Killer's Gambit

by Hermione Stark

  Killer’s Gambit

  Diana Bellona Book 3

  by HERMIONE STARK

  Copyright © 2018 by Hermione Stark.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. The people, places and situations in this book are products of the author’s imagination and in no way reflect real or true events.

  Killer’s Gambit

  By HERMIONE STARK

  In order to catch one killer, she’s going to have to set another one free.

  Things are finally going well with Diana’s job at the Agency of Otherkind Investigations when notorious vampire Steffane Ronin asks for her help. Ronin is locked up in a super-max prison for killers of the magical kind. He was found in a sealed underground room in bed with his unwilling teenage victim, her body drained of blood. He’s definitely guilty, no matter how insistent his claims that he didn’t do it.

  Diana knows better than to trust a vampire, especially one who her psychic gifts don’t work on. Even more so one who her frustratingly handsome boss Agent Storm put away. But Ronin is offering the one thing that Diana cannot resist. In exchange for risking her job, her friendships and her life, he’ll tell her the secret identity of Devil Claw, the serial killer who murdered her mother. But first she has to prove his innocence.

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  Prologue

  Six Years Ago

  STORM

  Storm’s phone rang, dragging him out of sleep. He felt like he had slept for barely an hour but something about the ring tone was insistent and un-ignorable. Groaning, he reached for it and registered by the clock on the screen that it was 5:45 am London time. Which made it 9:45 pm in California. For a moment he panicked, thinking something must have happened back home. He answered quickly, saying, “Saskia?”

  “Where are you?” demanded a cranky voice on the other end. It was not Saskia. It was Supervisory Special Agent Cranning, Storm’s new boss.

  “Home, sir,” said Storm, trying his best not to yawn. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes. Where the hell else would he be at this time in the morning? He didn’t know whether to be glad that it was not Saskia, or mad that it was Cranning.

  Someone must be dead. Someone had better be dead for Cranning to be calling him at this insane hour. He’d had less than three hours sleep. Storm was the new guy on the team and the youngest - aged twenty-one - which meant he was the current dogsbody for the never-ending research and the late-night sitting-in-a-van-watching-an-old-lady-take-her-dog-for-a-shit-in-her-goblin-neighbor’s garden, better known as surveillance. Last night had been nothing so exciting. Last it had been report writing that had kept Storm up burning the midnight oil, documenting his team’s latest closed case; a territory dispute between two werewolf packs which had ended in arson. Cranning had delegated him that duty, telling him he wouldn’t mind working late since his body clock must still be on California time. Storm hadn’t bothered to tell him that a month after moving to London his body had happily adjusted to UK time thank you very much.

  “Get yourself in asap,” Cranning said now. “We’ve got a hot one.” Cranning sounded more sullen than excited. No doubt he wished the hot one had waited until well after breakfast.

  “To Headquarters?” Storm asked.

  “No,” said Cranning shortly. “I’ll send you the address. Make sure you’ve got all your gear. It’s the home of Gaius Ronin. We’ve received a call from the household - some sort of trouble with one of their brood.”

  Suddenly all of Storm’s sleepiness was gone. “The Ronin Ronin’s?” said Storm unable to keep the interest from his voice. The Ronins were a notorious Otherworld vampire brood. A slightly less notorious but no less famous offshoot of the family branch had settled in London and adopted a veneer of respectability. The patriarch had befriended no less a personage than the mayor of London and was rumored to have political aspirations himself.

  “Yes, the Ronin Ronins,” Cranning snapped. “Just get there.” He hung up.

  “No rest for the wicked,” Storm muttered, climbing out of bed. Faint light was creeping in through the fabric of his thin curtains. It was just about dawn outside. Why on Earth would vampires call law enforcement during the daylight hours? Heck, why would they call law enforcement at all?

  An hour later, as part of a team of six heavily armed Agents, Storm was creeping through dense woodland and past a cemetery towards the Ronin home. Nest, he supposed he should call it. The house was a sprawling and massive old mausoleum on the outskirts of London. When they got close enough they could see the front door was of heavily fortified iron and wood, and was inscribed with magical sigils. The team’s mage approached it first, but there was no need for her to break it down. It had been left open.

  Which was unexpected, especially for vampires.

  The team entered as quietly as ghosts, Storm bringing up the rear. The house was silent and dark. The Agents with their thick-soled boots made no sound as they rapidly infiltrated the house, spreading one-by-one through all the dark living spaces, weapons pointed ready for an attack. The weapons were guns with special bullets capable of slowing down a vampire.

  Storm made his way to the rear of the house but came across no suspects. Nobody was there but him. Storm’s ear piece did not even crackle - clearly none of the team had found anyone in the other rooms either. Storm came to a hallway at the back of the house which was as black as death. The tall windows had been painted over with thick black paint and hung with heavy curtains. They blocked out very sign that it was already dawn outside. Unsurprising in a vampire nest.

  Storm found the stairs leading to the basement. The team’s mage followed closely behind him, looking eerie in her night-vision anti-mesmerism goggles. Together they penetrated the basement and then the sub-basement. There they found a sobbing woman on her knees. She pointed a shaking finger down a long dark hallway.

  “My Leonie,” she whispered. “He took my Leonie, my niece.”

  The passageway had a smell of old stone and heavy earth. The ceiling was of vaulted stonework. They were in the crypts. Every doorway was sealed off like a burial chamber. This must be where the Ronins slept, if you could call it sleep.

  It was Storm who reached the chamber at the very end first, where the weeping woman had been pointing. The door was a thick slab of solid stone, its mass immovable even when Storm applied his shoulder and shoved it. And Storm was strong. Very strong. Which meant this was an old fashioned vampire’s door, like those they had in Otherworld. Those doors - once locked from the inside by the vampire using a special mechanism on the inner part of the door - could not be opened from the outside. The damn door was sealed like a tomb. It took three special blast spells from the mage’s wand to break it open.

  Storm and the mage looked in warily. Inside was a lavish bedroom with rich furnishings. At its center was a bed with gray silk sheets. On the bed was a dark-haired man, his mouth smeared in blood. He was sobbing. He was sitting in a mess of blood coming from the beautiful young woman beside him. She was naked, the curves of her body taut with youth. She was clearly dead.

  As Storm secured the suspect with sigil-inscribed restraints, he heard raised voices approaching along with scurry of scuffling footsteps outside. Cranning charged into the room. He looked delighted with what he saw; one of his team arresting a famous Ronin vampire.

  “Steffane Ronin,” Cranning said s
mugly. “You’re under arrest for murdering a human.”

  Ronin finally spoke, his voice quiet, seemingly with shock. “I didn’t do it.” The vampire fixed Storm with his glittering dark eyes. “It wasn’t me,” he insisted.

  Perhaps it was the mesmerism; Storm almost believed him.

  Chapter 1

  Present Day

  DIANA

  The Petrichor Club was one of those underground bars that you got in London where from the outside it looked like it was going to be some seedy underground pit, but once you got down there was surprisingly spacious and full of a heaving plethora of beautiful bodies drinking and dancing and having all kinds of fun.

  I was perched on a bar stool, sipping on a gin and tonic and biding my time. Between sips I tinkled the overly plentiful ice cubes in my glass with a long black cocktail tube that was too thin to be a straw and had me wondering what the heck its purpose in life was supposed to be. This gave me something to do between the coy peeks I was taking at a woman sitting on a stool at the far end of the bar.

  Like me, the woman was here alone. Like me she had turned away a string of men who had tried to buy her a drink. She had a sweet oval face, very pale, and short inky black hair that curled playfully around her lovely forehead and high rounded cheekbones. She was an absolute Madonna. The kind of rare beauty it was hard to keep your eyes off. And she was definitely returning my interest.

  When she caught my eye I quickly looked away, fluttering my eyelashes down towards my drink, playing the shy girl for all I was worth. I was dressed the part of a sweet little thing too. The frilly white cherry printed summer dress I was wearing came to just above my knees. I had left my pale hair loose, streaming like silk over my back, with only an alice band to hold it in place. I looked like I did not belong here, which was exactly what I had intended.

  The Madonna across the bar might be flirting, but I was not. Not unless you counted flirting with danger. I was excited. I sensed that she was about to take the hook that I’d been dangling at her for the past half hour. All the while I had had to make sure my interest in specifically her was not overly obvious. I sensed that would put her off immediately.

  I sensed it with my everyday normal intuition if you were wondering, not my psychic powers. Because this woman was a complete blank on my psychic radar and that was what had caught my attention about her in the first place. Ever since my friend and part-time employer, wizard Theo Grimshaw, had performed a powerful magical spell on me three weeks ago, my psychic gift had taken an unexpected turn towards the interesting.

  The spell had not worked the way it was supposed to, and a side-effect had been changes in my psychic ability that I was still getting used to. Before my psychic abilities had usually been somewhat vague feelings or smells or visions and dreams that I’d had to interpret, but now it is like I was surrounded with this constant background hum that was always everywhere around me. If I concentrated on it, I could tune into it and interpret what it seemed to be telling me. The only way I could explain it to Theo was that I could now hear the resonance of my psychic powers as if it was music. Most of the time it was such a quiet background hum that I forgot about it, but sometimes it became like a crashing crescendo of music. Not actual music, you understand?

  So anyway, without this new sense I might never have known that the Madonna at the bar was the only person in this place who might be able to help me to find my missing girl Zezi. Where everyone else in this place was letting off that same vague background hum that I had mentioned, which had not caused any prickles of alarm for me, the Madonna herself was a complete absence of sound or music to my psychic radar. It was like she was a void from which sound did not emerge. Which had got me aching to find out why, and whether she was doing it on purpose.

  I flashed a quick glance up at her again from beneath my eyelashes, and this time she smiled and crooked her index finger at me. It was like a command. She was fixing me with those big dark eyes of hers and clearly she expected me to obey. Interesting. I responded like a puppet pulled on a string and made my way over to her.

  “Hello, sweet pea,” she crooned, patting the empty stool beside her, which had just been vacated by some guy that she had batted her eyelashes at. The guy hovered for a few moments, but when neither of us paid him any attention he disappointedly took the hint and drifted off.

  “And what brings you here darling?” the Madonna said to me, and reached over to tuck a loosened strand of my hair behind my ear. The graze of her fingers on my cheek was cool and made me stiffen ever so slightly, as I realised something that I had not guessed from looking at her alone. The woman was a fucking vampire.

  I pretended I hadn’t noticed this. “Erm, well, you know, sometimes you have to live a little,” I said, my words hesitant with pretend shyness.

  She let out a tinkle of laughter and ordered me a stronger drink. “Here’s to living a little,” she said, clinking my glass against hers.

  I gulped my drink quickly and made sure to keep my eyes averted from hers except for brief glances. No wonder she had tried to fixate me with those big eyes of hers. Silly me for forgetting about vampire mesmerism. Not that she seemed to be using it on me yet. But if she did, no way was I going to be able to keep up my little ruse with her. This fact annoyed me. But only ever so mildly.

  The way I was feeling was another side effect of Theo’s spell. I should have been feeling worried by now, having just allowed myself to drift into the interest of a vampire. Gorgeous or not, everyone knows that vampires are not to be messed with. But instead of feeling anxious, I felt irrepressibly buoyant, happy as a sunbeam, and growing tired of my little pretense if I was honest with myself.

  “So, what’s so bad vampire like you doing in a nice place like this?” I asked her lightly.

  She looked astonished for the briefest moment, and I was not sure whether this was because I had guessed what she was or because I had so abruptly stopped my game-playing. She let out a shout of delighted laughter. It was a gorgeous and delicious sound, as if she had cultivated it over the decades. It turned out that her name was Marielle Zamas, and that she was a happily-married law-abiding vampire who, as much as she loved her husband, was sick of staying in her nest under the thumb of her mother-in-law all the time.

  “She’s such a drag,” she moaned. “And like you said, a girl has got to live a little.”

  Her turning out not to be a big bad vampire was both annoying and a relief. A relief because now I wouldn’t have to consider killing her for being illegally out on the hunt, and annoying because it looked like she was not going to be able to point me in Zezi’s direction either.

  “Have you been coming here long?” I asked.

  “Oh years,” she said airily. “Half of the clientele are otherkind. They really don’t mind a vampire or two. They even serve my margaritas the way I like them.” She gestured at her glass of deep red stuff and I realized for the first time exactly what was in there. I grimaced and she giggled.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to discriminate against your food or anything.” I might not be too impressed with the blood drinking apart, but it was better that she was drinking her blood out of a glass than from anywhere else.

  “So if you’ve been coming here for a couple of years, I wonder if you’ve seen this girl?” I took the photo of Zezi Shahidi out of my pocket and slid it across the smooth wooden bar top towards Marielle.

  It was a small passport photo, creased up from being handled over the years. Zezi’s mother had not kept anything else. When Zezi had first gone missing two years ago, her rather strict mom had been furious, convinced that Zezi had run off to live with her new and tawdry friends. Feeling abandoned and rejected, Mrs Shahidi she had confessed that she’d dumped all of Zezi’s things in a pile in the garden and set it on fire. To teach Zezi a lesson, she had said.

  A couple of weeks later when it had become clear that her daughter was not staying with any of her friends, and certainly had not gone anywhere of her
own free will, her mom had been horrified and distraught. Not only had she let two weeks pass without calling the police, she had burned up all the evidence than might have pointed to whatever had happened to her daughter. Zezi had never been found and her mother had never forgiven herself. When I had visited her recently, her pain had been raw and difficult for me to be around. It had been like a crashing tumult of fierce waves thundering and tearing at me and leaving me feeling flayed. It had even managed to temporarily flip my sunshiny mood upside down.

  Back then the police had forwarded Zezi’s case to the Agency of Otherkind investigations - where I was currently consulting on a part-time basis - because Zezi’s mother had insisted Zezi had involved herself with otherkind. Goblins apparently. There had been no evidence of this so the Agency had rejected the case as being outside of their jurisdiction, and the police had not been interested in pursuing a girl who her own mother had initially thought had run away. Especially as the girl had been eighteen already. And so poor Zezi had been consigned to the pile of missing people that nobody had any time to look for, not even her mom who was run ragged raising her other three rambunctious children. Zezi had been the eldest. She used to help look after her troublesome teen brothers and her baby sister while their widowed mom was working two jobs. Zezi’s disappearance had practically destroyed their already struggling family.