Killer's Gambit

by Hermione Stark

  The movement of Steffane Ronin’s head had caused the sigils on his shackles to gleam. He didn’t react. No wincing and gritting his teeth like he had done in my dream, but I did notice that he stiffened almost imperceptibly until their light died down. He was shirtless and pantsless, wearing only a black pair of boxers just like I had seen. I had thought that the chair was a prison, but now I thought it was more a torture device.

  An unpleasant thought occured to me. This was not just a visitor’s room. This was his cell. This was how he was being kept permanently.

  “Diana Bellona, I presume,” the vampire said.

  His voice was unexpected. For a guy locked into a chair it was far too smug. And deep and rich and melodious; the kind of voice that immediately magnified a man’s attractiveness tenfold. But he wasn’t for me. Sadly I seemed to be stuck on Storm.

  “At your service,” I told him, taking a seat on a second chair outside of the circle. It had an alarm button attached to its arm. Compared to his, this chair was spindly.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said.

  “A figure of speech,” I retorted. “Don’t get your hopes up, vampire boy. You want to tell me why I’m here?”

  He threw back his head and laughed a booming laugh, and this time he didn’t seem to care at all about the gleam of the sigils. “Vampire boy,” he said, shaking his head. “Nobody has ever dared call me that.”

  “Ooh. You must be a big bad vampire boy. So, what do you want?”

  Meeting him had thrown me off. I had expected that I would come in here and I would sense something from him immediately, the way that I had sensed that insistent nagging tugging from his case file. But he was like the vampire Marielle; a void in the middle of the psychic music. I could not sense anything coming from him at all and I did not like it.

  “What do you think I want?” he said.

  “Very funny. Am I am supposed to pick your brains for you? I’m not in the mood. You asked for me, so spit it out.”

  He tilted his head and looked at me curiously. “Why you came when I asked is of interest, no?”

  “Call me curious.”

  He didn’t tell me that curiosity killed the cat. He glanced around his cell meaningfully. “Clearly I want your… help.” He said the word ‘help’ like it was an unpleasant thing. Like he had never asked for help in his life.

  “And how and why am I going to do that? You’re a killer in a supermax. It seems to me that you’re exactly where you belong.”

  “I am not where I belong,” he snapped. “I did not murder Leonie.”

  It surprised me that he called her by her name rather than just ‘that girl’. Leonie Ashbeck was the name of his victim. She had been eighteen years old. Why did I always seem to be chasing after girls who had been targeted by monsters? Why couldn’t these goddamn monsters target their own beastly peers for once?

  There had been not much else about Leonie in the file. No photos. I wondered what she had looked like. Whatever that had been, I couldn’t imagine any teenage human girl would have consorted with this cruel-faced vampire if she had really known the monster he was.

  “You seriously expect me to believe that you really cared about Leonie Ashbeck?”

  “I care nothing for what you think.”

  “Clearly you do.”

  “I didn’t murder her,” he repeated, looking me right in the eyes.

  “I’ll just take your word for it, shall I?”

  “You don’t need to,” he said with a smug smile. “Given that you’re a psychic.”

  I frowned. How the heck did he know that? It’s not like I’d been advertising the fact. “A psychic, huh? Why would you think that?”

  “My friends told me.”

  I took a meaningful look around his cell. “I bet you have a lot of friends.”

  “Enough to count. It’s where they are that matters.”

  I wondered if this was meant to be a threat. “And where’s that?” I asked.

  “Interesting places.”

  “Gosh, you just love to give people the old dance-around. I bet you were fun in your day. Why did you want me to come and see you, Mr Ronin?”

  “Because you can help me.”

  “Why me specifically? Where did you get my name?”

  “You looked me up,” he said. “On a computer.”

  “So?”

  “I like to keep an eye on those who are keeping an eye on me. My friends alerted me to it. You took an interest in my case. Why? Is it because you sensed I was innocent?”

  “So how does that work? Do you have some sort of alert set up to ping on google every time someone types in your name?”

  “Wouldn’t the world be an interesting place if it was that simple? You would know the name of every man who had a crush on you, and I bet a lot of men have crushes on you.”

  “Are you flirting with me?”

  “I always flirt with beautiful women.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere.”

  “Can you blame a man for trying?”

  “Sorry old pal. I didn’t see a thing that pointed to your innocence.”

  He looked ever so slightly disappointed at this news, but he masked it quickly. “No matter. I want you to look into my case and find out who really killed Leonie.”

  “You want a favor. Why would I give you one?”

  “Because I am not the monster they say I am. I loved Leonie. But they put me in this goddamn chair for something I never did.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says me!” he roared, his veneer of calm finally snapping. His eyes flashed a dark dangerous green, not black like I had thought they were, and then he threw himself at me. I couldn’t help but flinch. But no way could he escape his restraints. Light flared from the sigils all over his chair and no matter how he thrashed he could not get out. He really was like a bug skewered by a pin. I’d have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been trying to murder me.

  Eventually he quietened and stopped moving. He was panting for breath as if in a serious amount of pain. Interesting. I didn’t know vampires panted. I should really look them up.

  “I didn’t kill Leonie,” he said quietly. “Six years they’ve had me in this chair. Six years for something I did not do. Six years knowing that whoever killed her is out there beyond my reach.”

  “You’ve been in that chair for six years? I asked incredulously. “They didn’t put you in it because you’ve been particularly naughty?”

  He laughed, but there was neither mirth nor self-pity in the sound. He leaned his head back against the chair and nodded. “Six years,” he confirmed. “Six years of stagnating in this hellhole. Six years of not seeing the night. Do you know how long they’ll keep me in here? An eternity. An eternity because I’ll never agree to let them kill me. Never. Can you imagine what it is like when the only freedom on offer is eternal death?”

  “I suppose you think you should be out there being king of the night, huh?”

  He saw that I felt no pity for him so he changed tack. “Do what I ask and I will give you something you want.”

  “Ha! Make a bargain with a vampire? Do I look like a fool?”

  “You look like something I’ve never seen before.”

  The fine hair at the nape of my neck prickled. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, trying not to sound wary. No way could this vampire know the truth about me. I barely knew it about myself.

  “You’ve been looking me right in the eyes this entire time. Don’t tell me those goggles work because I know they don’t. No one is immune to my mesmerism. No one.”

  There went that tingle on my nape again. “It looks like you just found the exception, buddy. Too bad for you I’m not in the job of letting monsters out on the streets.”

  “It could be you in here just as easily as me, I think,” he said. “You and I are alike. I’m something you’ve never seen before too.”

  “You’re right. I’ve never seen a vampire pinned in place like a bug.”
>
  “Dhampir,” he said.

  “Half living, half dead, huh? Is that supposed to make me feel sorry for you?”

  This made him sneer. “I don’t want your pity. Just your understanding. You know what it is like to crave blood, I think. You’re not a vampire but there is darkness in you. Only something touched by the old darkness could stand in my presence and be so… unaffected.”

  “You really do think a lot of yourself. You can’t handle the thought that a plain Jane might be immune to your charms, huh?”

  “You’re no plain Jane,” he practically snarled. “And had I been free, you and I—”

  “Yuck. No thanks. Great conversation vampire boy, but I think we’re done here.”

  I felt a bit disappointed about it really. Steffane Ronin was certainly interesting. And he was right that his predicament was one I might end up in myself if I was not careful. But I was no closer to discovering why his case had given me an itch. Perhaps I had imagined it. Either way, I was tempted to touch him to make sure. One little touch might give me the vision that I had been seeking. Something to clear this whole mess up for me, so that I could go back to focusing on Zezi.

  One little touch…

  But looking at Steffane Ronin inside his circle of sigils I knew that would be a bad idea. He already knew too much about me. What if foresight was one of the powers of this dhampir? I was hoping that touching him might give me more insight into him, but what if it gave him insight into me? What if me merely being here had given him an advantage over me?

  I stood up decisively from my chair and turned my back on him.

  “Wait!” he said, that word a cold command that would have made someone other than me stop still in their tracks.

  I ignored it and continued going towards the door. My hand was already on the handle when he said, “I can give you the Devil Claw Killer.”

  That made me turn. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him. What the hell did he know about the Devil Claw Killer?

  His lips curled in a satisfied smile. “You want Devil Claw,” he said.

  “So does every department in the Agency,” I told him. “Why don’t you try your tricks on a real agent and not a mere consultant like me?”

  “Because everything else has failed. You think I haven’t tried getting them to re-visit the evidence? There is no evidence. But you — you can find what doesn’t exist. Because someone out there knows who killed Leonie. It’s hidden in their heads. Only you can find it. Do it and I will give you Devil Claw.”

  “I’m bored of this. If you had any information on DCK then you’d have traded it for much nicer digs than this shithole. You can try your tricks on someone else because I’m done with you.”

  “Freedom is the price for my information, and only you can give me that.”

  “You really expect me to believe you know who DCK is?”

  “You’re a psychic. You should know.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him that it didn’t work like that. It was impossible for me to read him. He was like a black hole, sucking everything inwards, taking, but giving nothing back. “There’s a difference between what I know and real solid proof. You have to give me something. Is he a vampire?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Does he live on this world or Otherworld?”

  “You ask so much and give so little.”

  “He lives here, doesn’t he?” I said triumphantly. I was sure of it. I didn’t know why, but I just sensed that it was true. Or perhaps I just wanted so badly for it to be true. Because Devil Claw needed to be in this world for me to catch him.

  “You’ll find out when you free me. I’ll give you enough to catch him. And I know how badly you want to catch him.”

  “So it’s a him?”

  “Him. Her.” Ronin shrugged. The bastard.

  “I don’t believe you know anything.” I turned my back on him, ready to leave.

  “I know many things. I know what only a few people in this world know. A secret that you keep,” he said.

  “Yeah, what’s that?” I said flippantly.

  “I know that he killed your mother.”

  Chapter 6

  DIANA

  My mother. How the hell did he know Madga was my mother? So few people in the world knew that.

  “How does it feel?” Steffane Ronin had said to me. “Knowing that the one who murdered your loved one is out there free and there is nothing you can do about it? Not a damn thing.”

  The bastard had got me there. It seemed we might have something in common after all. If he really was innocent.

  There is only one way that Steffane Ronin could know that DCK killed my mother and that was if the information came from DCK himself. And that meant he must know DCK. He was telling the truth. He had to be! But did that mean he was telling the truth about his innocence?

  I thought back to what I had read in the case file. Leonie Ashbeck had been an eighteen year old girl who had lived in the Ronin household for three years, meeting Steffane Ronin for the first time only a few months before she died. Vampires always kept a number of humans in their nests. They called them their sheep; a source of easily available fresh blood, kept under control by their vampire master’s mesmeric influence. Sometimes vampires enthralled their favorites from among the sheep, forming a closer — almost unbreakable — bond with them before eventually turning them into vampires. According to witnesses, Leonie had been neither a sheep to, nor enthralled by, any of the vampires in the house. So why the hell had they kept her?

  I felt pity for the poor girl, dead on the cusp of adulthood. A mix-up at the morgue had meant her body had gone astray, leading to a huge investigation in itself. The poor girl had never even got a decent burial. Now it looked like she may not have even got justice. Had she been a prisoner in that vampire nest? Had she wanted to escape? I had been in that situation once myself; an unwilling hostage to a cruel adoptive aunt who used me for my psychic powers, back when I had been stupid and always afraid. I had escaped. Leonie would never escape. I wondered if she had dreamed of being free.

  Perhaps I could avenge Leonie and Magda with this one case. For two years I’d been tormenting myself about the sequence of events that led up to Magda’s murder, unable to shake the certainty that I could have changed it if I had just not walked away from her when she had reached out to me. I’d abandoned her when she needed me. I was the reason she died. Madga, the mother I would never know. Never.

  And now, finally, maybe I would be able to lay that ghost to rest. Buoyed by a sense of stunned finality, as if this really was going to happen — I really was going to catch DCK and punish him for what he did to Magda — I was unable to say a word to the cowboy as he drove me back to Grimshaws. No way was I going to tell him where I lived. I saw him shooting me curious looks, wondering what my meeting with his boss had been about, but he did not ask and I did not answer.

  The feeling of absolute certainly that Steffane Ronin was not lying lasted all through the night and all of the following morning on my way in to work at Agency Headquarters. It had me pacing out side of Storm’s office an hour before he even showed up to work. I was in early. Far too early. But I could not help it. I had barely slept all night.

  No wonder I had kept being drawn to Steffane Ronin’s case. I came back to it over and over not because of Steffane Ronin himself, but because of his link to DCK. I must have sensed it.

  The idea that I could finally catch him, that he was within my reach, would have been shredding my nerves if I wasn’t protected by my buoyant sunshiny feeling. Instead I was impatient to get going. I wanted him now. Right now. I didn’t want to have to wait for Storm’s permission. And yet I needed Storm’s permission because I needed him to help me find those lost case files. Plus, Storm would be interested in the DCK angle. How could he not be?

  And was Steffane Ronin really innocent? Was I going to be able to prove it? I had to if I was going to catch DCK. Hell, for the chance to catch DCK, I had to get Ronin out
of prison whether he was innocent or not. The only way I was going to get the information he had was to set him free. That was what he was counting on.

  Half an hour of pacing outside of Storm’s office later, I had made up my mind that Ronin must be innocent. I could feel it in my bones. Sort of. Why the hell would he set me this task if he wasn’t innocent? He could have traded his information in for an easier sentence or for more creature comforts. A guilty man would have settled for that and maybe accepted a slightly cushier form of punishment, but an innocent one? No, an innocent one would settle for nothing less than his freedom. Which meant that Steffane Ronin had to be innocent.