline through their own actions or inaction. It hadn't taken Dmitri long to gather that information, not with the reports recently filed by Trace and Janvier, as well as input from Illium about the Made who wielded the most authority over others.
Dmitri had also had a long and interesting conversation with Adele that had clarified certain matters. She might refuse to join the Tower officially, but Adele's loyalties were unquestionable--and she knew as well as he did that punishment could not be avoided once the crime had been committed. While Raphael wasn't capricious or brutal without cause, he was also ruthless when it came to maintaining order in his territory.
Bloodlust equaled carnage. It would never be acceptable.
However, when Dmitri exited out into the glassed-in enclosure that housed the elevator, he was surprised to find Naasir and Elena on the other side. They were using the flat surface of the roof as a training ground and going at each other no holds barred. No, he thought after a second glance, that wasn't true. Naasir wasn't moving with anywhere near his ordinary speed.
It wasn't because he'd been injured that morning--the wound had looked bad, but was comparatively minor relative to Naasir's age and strength. No, it was because the two of them were still gauging each other's strength.
"She calls him a tiger creature."
Dmitri turned to the archangel who'd come up behind him. Raphael didn't use the elevators, so he had to have used the stairs. That, too, was highly unusual. Dmitri guessed he hadn't wanted to fly up, disrupting the practice session outside. "Well, she's heading in the right direction." Naasir's Making was a unique and terrible thing. "He did actually tell her several truths at dinner."
Lips curving, Raphael kept his eyes on Elena and Naasir. They were stepping it up now, Elena's knives slicing faster as Naasir moved with a swift grace that was fascinating to watch. Venom was as fast, but more sinuous, with the startling and jagged speed of a viper. Naasir's strikes were fluid, feline, and oddly stealthy for being so feral.
"She's holding her own--that's something." Elena had once slit Dmitri's throat on a busy Manhattan street, so the hunter had considerable skill, but she was up against a very dangerous vampire of over six hundred with nowhere to run; she couldn't even take off fast enough to avoid Naasir. "You have warned Naasir that she's not yet fully immortal?" The other male wouldn't fatally hurt her on purpose, but he might not realize he was doing so without an advance caution.
"Yes." Raphael's smile deepened. "Even with having to restrain himself, he's laughing. You know what that means."
"He's enjoying himself." There were an extremely limited number of people who could put that look on Naasir's face, especially in a sparring session. "It's because she's as unpredictable as he is. No rules, just do what's needed." That balanced out the fact that Elena wasn't strong enough to take his blows at full strength.
"Her sessions with Janvier have honed that aspect of her hand-to-hand combat skills."
"Good." Dmitri was the one who'd recommended Elena train with Janvier. The Cajun was one hell of a street fighter and Elena needed every skill she could learn; a considerable number of people would like to see her dead. She was, after all, a living, breathing manifestation of Raphael's heart.
Continuing to watch the session outside, he slipped his hands into the pockets of his black pants. "Trace got in touch earlier." The elegant vampire with his taste for poetry and art had healed enough to take over the watch on Khalil a couple of hours back, only to have to hand it off to Emaya and Mateo forty-five minutes ago. "He found the Umber dealer--unfortunately, it appears the man's head was separated from his body late last night.
"Trace believes his sup
plier didn't like the fact that he couldn't keep his mouth shut, and I agree with him." Whoever was behind this did not want to be famous or to have his name known to the Tower. "The dealer himself was low-level scum who was in all probability chosen for his contacts among the bored and the rich. I don't expect Trace to find anything to connect the dealer with his supplier."
Raphael's expression changed to the merciless focus that made him a member of the Cadre. "It's no coincidence this drug has made its appearance now."
"Yes. The weak fear what may yet come." The clash in the skies above New York had only been the first battle. "But the malaise is generally restricted to the cowardly pleasure seekers who scuttled into hiding rather than fight." Dmitri had been happy not to have to deal with their pathetic uselessness during the hostilities. "I am sorry about Rupert. He fought with courage. He must've taken the Umber in a moment of foolishness."
"Is his death and devolution chilling the ardor for the drug?"
"On the surface, but to some, the incident has lent it a deadly glamour." Russian roulette played with a crystalline substance, murderous bloodlust only a taste away. "If we don't shut off the pipeline, we'll have more incidents."
Raphael's eyes tracked Elena as she managed to swipe Naasir on the thigh, but got her wing twisted in the process. "A mistake," he murmured. "She won't do that again."
They watched the two outside for another minute before returning to their conversation.
"There's a chance this drug is another move by Charisemnon or a different member of the Cadre who seeks to weaken the city." The intense black of Raphael's hair gleamed blue-black in the light pouring through the glass. "I've spoken to Keir and he tells me a drug of such virulent effect on the Made would be near impossible to manufacture using known chemicals."
Dmitri agreed, especially since their own labs were having difficulty analyzing the compound. "The latest tests say it has an organic rather than manufactured base, but that doesn't get us much closer to breaking it down."
"Jason?"
"He's spread the word among his operatives--he'll have a report for us tonight from the other courts. So far, Umber appears to be a localized problem." Folding his arms, Dmitri met the violent blue of Raphael's eyes. "Of the vampire leaders, Severin and Anais are the worst offenders. Both have fed violently in public in the past two weeks." Not disallowed in and of itself, but a stupid choice at the present time.
