He took back the piece of paper he had given to me and crumpled it up in his fist. “No one said you weren’t good enough,” he said stiffly.
Suddenly I felt terrible. He had been trying to do a nice thing for me. God dammit, he must’ve gone out of his way to persuade the chief about this and it can’t have been easy given that I was not even a real member of Agency staff. I crossed my arms over my chest. “Look, it was really nice of you to think about me but —”
“Forget it,” he said shortly. “You said you wanted to tell me something?”
I had been pacing back and forth with increasing agitation throughout our previous exchange. Now I took a seat, hoping this would set a more professional mood, if at all possible following my outburst.
I cleared my throat. I knew that Storm was not going to like what I had to say. “I went to visit Steffane Ronin in prison yesterday.”
“You what?” He looked a bit stunned as if he thought I was making an unpleasant joke.
Before he had a chance to recover I told the rest of the story quickly, filling him in on all the details except the part about Ronin telling me that he sensed we were dark creatures alike. I didn’t need Storm to know about that.
When I was finished Storm’s face was thunderous. “Aside from the fact that you went to visit Steffane Ronin when I specifically told you to leave this case alone, putting yourself in danger—”
“I was careful,” I interjected, flushing slightly at my lie.
The hell had I been careful. I had forgotten immediately to never look a vampire in the eye. Not that it had mattered in the end. But it could have gone seriously wrong. My throat under his fangs wrong. Willingly letting him drain me dry wrong. I doubt he’d had fresh blood in six years. He might have done it, unable to help himself. It was not like they could punish him worse than they already were.
“Let me tell you in clear terms. This. Case. Is. Closed.” His words were clipped and harsh. “I did not hire you to re-open shut cases. We tolerate vampires in London only so long as they never kill. They can take as many blood-slaves as they like so long as they are willing and kept healthy. There is nothing we can do about willing victims who are of age, even if they are under the mesmeric influence. But the second they kill a human we lock them up and throw away the key. That is how it works.”
“What if he never killed her? Her body went missing before an autopsy could be done. Wasn’t that weird?”
“She was in a sealed room with Ronin. And the girl’s aunt testified that the girl had been terrified that Ronin wanted to claim her as one of his sheep. That was pretty much all that the jury needed to hear.”
“Leonie,” I said. “Her name was Leonie.”
“I know,” he said through gritted teeth. “I saw her. It wasn’t easy to forget.”
“You said you worked this case. Did you have any doubts?”
The briefest expression of something flashed across Storm’s face. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it was not quite doubt.
“Steffane Ronin was in his sealed crypt bedroom with the murder victim,” he said. “The door was made of stone and a foot thick. Nobody could have got into there once he had locked it from the inside. The walls were several feet thick and there were no windows. There was nobody in the room but him and the deceased. There is no way anyone else did it.”
“Then why do I feel like he is telling the truth?”
“So this is just a feeling of yours? Not an actual vision?” Storm looked even more frustrated.
“Does it matter? What harm is there in me looking into it? If it is true then we can free him and he will tell us who DCK is. If he was lying at least it looks like we tried to help him and maybe he will still give us some useful information. It is a win-win!”
Storm rubbed his forehead with one hand. “He is playing you. I don't know why. Maybe it is just boredom. Six years is a long time to be locked away, even for a vampire.”
“Then how did he know about DCK killing my mother? Only you, Remi, Leo and Monroe know that Magda was my mother.”
Even saying those words out loud twisted me up a little inside. It was hard to acknowledge out loud that Magda had been my mother. I never got the chance to know her. DCK took her from me in the most brutal way possible and left her corpse for me to find. The bastard. Every time I thought of this I wanted to kill him. I wanted to strangle him with my bare hands. I wanted to do to him what he did to her. Wanted him to feel the pain and the god-awful fear of being at the mercy of a monster.
“And the chief,” I added. “He knows too. Are you saying that any of them would have told someone?”
“No,” he said immediately. “They would never do that.”
“I agree,” I said. “They would never do that, so how did Ronin know?”
Everyone who knew that Magda was my mother had feared for my safety. They thought that DCK would come for me too because it would amuse him to kill mother and daughter. Because he was a monster who liked to play sordid games. I knew better.
Before she had died, Magda had warned me that my navelstone — Godstone, she had called it — was too powerful to fall into the wrong hands. She had been convinced that DCK had been hunting me so that he could get his hands on the stone. I couldn’t imagine why. All I knew about the stone was that it had the power to heal me overnight when I was injured. And recently it seemed to vibrate whenever the urge to kill got too strong inside me. But that was not enough reason for DCK to search the Earth for me like Magda had thought, was it?
Magda had thought the stone could be used as a force for good. I have no idea why she thought that. Sometimes I wondered if the urge to kill that overcame me, making me feel like an addict in need of a fix, was emanating from the stone. As time went by the need for a fix was increasingly becoming an obsession. I needed it bad. And that was why I needed to find DCK before I went out of control and killed someone I shouldn’t. I needed to deal with him. And maybe after that the stone would calm the heck down and give me some peace.
If Storm could hear my thoughts he really would think I was crazy. Thinking that my weird navelstone had desires and feelings of its own. Thinking that it was the reason I wanted to kill something or someone.
“We don’t know how Ronin knew, but we can try to find out,” Storm said reassuringly.
“C’mon!” I chided him. “Ronin must have found out that Magda was my mother directly from DCK himself. It would make sense that a serial killing maniac like DCK might be friends with a dhampir like Ronin. Ronin was rich, powerful and had a fabulous life. Probably just the sort of guy that DCK would befriend. Even a monster must have friends.”
Storm shook his head. “You can’t imagine the trouble that Ronin’s mesmeric influence gave us with the jury during the trial. The guy is a master game player. He knows that you want to believe him, and that’s why his game is working. He is a selfish man who’s been locked away for six years, Diana. He wouldn’t have sat on information he knew we wanted badly for all that time. If he really knew anything he would have traded it in for a few luxuries a long time ago.”
“Not if he is innocent. He would be going insane trapped in there if he is innocent. He wouldn't give away his most powerful bargaining chip for anything less than his freedom.”
Storm sighed. “I don't know how to get through to you, Diana. The chief and the Agency will never sign up on you pursuing this case. The Ronin family are the most powerful vampire family in London. Steffane’s father, Gaius Ronin is a friend of the mayor. Gaius Ronin had political ambitions of his own before his son sullied the family name. But they are still a well-connected and wealthy family. We can’t mess with them on a whim.”
“So you’re saying don’t mess with the status quo. They’re too rich so we can’t upset them?”
“I’m saying we will get DCK some other way. And as your boss, I expect you to back off this case. I don't want to hear anything more about it.”
Boss-smosh, I felt like saying, But I knew it would
not get me anywhere. I took a deep breath. If this was any other case I might have thought that Storm was right. I had no real reason to believe that Ronin was innocent after all. I’d had no visions.
“Fine,” I told him. “I understand.”
The hell I did. But I wasn’t about to tell him that.
Chapter 7
DIANA
As I made my way out of Storm’s office I saw that Remi had arrived at work. Her desk was just outside of Storm’s office. Her back was to me as she took off her jacket, but that tall lithe figure and her abundant dark red hair pulled back into a braid was unmistakable. Hearing my footsteps she turned, and then grinned when she saw it was me.
“Hey early bird,” she said. “I got you this.” She handed me a tall paper cup with a hot drink inside. It was full to the brim and she’d had to wrap her napkin around it to catch the drips. The aroma rising from it told me it was a steaming hot chai latte, my absolute favorite.
I accepted it gratefully. “Thanks Remi. You’re the best. But you took a risk there. It might have been stone cold by the time I usually arrive.”
“I thought you might be in early today,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.
“Oh yeah?” I raised an eyebrow. “You know I love my sleep too much to drag my carcass out of bed early except on special occasions.”
She waggled a finally arched dark brow. “Maybe today is a special occasion.” Her eyes flicked for the briefest moment towards Storm in his office.
Storm had been away for a whole week. She thought I’d missed him. “Shut up!” I said, tossing my crumpled wet napkin at her.
She snatched it out of midair before it had a chance to hit her shirt, and laughed as I walked away. Damn her. She thought I had a crush on Storm. She thought that just because he’d been away I had been pining for him. As if!
So I’d missed him. That was perfectly normal. So it had been driving me crazy that I had no clue why he suddenly took a week off out of the blue, as if he had to attend to a private matter. Yes, I didn’t like that he had private matters that took him away. And yes, I wished I knew why the hell he had gotten sloppy drunk the other night to the extent that he had actually ended up in my bed. And yes, it was goddamn annoying that he had refused to tell me why he had lost control of himself like that.
Gaaargh. So I had major feelings for Storm. But I would never call it a crush. Crush was such an insipid and ludicrous word. I did not have crushes and she had better well not be thinking that I did, dammit.
And just because I might or might not have feelings for perfect Mr Storm, or not so perfect as it turned out, didn’t mean that I was going to jump to attention at his say-so. If he thought that he could order me about he had got another think coming.
I hadn’t lied when I told him I understood his problem with reopening the Ronin case. I did understand. I understood my problem too. I had to get to goddamn DCK one way or another and scratch my little killer itch before it got out of control. Storm had made it clear that his hands were tied. But mine weren’t.
And maybe it was better if I handled this one on my own. It meant that Storm couldn’t get in my way when I finally got my hands on DCK. It meant I wouldn’t accidentally launch into full blown killer mode around him, and that he had to never know what I was. When this was all over, one day in the future, all I wanted was a peaceful life. Preferably with Storm.
The rest of the working day was going to drag for me. I was peeved about it. Storm was paying me after all, and I couldn’t just walk out because I had other things on my mind. I had to give him something for his money. But mostly it was the thought of Zezi that kept me going. I had persuaded her mother to allow me to come and see the bedroom that she had once slept in today.
Even though Mrs Shahidi had insisted that none of Zezi’s belongings were there, I hoped I might pick up a feeling or vision. Mrs Shahidi had refused to allow me to visit the house while her other kids were there, saying that she hadn’t wanted to rile up all of those old and disturbing feelings for her kids again. She hadn’t wanted to give them false hope.
When I got to the house Mrs Shahidi was waiting for me. She thrust an old dusty plastic bag into my hands. “I found it under the floorboards,” she said excitedly. And then she began to pace with great agitation, wringing her hands. “I was tidying her old room and it was there. I knew it! It was the goblins. It was that horrible boy she went to school with. She kept it a secret from me!” She looked baffled and upset.
The contents of the bag turned out to be a diary that Zezi had kept. She had written all of her diary entries as letters addressed to the so-called horrible boy, one Finch Greyiron.
“He’s a goblin!” Mrs Shahidi shouted. “I told him to stay away from my girl. I told him, but he wouldn’t listen.” She sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands and started to cry.
I sat down beside her and put my arm around her until she stopped crying. I made her a cup of tea and drank it with her and let her talk to me about Zezi before I left. I knew she hadn’t spoken about Zezi to anyone else but me in a long time.
Afterwards I went to a café to scan through the diary, not wanting to read it in front of Mrs Shahidi. The contents were unexpected. They made me decide it was a good idea to find Finch Greyiron immediately. By the time I finally tracked down his current whereabouts and made his neighbor promise to tell Finch to call me, it was already past 6:00 pm and time for me to call it a day.
I would normally have kept going, unable to rest once I was on the scent, but today I had bigger and more personal things on my mind. After all, I hoped Zezi was only missing, but even if she had been dead, no killer was as important to me as DCK.
I had already looked up the address of the Ronin nest. I couldn’t allow the fact that it was a rich man’s mansion deceive me into forgetting it was a vampire nest. I couldn’t go there unprepared.
Steffane Ronin’s mesmerism might not have worked on me, but that didn’t mean that the same would be true of the other vampires in the brood. They would be pure-blooded vampires rather than dhampirs. It was interesting though that he was a dhampir, that rare and almost mythical of things. I was so curious that looking it up was the first thing I planned to do when I got home.
But first I had to make a pit stop at Grimshaw’s. The bell rang as I let myself in, and I found Theo in the back section of the shop behind the counter, his head bent over his ledger as he updated it. He looked up when he heard me, and smiled as if pleased to see me.
“Diana!” he said. “What brings you here? I wasn’t expecting you.”
Clearly he was distracted by whatever he was writing because his head was already bent over the ledger again and his round spectacles had slid down his nose. His brown hair had a dash of gray at the temples, and he pretty much always wore a tweed suit that looked surprisingly good on him. If you saw Theo walking down a street you would think he was an upper-class English gentleman, and never guess that he was a wizard.
“Hey Teddy bear.” I went over to the counter opposite him and leaned my elbows onto it as I watched him scrawl his neat little notes.
“Everything all right?” he said distractedly.
“Do you sell truth serum?”
That did get his attention. His eyebrows shot up towards his hairline. “Most certainly not. Why did you want it?”
“Oh, you know me,” I said casually. “I’m always on the hunt for murderers. Truth serum would be a handy tool in my kit.”
“You’ve never asked for it before.”
“I’ve never interviewed vampires before.”
“I see.” Theo pushed his glasses up his nose and eyed me thoughtfully.
Theo’s knowledge of magic and otherkind was expansive and varied. He knew that it helped me to sense things about the people that I was interviewing if I was able to touch them. And he had probably already figured out that I wanted the truth serum because I wasn’t sure how I felt about getting within touching distance of a vampire.
&nbs
p; He pursed his lips, and then said mildly, “I’m not sure you want to be associating with vampires.”
“This vampire knows who killed Magda.” I explained my conversation with Steffane Ronin to him.
When I finished Theo looked a mixture of both understanding and pained, no doubt because he knew that nothing was going to sway me from my current course of action.
He tried, bless him.
“I’m not sure that your compulsion to hunt down this Devil Claw Killer is entirely healthy,” he said. “This man is a monster experienced in his savagery. You can’t seriously think that you’re going to be able to kill him?”
Theo knew all about my compulsion for killing. I had been forced to tell him everything in the hopes that he might be able to help me from going out of control. We had made a pact that if it came down to it and I did have to kill someone, I must absolutely make sure that they were truly guilty.
Psychic for Hire Series Box Set Page 74
