Dead Man Stalking

by TA Moore

  That was a lead solid enough for Madoc to tug. “Annabelle’s mother?”

  “Aunt,” Took admitted. The lead finally settled into something solid enough for Madoc to catch with his fingertips. “But the fact that alchemy and anti-Anakim feelings tend to share a slice of the Venn diagram caught my attention. Then I found her.”

  He hit Play on the screen. The still image of Waring turned fluid and alive as his mouth tilted into a smile around a just-finished sentence. Bony, teenage-boy hands finished a gesture, dropped to the table, and cupped a mug of tea.

  “I don’t think tea is going to help me with football,” he said as he toasted the camera. “But it tastes good. Thanks, Worm!”

  Took hit Pause.

  “Her?”

  “Worm.”

  “Nice.”

  “Worm_in_the_Apple,” Took said as he scrolled down to the comments. “She only follows Waring, and she’s based in Appleton. Her aunt makes that tea she sent Waring.”

  “Annabelle,” Madoc said.

  “I checked her out to see if her family have Hunter connections,” Took said as he pushed back from the desk. “They don’t, but they go to a Proverbial church, so they’ve probably tithed for the cause.”

  “I’d bet the sheriff has too,” Madoc said.

  Took acknowledged that with a shrug as he closed the laptop. With the need to look over Took’s shoulder removed, Madoc made himself step away.

  “And how did you get from there to the Arons?”

  The flash of doubt on Took’s face surprised Madoc. Until then, Took had seemed confident that he had the answers.

  “I… a hunch?” Took admitted reluctantly. He scratched absently at the still-raised scars on the back of his hands. “They could never find any connection between Waring and the Arons, and once I found out that Annabelle had gone missing, it seemed possible that she had been involved somewhere along the line.”

  “You were right.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know why,” Took pointed out with a scowl. “If it isn’t reasoned, then it isn’t analysis. It’s just a lucky guess. Kit does lucky guesses. I work out what the evidence means.”

  Madoc snorted. “And I don’t care as long as I get a result,” he said. “We know that Annabelle visited the Arons. Do you have a guess as to why?”

  Took shot him a sour look but dug into a drawer to unearth a repurposed folder, the original title scored out and written over in Sharpie. Madoc didn’t need to open it. The word MISSION in Took’s neat block capitals was enough to jog his memory.

  “They were Proverbials too,” he said. “Two years before they were murdered, they sent a missionary group to Europe, lost half their faithful to Russian fangs.”

  It was centuries on since Madoc had followed his old master across the sea, but it was different in Europe. Or rather, still the same. The blood cardinals were still cardinals there, and while they paid lip service to international law, any dissent the missionaries fomented among the breathing there with their preaching was put down swiftly. Bloodily. The Proverbial faithful knew that and accepted it, embraced it even. A mission that came back without at least a quarter of their party lost was considered a failure.

  “Annabelle was with them?”

  “Her brother,” Took said. There was a dry edge to his voice, that old bitter note that crawled up sometimes when he talked about religion. Madoc had always assumed a break with his faith was what had convinced Took to leave California, where he got to hunt vampires, and come to Philly where he had to work with them. “They were very proud. He was their first-born, to be sacrificed to their faith. Annabelle was the one they expected to excel in his memory.”

  Or maybe he was wrong, Madoc thought with a slice of dark amusement, and there were no personal feelings there at all.

  “So the fact that the Arons oversaw their oldest child’s death wouldn’t have been a reason for the Franklins to keep their daughter away from them?”

  “Quite the opposite,” Took said. He held his hand out for the file and, when Madoc handed it over, flipped through until he found a police-tagged copy of a sun-faded photo on a bloody fridge. It showed Benedict Aron, gray hair pulled back from his face in a ponytail, surrounded by preteen kids in front of—based on their T-shirts—Lake Santa Ana. Took tapped a finger against one small, wan face in the sea of tanned grins. “It’s an incentive to send her to their bible camp, so she can find out what a hero her brother was and prepare her to make the next generation of martyrs.”

  “What were you?” Madoc asked.

  Took paused for a second and then shrugged. “Too gay to make more martyrs,” he said, but the edge was gone from his voice, so it was a lie… or a truth that didn’t matter. “What I don’t know is why Waring decided to take out the Arons. If VINE’s profile was right and he had ties to the Hunters, there’s no reason for him to decide to kill a good Proverbial family.”

  “Unless they weren’t so good,” Madoc said thoughtfully. “Unless whatever they were doing was something the Hunters wanted wiped from the face of the earth. Abuse?”

  The corner of Took’s mouth tilted in a rueful grimace. “No. That would just be… leverage, even if they touched up a Hunter kid. They would have drained them dry of anything useful and gotten rid of them quietly.”

  The door creaked open and the cat slunk in, all carefully placed paws and belly low to the ground. It gave Madoc a distrustful side-eye on the way past and then scaled one of the bookshelves so it could tuck itself into a loaf and watch them from a height.

  It should have been bled out and gotten rid of in a sack. One way that Vine tracked rogue nests was through reports on missing pets. A handful of kittens were even easier prey than the frail or the weak and good enough for a just-Kissed vampire not yet ready the Hunt. Instead, here it was, alive and well.

  “Sometimes things don’t go to plan,” Madoc pointed out slowly as he worked his way through his sudden inspiration. “Maybe you’re right—maybe—and Waring didn’t work for the Hunters, not when he started, anyhow. So whatever they had planned for the Arons was interrupted by their murder. And Annabelle’s body was never found.”

  The flash of delight on Took’s face was one of the few things that had made his smart mouth tolerable, even before Madoc wanted to drown himself in it. As much of a showboat as Took could be about his wits, it delighted him when someone beat him to the end of a puzzle.

  “Maybe she’s not dead,” Took filled in for Madoc. He got up from his desk and paced around the room as he hunted through the filing cabinet and between books for something. “Damn it, where’d I put the—”

  The cat jumped down from the bookshelf in a smooth, long ripple of motion, like poured milk with eyes, and landed on soft paws. It padded across the room and shoulder checked the trash can. It fell over and Madoc saw the buff folder impatiently shoved in there.

  “You threw it out,” he said. The itch of irritation at the back of his throat surprised him a little. He did his job because he was good at it and because, a long time ago, he’d been told to do it. It had never occurred to him that he might take pride in it, perhaps because no one he cared about had ever insulted it before. “Are you sure you still work for VINE?”

  Took looked as though he would flush if he had the blood for it. He padded across the room and retrieved the file from the bin.

  “I was just frustrated,” he muttered as he brushed it off. “And Lawrence pissed me off.”

  “Why?”

  Took straightened the dog-eared corner of the file. “She’s not bad,” he admitted stiffly, the requisite faint praise before damnation. “But just because she still has a heartbeat doesn’t mean she understands Hunters. It doesn’t mean she understands people. She grew up with VINE bodyguards, had family with fangs. End of the day, she’s more Anakim than me.”

  The irritation took root in tight bands around the inside of his throat. “Maybe that was in her favor,” Madoc said coldly.

  “Yeah, well, it shouldn’t b
e,” Took fired back. “She missed stuff. Right from the start, no one could understand why people would answer the door to Waring. Lawrence dismissed it, said that the Anakim just saw a distressed young man and anyone would answer the door. We both know that’s not what you’d see.”

  The fact he was right—no Anakim, not even ones with only a decade fanged under their belt, would see a stranger unannounced at their door as anything but a threat—didn’t settle Madoc’s hackles at all. Took was the one who’d left, who’d walled himself off behind red tape and a refusal to speak to anyone on the team. He didn’t get to sneer at Lawrence, who never wanted to be anywhere else.

  “And you?” Madoc asked. “What would you see?”

  Took’s laugh was harsh and as full of mockery as a guard dog’s bark. “Monsters,” he said as he pulled a piece of paper out of the folder and slapped it against Madoc’s chest. “What else is there that knocks on your door at night. If you’re right about Annabelle, though, you better prepare your protege for worse criticism than a file in the garbage.”

  “Why”

  “Because she’s not the only body they never found,” Took said. “If she’s still alive, then the missing children could be too. The minute the Haza realize that, the case is open again, and she’ll be first in line to be gutted by the press.”

  By the end of the statement, some of the sharp glee had gone from Took’s voice. They had all been on the end of bad press from one side or another over the years. The satisfaction remained. This was what, after all, he’d wanted. The case reopened, of course, but mostly the satisfaction that Took had been right and everyone else had been wrong.

  “Waring is still guilty in this theory of yours,” Madoc said grimly. “At the end, when the children turn up dead or in pieces, he’ll still be executed. All this does is give people a handful of false hope, solve your puzzle, and maybe ruin Lawrence’s career.”

  The flash of guilt over Took’s face was enough to confirm he had no real hope that his investigation would exonerate Waring. It was just enough to paper a good cause over his obsession with the puzzle and soothe his conscience.

  And the worst of it was that Madoc’s frustrated anger made no difference to the sweet ache in his heart when he looked at Took. He’d always known that Took could be a self-interested, self-righteous fool, that he’d pull everything down for his own satisfaction. That just didn’t matter as much as his loyalty and ready humor and the easy charm that lit his face when he smiled.

  “It looks like your flirting isn’t the only thing that got rusty,” Madoc said. He glanced at the sheet of paper that Took had handed him. The names of the missing children marched down the page, from Anatoly to Yvette. He knew that Took was right. The smallest chance to bring these children—alive, undead, or just at rest—home to their families, and Madoc had to take it. “Your morals need freshening up too. But at least if VINE reopens this case, we won’t need any help from an independent contractor.”

  That last point caught Took on the raw where the morals jab had only made him wince. He scowled. “I’m better than Lawrence,” he said. “We both know it.”

  Madoc grabbed Took by the T-shirt, hand twisted in the worn cotton, and yanked him close enough that he could smell the fresh-scrubbed skin and the lemon of his soap.

  “You understand monsters,” he said through fully extended fangs. The pulse of blood in his ears made the smoke curl hot and dry in the cavity of his heart and hang heavy in the air. He’d put upstart boyars on their knees with his power before, made them show throat so he could shred his master’s tithe from their veins. Part of him knew he would regret this later, when the anger faded and the edges of that broken trust cut deep. The scars on Took’s skin drew the eye, but Madoc had lived long enough to know that the deepest scars were the ones you didn’t see. Regrettably, his temper had never cared for foresight, and his voice snarled out of his throat. “That doesn’t make you better than her. It makes you broken.”

  Took barked out a harsh laugh. “Do you think I don’t know that?”

  Despite the bluster, his gaze flickered nervously across Madoc’s face, to his eyes and then nervously down again. Madoc waited with a quietly grim satisfaction for Took to backtrack.

  Instead Took kissed him.

  Madoc wasn’t sure which of them was more surprised. It was rough and eager, with Took’s hand cupped at the back of Madoc’s neck and his compact body pressed against Madoc’s.

  He should pull away. It was too sudden and too caught up in the ever-more-divisive Waring case to be anything but ill-considered. If he didn’t, there would be no way to back down from it, no more patience with Took’s slow recovery or sly reserve. If they did this and Took withdrew again—turned Madoc away at the door like an unwanted bastard with a hungry belly—there would be no kindness left in Madoc for either of them.

  So he should close his mouth, step back, and push Took’s lean, soap-fresh body away. The excuse would ring flat—Madoc already knew that—but they’d live with it. They had before. All you needed to do was emphasize the unexpected in “that was unexpected” or downplay the hot awkwardness of a kiss in New Orleans on drinks, blood, and relief that a bad case had wrapped up. It just took commitment.

  Instead Madoc growled into the sweetness of the kiss and dragged Took closer. He had been good. He’d played by the rules he’d set himself and tried to keep his distance. And it had gotten him nothing but frustration and lonely nights, an ache in his balls, a hole in his heart, and everyone’s careful, well-meaning advice about how “fragile” Took was.

  It was enough. He either wanted Took back or he wanted to let this thing between them burn out completely. No matter who it took with them.

  As one last sop to his conscience as he leaned back, his throat parched with hunger for one more breath of Took, he asked, “Are you sure you want this?”

  He supposed that, technically, Took’s snort as he pulled him back into a kiss wasn’t an answer. But it would have to do.

  Chapter Nine

  TWICE. IN the months—years now, he supposed—since he crawled out of that box, he’d gotten this far with someone twice. Eager mouths and rough hands over clothes, shoulder blades pressed against a wall and fingers twisted in his hair.

  Then he’d find his mouth on their neck, taste the bloom of hot blood under the skin as he worried at the tender flesh, and he’d recoil. his hand on the back of their neck, thumb against the base of their spine, and right there at the front of his brain, the dark, poisoned knowledge of how easy those delicate, human bones would be to snap.

  That was usually enough to throw cold water over the evening, as whatever was left of him that was human shriveled at the slide toward monster. He hadn’t been celibate this long since he was fifteen and decided he didn’t give a damn what his family thought of him.

  Madoc’s lips were cool under Took’s mouth, his breath still flavored with smoke where the ruin of the Aron house lingered in his mouth. Took could be gentle and graze his fingers along the sharp bones of his jaw, the slow growth of stubble just long enough to prickle against his fingertips, or he could push Madoc back against the wall hard enough to rattle the bookcase next to them and not worry that he’d kill him.

  He chose both and buried his hands in Madoc’s hair, the clipped nap of it like velvet under his touch as they stumbled into the wall. He worked his knee between Madoc’s legs, the heavy jut of a cock hard against his thigh, and his tongue between the sharp, ivory sickles of Madoc’s extended fangs. He didn’t even feel the sharp edges cut his lips until a second later, when the familiar taste of his own black blood filled his mouth.

  Fangs had taken him a while to get used to, more or less.

  He hesitated for a second, his bloody tongue curled behind his own teeth, as he foggily tried to work out what the etiquette was. The mechanics of sex between humans and vampires was something he’d spent, maybe, a little more time on that he could really explain away as just work. What exactly two vampires did today
had never seemed relevant, personally or professionally.

  Did their blood taste good….

  Madoc growled into his mouth. The sound vibrated through the bones of Took’s skull and didn’t read as human at all. A misfire of whatever atavistic impulse should have made Took pull back but instead shivered hot, electric delight down his spine and into his balls. Madoc gripped the back of Took’s neck, fingers cupped around the curve of his skull, and chased the taste of Took between his lips and over his tongue.

  That answered that question. Maybe he should write a paper on it for the Academy—the normal courting behavior of the undead? That serial killer in Montana who’d turned out to be Anakim, some of his patterns could have—

  Madoc bit Took’s lip neatly, a sharp nip with blunt teeth that folded the soft flesh. The little jolt of pain focused Took’s mind back in the ache of the present. “No.” He licked the last drops of blood from the razor-thin cuts on Took’s lips and pulled back slightly. “No thoughts. No plans. Just be here.”

  Took licked his lips and wondered if it tasted the same—like bitter honey—to Madoc. Or what Madoc’s blood would feel like on his tongue.

  “Make me.”

  Heat flashed through Madoc’s dark eyes. It was as much anger as lust, but Took didn’t care. He wanted to feel safe. Nothing could erase the scars that kept him up during the day and restless and unmoored at night because of his fear of what was in the dark. But maybe Madoc could convince him, for a few hours, that there was no monster in the dark inside Took. Or at least if there was, that it wasn’t one Madoc had to be afraid of.

  Even if Madoc is the monster?

  Took wasn’t sure if that was a jab at his frustration or his lust. He didn’t have time to decide. A foot hooked around his ankle and tugged and both of them toppled to the floor in a tangle of heat, denim, and tangled limbs. The question was lost in a blur of lust and rough, careless kisses that slanted across mouths and down to the jaw. Half foreplay and half tussle, one minute a kiss pressed wet and openmouthed against Took’s collarbone made him groan, and the next he rolled his hip to flip Madoc under him.