by Dannika Dark
He stretched his arm across the seat and grinned. “You should be used to it.”
“Yeah, but I’m usually asking for it. He didn’t have a reason to be giving me that look when I was handing him two hundred dollars. Which, by the way, you owe me a hundred.”
“Afraid not, lass. I’m wearing my half.”
“Your ink will fade; my money won’t replenish.”
He tugged on his ear. “There are a lot of superstitious men out there. Most of whom are one of the ancients. I knew a man who refused to have a pregnant woman in his home, and another who never trusted men with birthmarks. I suspect your eyes stirred him up, but so what?”
“Maybe I just don’t like getting the evil eye.”
“Well, at least he only had one,” Christian said with an amused snort.
My jet-black hair and black lashes had a way of making my blue eye stand out as if it were glowing with light. It wasn’t a warm sapphire like Blue’s, but clear and bright like a husky’s. Mostly I didn’t care what people thought of my mismatched eyes, but the look One Eye had given me left me rattled.
The car slammed to a stop.
I flew forward. “Hey, watch it!”
He was an independent cabbie who only shuttled around Breed, so it wasn’t uncommon for them to have security dividers and not give a rat’s ass about traffic violations.
We stopped in front of an old brown house with a wooden swing on the front porch. The property looked fifty years old, but by no means was it unloved. The garden beneath the window was blooming with fall flowers, the trim had a fresh coat of sage-green paint, and the concrete showed signs of recent repairs. While Christian paid the driver, I got our bags out of the trunk. Since we had no idea how long this search would last or what we would find, we decided to worry about transportation later.
I looked around as the cab sped away. “What if the neighbors call the police?”
Christian lifted both bags in his left hand and put his arm around me. “For what? Penny’s just having a few of her oldest friends over,” he said, tugging me close against him. “Should the neighbors be peering out the windows, they won’t suspect a thing.”
“Until you kick down the door.”
We stepped onto the porch.
“Nonsense. I have a little more finesse than that.”
We huddled next to each other while Christian rang the bell. He gripped the knob, planting his boot against the bottom of the door and giving it a hard push. The bolt split through the wood, and the door opened a crack.
He held it for a minute and switched to an American accent. “Penny! It’s been ages. Thanks for inviting us!”
I chimed in with a few fake greetings as we moved inside and he shut the door behind us. All the drapes were closed, but it wasn’t so dark that we couldn’t see the brown carpet, matching furniture, and an oversized chair in the right-hand corner—a blanket draped over the arm and paperbacks piled on the end table.
Christian dropped the bags by the door and theatrically strolled across the living room. He lifted a mug from the table and peered inside.
“What if she’s married or lives with someone?” I whispered.
“Don’t be daft. Just look at all the paraphernalia of a single woman.”
I sat down on the couch and watched Christian rest his arm on a bookshelf to give me the full explanation.
“Romance novels on public display in the living room? I’m guessing she’s not the sort of woman who has company over, or she’d have these bodice-ripper novels hidden beneath the bed. There’s nothing masculine within this room aside from the toenail clippers sitting next to her cup of amaretto coffee. And then we have exhibit C,” he said, pointing to a bra tossed on the floor.
“A man could have done that.”
“Aye. But Jaysus wept. Will you look at it? That’s not the sort of bra a woman would wear in front of a man. Imagine the mortifying shame of it.”
I stood up and tossed my coat and hat onto the bags. “We should get started. Any idea what we’re looking for?”
He strode past me and peered into a closet. “Something that links her to the murderer?”
“Brilliant, Detective Poe.”
He disappeared down the hall, and I sat at a small wooden desk and opened the laptop. The only thing she had pulled up was the Internet, so I looked through her browser windows. One was for online shopping, another was a weather forecast for Cognito, and the third was…
“What the hell?”
I leaned in, my eyebrows knitting together. It looked like an online dating site for Breed. Did such a thing exist? What had tipped me off was the special symbol in the background that I’d commonly seen on the windows of Breed establishments. I didn’t want to risk logging out to check how secure it was from humans accessing it, so I began scrolling down the page.
I chuckled at some of the names showing up as online. “ISpark4U? Oh God, this is so… weird. HotAlpha69… Hey, Christian? I think I found something,” I said without yelling. There was never a need with him.
Some of the people online were showing up as her friends, and her inbox was flooded with over a hundred unread messages. The last thing I wanted to do was click out of there by accident, so I closed the laptop and decided to let Wyatt search through it.
When Christian didn’t come, I got up to find him. At the end of a hall, I entered a bedroom on the left and discovered Christian snooping in the top drawer of a dresser.
He lifted a pair of large cotton panties. “Definitely single.”
“Meanwhile, I think I broke the case.”
He ignored me and pulled out a red G-string. “But by the looks of these knickers, she was holding out hope.”
“Are you done going through her underwear?”
“For your information, what a woman keeps in her private quarters can tell a lot more than all your fancy machines. Penny was a single woman who’d all but given up on finding love. But she was a romantic at heart based on those books she read, and these knickers are new—the tag’s barely crinkled. She recently met someone, and yet because it was shoved way in the back, she didn’t think she could go through with it. Maybe she had self-esteem issues.”
I blinked in surprise. Wow, this guy really knows his stuff.
“I found a dating website. Maybe one of those guys is the killer.”
“Aye. But you’ll want to skip over the numpties looking for a good shag. She wanted something special. See that table by the bed?” Christian pointed behind me. “Inside the drawer you’ll find a book of love poems with a rose pressed inside. Someone broke her heart, and she’s never gotten over it. The rose looks about as old as the book, which was printed in the eighteen hundreds.”
I had to give the man credit; he had a good eye. But his keen assessment made me incredibly uncomfortable about his preconceived notion of me. “Anything else?”
He strolled to the mattress and lifted it with ease, revealing a red book. “Dear Diary. It’s an archaic tradition in the modern era, but I’ve learned some of the older ladies still keep them.”
“Huh. That might tell us something.”
Christian suddenly wrapped his arm about my waist and whirled us around. He pressed his index finger to my lips, and my pulse jacked up a beat. His eyes were fixed upward, his head cocked to the side.
He must have heard something.
In a split second, a man appeared in the doorway and fired a crossbow. Christian shoved me to my knees and dodged the arrow, which struck the wall. He charged the man at breakneck speed until their bodies collided.
I reached in my boot heel and pulled out a small blade. The moment I looked up, Christian collapsed on the floor in a heap.
It took me a second to process that someone had shot him in the back with impalement wood shaped like an arrow.
When a man appeared in the doorway, I threw my stunner and pierced his chest. The crossbow fell to the floor, and I had a split second to decide if I was going to blast him or bite him. I f
lashed forward, harnessing my light.
Before I could deliver a powerful blast of energy, he stepped aside and staked me in the back.
Chapter 13
Impalement stakes have never worked on me, though I’d never had one that large shoved into my back. And it hurt. Tremendously. In fact, it gave me paralysis from the pain alone. But it was life or death, and I needed to play dead to assess the situation. They were armed, and I still wasn’t sure who “they” were or what their Breed was.
Definitely not Vampires.
From what I could tell, the two men were Native American—one sporting a red baseball cap and the other wearing a flannel shirt. I couldn’t see anyone else from my position, but that didn’t mean anything.
My cheek pressed against Christian’s ass, karma at its finest.
“That was easier than I thought,” the man with the cap said. “Good thing we brought the crossbow.”
“Never leave that at home when it comes to Vampires,” the guy in flannel said, panting as if he hadn’t exercised in months. He was rounder, with messy black hair that covered much of his face. “You can’t get too close to them, or they’ll snap your arm off.”
We were in a short hallway, and each man was leaning on an opposite wall.
The guy with the red hat picked up his crossbow and looked it over. “It’s your call, Standing Bear. I’m just along for support.”
I watched through my peripheral vision, thankful that Christian hadn’t eaten any beans on the airplane.
Standing Bear—the hefty man in flannel—rubbed his pudgy nose and then flicked a glance back at us. “One Eye doesn’t want witnesses. He doesn’t want the guy, so we need to get rid of him.”
Red Cap grimaced. “I don’t cut off heads, bro.”
Standing Bear lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “We’ll burn the place down. That way it doesn’t have to get messy.”
“Damn. What did they do to cross One Eye?”
“He didn’t like them snooping around in his shop today.”
“What about the woman?”
Standing Bear flipped on the hall light and knelt in front of me. He lifted my right eyelid and scooted aside. “See that?”
“So?”
He stood back up and turned away. “One Eye says she’s a demon. Her other eye is brown. He says that happens when a soul is cursed.”
“What does he want us to do with her?”
Standing Bear scratched his head. “We’ll set her to burn with the Vamp. But you’re doing the honors,” he said, handing the other man a knife.
“For what? I don’t have to cut off their heads if we’re going to burn them.”
“No, but One Eye says she has power in that blue eye, and he wants it. He thinks if he puts it in his dead socket that he’ll see again.”
The second man laughed. “Bullshit.”
“Don’t laugh at the old ways or you’ll anger the spirits. Are you turning your back on your people already?”
The man took the knife from Standing Bear.
While they talked it out, my left hand was slowly creeping around inside of Christian’s coat and pants in search of a weapon since my only dagger was too far out of reach and quite useless against these men. Apparently it wasn’t easy to get daggers through airport security, so Viktor had told us to leave them at home. One person who searched my shoes grew suspicious, but Christian charmed him, and they quickly became preoccupied with a drunk who was threatening to blow up the airport if they didn’t find his luggage.
Each time I tried to move my hand higher, the wood in my back tore at my nerves. It had gone deep, and I could feel the blood trickling down my back just as tears were gathering in my eyes from the pain.
“Do you have a bag to put it in? I’m not carrying her eyeball around in my pocket,” the man said.
Standing Bear pinched his chin. “I’ll see if I can find a resealable bag.”
Relief swam through me when he walked away. The man in the hat wandered over and squatted down so he could brush my hair back. He held the pointy tip of the knife near my face, and I was seconds away from blowing my cover when he yelled out, “Bring me a spoon!”
“A what?” Standing Bear yelled from across the house.
“A spoon! The kind you eat cereal with. I can’t do this with a knife, or it’s going to get messy. Easier just to scoop it out.”
I shuddered inwardly.
He turned around and tossed the knife by his crossbow. Before he looked back, I hooked my right arm around his neck and yanked him in, sinking my fangs into his jugular. I sucked hard and fast, and when he scooted back to get away, it helped me to sit up. Since he was neither a Mage nor Vampire, I pressed my hand against his chest and knocked him out with a powerful burst of energy. His body convulsed, and I quickly retracted my fangs and spat out a mouthful of blood. Then I gave him a second shock to keep him quiet.
When I pulled the stake out of Christian’s back, he sat up and looked at me, completely nonplussed. “Well, you’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
I gritted my teeth when he pulled the impalement wood from my back. “Every girl should have secrets,” I croaked.
Christian leaned in and gave me a hostile glare. “Why didn’t you share that with me in the training room? It’s a fairly important detail to know that impalement wood has no effect on you.”
“What would be the fun in that? Can we talk about this later? Standing Bear is on his way back with a spoon to scoop out my eye.”
Christian put his arm around my waist and helped me up. “And what exactly were you searching for in my trousers, Precious?”
I patted my hand on his chest. “A weapon? Sadly, I didn’t find anything impressive.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Maybe next time check a little lower. That’s where I keep the dangerous ones.”
I glanced down at the fallen man. “Maybe you should go take care of Spoon Man before he comes back.”
Christian straightened his back. “From the sound of it, he’s in the freezer using that spoon to eat ice cream. He’ll just be a moment. Why don’t you freshen up while I give my warmest regards to our visitor?”
I caught my horrific reflection in a hall mirror and went into the bathroom to rinse the blood off my mouth. Seeing myself like that brought back memories. When I emerged from the tiny room, Christian was dragging the unconscious man down the hall by his wrist.
“What about the guy in the kitchen?” I whispered.
“Already taken care of,” he sang. “Gather up the weapons, will ya?”
When I entered the living room, I chucked the crossbows and knife in a pile by the bodies.
“Christian, we can’t burn him alive,” I said, motioning toward the guy whose baseball cap had fallen off.
Christian knelt down and cracked his knuckles. “Worry not. I don’t like killing them when they’re as feeble as a kitten. I think One Eye needs a lesson on who he shouldn’t mess with, so I’ll make sure this one sends him the message.” Christian patted the man’s cheek. “It’s your lucky day.”
I collected my jacket and hat from the floor and grimaced as I headed to the bedroom to retrieve Penny’s diary. While Christian was busy searching for a can of gasoline or a nuclear device, I packed the laptop in his bag and did another search to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. Penny wouldn’t have photographs lying around, and people didn’t use address books anymore since they kept everything on their phones. Unfortunately, we hadn’t found a phone on either of the victims, so it led me to believe the killer had known them and taken the phones so nothing would trace back to him.
When I turned, Standing Bear’s dead body was still spread-eagle on the floor, his neck twisted in a sickening manner, but his buddy was nowhere to be found. Christian sauntered through the living room and shoved a dagger into Standing Bear’s chest. Then he stood up and scratched his beard as if solving a crime.
Or committing one.
“Where’s the other guy?
” I asked.
“Sunbathing on the patio. Good thing she has a privacy fence.”
“What’s the plan?”
He rotated his shoulders and glanced around. “I’m going to torch the house and put the gasoline can in your friend’s hand. He’s too weak from blood loss to run, and if the police show up, they’ll just think he’s on drugs.”
I sighed. “This wasn’t in the brochure.”
“Do me a favor. Next time you decide to take a bite out of crime, lick the wounds. You can’t just leave victims lying around with bite marks on their necks, and I’m not particularly fond of cleaning up your mess.”
“Not a fan of whiskers? That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
Christian arched a brow and made a quarter turn.
The light in the room was dimming; it must have been after sunset. “Should we call a cab?”
He barked out a laugh. “Jaysus, you can’t be serious. Let’s call a cab from a soon-to-be crime scene. Do you think the driver will wonder why the house is engulfed in flames?” He circled the body. “By the time I get this bonfire going, it’ll be dark. I can shadow walk, and you can flash. We’ll meet up at the motel we passed on the way—that one you were making fun of.”
I switched over to a lyrical Irish accent. “Ah, you mean the one with the shamrock? Me thinks of home every time I see that lucky clover.”
He reached behind him, feeling his coat. “Feck me. It never fails. Anytime I find a good jacket, someone puts a hole in it. And no, not that motel. I’m referring to the one with the sign advertising complimentary shrimp with cable.”
I wanted to laugh, but it hurt to breathe. “I’ll be in the backyard. Hurry up.”
It didn’t take long before Christian finished staging the crime scene and joined me out back. I was sitting on our bags with my eye on my attacker—probably a Shifter—who was still out like a light. I struggled to stay focused despite the pain in my back.
I watched Christian pour a trail of gas to the back door. He set the empty canister by the unconscious guy and then patted his pockets. “Got a match? I don’t smoke.”
