Heart of Fire

by Lisa Edmonds

  “And coffee?” I asked hopefully.

  He kissed the tip of my nose. “I already made some. I’ll put it in a travel mug.”

  I could get used to this.

  With Northbourne still surrounded by protesters, the vamps were holding Ravell at a private residence belonging to Charles. We took Sean’s company SUV and drove past Hawthorne’s on the way.

  When we turned onto the street where Charles’s retail lofts were located, I gasped. The explosion and resulting fire had gutted about a third of the block. It was hard to tell what had been destroyed in the initial explosion and what had been lost due to fire, but there was nothing left whatsoever of Hawthorne’s or the offices above it. How the subbasements had fared, I couldn’t tell, but I was guessing not well. The feds had put up a tall chain-link fence around the entire building and investigators in coveralls combed through the ruins.

  “It’s not nearly as bad as it could have been,” Sean said, covering my hand with his. “The explosion was near the front of the building. They saved most of the apartments. No one died, or was even seriously injured, except you.”

  I was relieved to hear it, but seeing the blackened ruin that was all that was left of the bar left me shaken. I pulled my hand out of Sean’s and crossed my arms as we continued down the street. “I wonder if the vamps have any leads.”

  “From what I understand from Bryan Smith, the van was spotted by traffic cams leaving the scene. The police located it about an hour later, on fire. Apparently, it had been stolen earlier in the evening.”

  “No help there, then,” I said with a sigh. “Unless someone takes credit for the bombing, it’s going to be hard to catch whoever was behind it.”

  My phone rang. Lake Calling. I swiped the screen and put the phone to my ear. “This is Alice.”

  “Alice.” Lake sounded relieved. “I’ve been calling. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I lost my phone and it took some time to get a replacement.” All true, as far as it went.

  “You heard about the bombing at Hawthorne’s last night?”

  “Yes. I just drove past and saw the damage. I hope they find the bastards who did it.”

  “Were you at Hawthorne’s yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “Were you in the area last night at all?”

  On the off chance my car had been identified on traffic cams in the area, I said, “Yes. I was visiting a friend who lives in the Heights. I drove past at around ten, I think. The bar was closed.”

  A pause. “I was on the scene earlier today. It looks like there was someone trapped in the bar after the explosion, someone who got out by blasting their way through a large pile of debris.”

  “It wasn’t me. I already told you I wasn’t there.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Lake said, his voice frosty. “I think you’re lying, but I’m not sure why.”

  Beside me, Sean’s eyes blazed. The steering wheel creaked under his hands.

  “You’re free to think what you want,” I said. “But no matter how many times you ask me, the answer will be the same: I wasn’t there.”

  “Then where were you?” he demanded.

  “Good-bye, Lake.” I disconnected.

  “For a man who’s trying to get into your pants, I think he’s going about it the wrong way,” Sean observed, in a far more mild tone than I was expecting considering how white his knuckles were.

  I shook my head. “No matter what he thinks or says, he’s a fed first. That’s never going to change.”

  That was the realization I’d come to yesterday, sometime between Lake’s departure from my house and when I’d answered Sean’s call at Hawthorne’s. Despite our mutual attraction, the hard truth was I’d never be able to be myself around Lake for more than a few minutes at a time, and I’d be in a perpetual state of fear that he would figure out I wasn’t who I claimed to be. It would be exhausting and miserable, and it would end badly. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt—I did like him, and Lake was a good guy underneath all that fed.

  “If he decides to push it, I’ll vouch for your whereabouts,” Sean said.

  I patted his hand. “I appreciate the offer of perjury, but I doubt it’ll come to that.”

  Our quick stop for burgers turned into a mild argument when Sean insisted I attempt to eat a double cheeseburger and a large order of waffle fries. I managed about a third of the burger and half of the fries. Sean grumbled but finished off my food.

  The house we were visiting was north of the city, only five miles or so from Northbourne. The gate swung open as we pulled up and Sean followed a long, winding driveway that ended in front of a sprawling mansion. We parked next to two other black SUVs and got out.

  My boots had come out of the fire looking battered but were still wearable, thankfully. I had on the change of clothes from my go-bag, which was a green long-sleeved shirt and jeans. I had no shoulder bag anymore, so my phone was in my pocket and Sean had loaned me a Maclin Security jacket to go over my holster.

  When we reached the front steps, the door opened, revealing the enforcer who had accompanied Adam to Felicia’s apartment and escorted me to my meeting with the Vamp Court. “Ms. Worth,” he said. “Mr. Maclin.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Fortune.”

  “Is that a first or last name?”

  He smiled. “Just Fortune.”

  Alrighty then. “Is Adri here?”

  He stepped aside and we walked into the house. I felt a pang when I realized the interior reminded me of Charles’s now-destroyed offices above Hawthorne’s: dark wood, low light, and expensive antiques. Even if I hadn’t known the house belonged to Charles, I would have been able to guess. To our right was an enormous living room with couches, cushions, and a high vaulted ceiling. In the back, a grand piano rested on a raised platform. I wondered if Charles played.

  “Alice.” I turned at the sound of Adri’s voice. She was walking toward us down a hall, in her customary all-black attire. “I’m glad to see you’ve recovered.”

  “How’s our guest?”

  She smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile. “He’s delightful. He’s only threatened to rape me twice.”

  Sean made a deep rumbly noise.

  “No surprise there,” I said. “The first time I met him, he was robbing a girl and trying to rape her. Someone should teach him some manners.”

  “I would love to do so, but our instructions were not to touch him until you arrived.” She glanced at Sean. “Mr. Maclin. If you’ll both follow me.”

  Adri led us down the hall, with Fortune behind us. I could tell Sean didn’t like the enforcer at his back, but we were in vamp territory and it was their playground, their rules.

  At the end of the hall, we stopped at a heavy door and Adri entered a code. The door opened and we stepped into what looked like a conference room, except one wall had a large one-way mirror. In the room beyond, a wiry young man was sprawled in a chair, his leg outstretched, arms crossed over his chest.

  As we entered the observation room, he was calling out, “Send that tall bitch back in here. I’ll let her blow me, if she says please.”

  “Cocky little shit, isn’t he,” Adri said as Fortune closed the door to the hallway. “Most people would at least be a little intimidated by being kidnapped off a street corner and chained in a soundproof room.”

  “If he’s on Haze, he’s too high to be scared.” I walked up to the window to get a good look at him.

  Ravell’s right ankle was cuffed to the leg of the chair and the chair was bolted to the floor. The room was otherwise bare, except for metal rings embedded in the walls, ceiling, and floor, and cameras in the corners. There was a six-inch drain in the floor, not far from the chair.

  I’d spent a lot of time in rooms like the one Ravell was in and buckets of my blood had gone down drains like that one. I’d learned how to get what you want from someone who doesn’t want to give it. An icy calmness settled over me.

/>   “You gonna ask him nicely first?” Adri asked.

  I eyed Ravell. Defiance oozed out of every pore. He was too high to appreciate the danger he was in and too much of a misogynist to respect anything I had to say. Mark was dead and the city was tearing itself apart. “I’m not really in the mood to ask nicely, and I don’t think it would do any good anyway.”

  Adri arched an eyebrow, reminding me of her vampire boss. “So how do you want to play it?”

  I slipped out of the jacket and put it on the table. I took the holster off my belt and my phone out of my pocket and set them down next to the jacket.

  I glanced at Sean. He gave me a nod.

  “Give me five minutes,” I said.

  When I walked into the room, Clint Ravell looked me over with blatant lust, his eyes traveling from my chest down to my boots and back again. “Damn, girl,” he said, his gaze on my breasts. “You ain’t the tall one, but you can come give me a ride.” Then he looked up at my face and froze.

  “Surprise.” I lashed out with my cold-fire whip.

  My aim was precise. The bright green lash caught him around the throat and he screamed. He reached up to grab the coil of fire and let go quickly when it burned his fingers.

  “I have some questions,” I said conversationally. “The faster and more truthfully you answer them, the sooner I walk back out of here. If you lie to me, I will separate your head from your body. Are we clear?”

  “Yes!” he screeched.

  “Good. Where are Jake Travers and John Andrews?”

  “I don’t know!” I tightened the whip and he shrieked. “I don’t know!” he repeated frantically. “They disappeared yesterday. I’ve been calling and texting and they’re just gone. Check my phone—you’ll see.”

  “Where would they go if they were hiding?”

  “I don’t know! Fuck…Jake has a sister, Hailey. Maybe he went there. John’s got a girlfriend named Amy.”

  “Amy who?”

  “Amy Curry! Jesus, God…”

  “What about their other friends? Give me names.”

  Half-sobbing, he rattled off five or six names.

  “What did they have to do with killing that man they said they found in the alley?”

  He frowned at me. “The guy the vampires killed?” Another shriek. “Nothing! They were walking past the alley and they saw some assholes dumping the body.”

  I kept my face blank. “Tell me.”

  “They saw two men unload a body wrapped in plastic out of this blue van and then leave it in the alley. After the van drove off, they went over to see if the dude had any money. They took his ring but they couldn’t get to his wallet because they didn’t want to leave fingerprints. Then they saw the fanghead bite and knew it was gonna be a big fucking deal so they called the cops.”

  “They’re a couple of drug dealers. Why did they call it in?”

  “They’ve got cases pending.” His nose was running and he wiped it on his sleeve. “They thought if they could tell the cops about the van, it would help with their cases. Jake got part of the plate number. The cop said he’d talk to the D.A., get their charges dismissed. They told him everything and the cop let them walk out.”

  “Which cop?”

  “I don’t know! They didn’t say.”

  It all had the unmistakable ring of truth, which meant Detective Brody had falsified his report and omitted any mention of the van, its occupants, and its license plate. I thought back to the mystery vehicle that tailed Mark from the liquor store, the one that looked like an unmarked police car. Was it Brody behind the wheel? Was he somehow involved with the harnad?

  Speaking of: “Do you work for the harnad?”

  “What the fuck is a harnad?”

  “What do you know about the missing women from the Stroll?”

  “Nothing, I swear,” he said and I believed him.

  “What do your friends know about it?”

  “They never said nothin’ to me about it, ’cept we all figured it’s the vamps doing it.” Ravell looked up at me, tears streaking his face. “Lady, we sell drugs, we use drugs. We bust heads for our supplier when he needs somebody to collect debts. We don’t kill nobody.”

  “Who’s your supplier?”

  He stared at me. I tightened the whip, and he shrieked, “Rat Boy! Rat Boy!”

  “He sounds like a great guy. If I hear about you doing anything I don’t like in the future, I’m going to find Rat Boy and tell him you’re a snitch.”

  He blanched.

  “Is there anything you’d like to add, Clint? Anything you can think of that might help me find your boys?”

  “No!”

  I released him. His neck was bloody and blistered but he’d live. I turned and headed for the door.

  Of course, he couldn’t resist saying one last stupid thing. “Cunt,” he spat at me.

  I turned and lashed with my whip. It cut through the crotch of his jeans and sliced right through the seat of the metal chair. His scream was impressively loud and high-pitched.

  I walked over and bent down so I could look him in the eye. “What did we learn today about what happens when you call women disrespectful names?”

  He stared at me, his eyes like saucers. It looked like the Haze had pretty much worn off, and he was mewling.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” I said, walking away. “I’m sure that will only take a couple of weeks to heal. You might even be able to have sex again someday.”

  Behind me, he started screaming curses.

  The door beeped and opened as I approached. Fortune and another male enforcer I didn’t recognize stepped into the room.

  “He’s got a boo-boo,” I said.

  I might have been imagining it, but I thought Fortune’s buddy looked a little green. He must be new to working for the Court. I found it extremely hard to believe the little bloodletting I’d just done was anything close to the worst thing that had happened in this room in the past week alone. Despite its clean appearance, my magic told me the floor, walls, and ceiling had seen a lot of blood.

  “We’ll take it from here, Ms. Worth,” Fortune said. They moved aside to let me pass and then closed the door behind me.

  Sean and Adri waited for me in the observation room. Adri gave me a thumbs-up. “I like your style,” she said. “Get in, get the answers, get out. Very efficient.”

  Sean leaned against the conference table, arms crossed. “There was nothing in the police report about a blue van.”

  “There sure wasn’t, which I find extremely interesting. It would appear Tweedledee and Tweedledumb stumbled upon Mark’s body being dumped in the alley and tried to use what they saw to their advantage. Who wants to bet the detective who faked their statements called the harnad before he let them go?”

  “If that’s the case, I doubt we’ll be seeing them again,” Sean said. “The harnad has already proven they don’t let potential witnesses go free for very long.”

  Behind me, the loud cursing cut off abruptly. I glanced through the window just in time to see Fortune tuck a used spell crystal in his pocket. He’d apparently used a sleep spell to knock Ravell out.

  “We’ve got some leads to check out.” I glanced at Adri. “We need a deep dig on a Major Crimes detective named Brody: financials, phone calls, the works.”

  “I’ll get Kim Dade on it,” she told me. “Anything else?”

  “Addresses for Jake’s sister Hailey and John’s girlfriend Amy, and whatever you can find on the rest of those jokers he named in case neither of those leads pan out.”

  “You got it. We’ll send them to your phone.”

  I jerked my head at the window to the concrete room, where Fortune and his partner were uncuffing the unconscious drug dealer. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “When the vampires rise, we’ll heal his neck and wipe his memory of the past twelve hours. Then he’ll be dropped off in a park with a headache and his pockets turned out. He’ll think he got robbed.”

  “So
he won’t remember any of this?”

  She shook her head.

  I made a face. “Damn, and here I thought I was making an important point he’d remember.”

  “He’ll probably wish he did remember what happened when he finds the damage you did to his junk. We’ll fix his neck. I see no reason to do more for him than that.”

  I raised my hand and she slapped me a high five. “Ow,” I said, shaking my hand to ease the sting.

  “Sorry,” she said, but she was grinning.

  22

  The missing vamps turned out to be a couple, Bartholomew and Victor, two of Charles’s line who owned a supe-oriented bed-and-breakfast overlooking the river north of the city. No one was sure when exactly they’d gone missing, since their staff was used to taking care of the guests and property without direct supervision from their undead bosses. Only after the vampires hadn’t been seen in three nights did the staff check on their lair and found it empty.

  Adri reported Charles could not reach either of them through their telepathic bond. He hadn’t felt their deaths, but if they’d died behind the wards, even their master wouldn’t have sensed it.

  The vamps were looking into Bart and Victor’s disappearance, so Sean and I focused on finding Travers and Andrews while we waited for Kim Dade to get us information about Detective Ian Brody.

  Kim had finished her analysis of West’s phone records and determined the calls made to and from the known cell phone were all business-related, which meant there had to be another phone we didn’t know about. She had dug around and hadn’t found any other number registered to either his business or home address. It was probably a burner phone—prepaid and virtually untraceable.

  Despite serious misgivings, I decided it was time to put a tracker on West’s car. Sean had a fancy new prototype he’d obtained from a “friend of a friend” who worked for a military contractor. It was unlikely to be noticed and almost impossible to detect, he assured me. We had to swing by Maclin Security to pick it up, and then we’d see about getting it onto West’s car.

  Adri was curious about the technical specs for the tracker, so as she and Sean were discussing it, I went outside to the SUV.