Storm arrived at 8:00 am on the dot and looked surprised to find me pacing outside of his door. I’ll confess that I was not an early bird. If left to my own devices I would have rolled in to work at midday every day. As it was, I barely managed to scrape in by 10:00 am most mornings, but no one minded because all I was doing was reviewing and closing old cases. They pretty much left me up to my own devices. That would change if I was helping on one of their active cases, at which point I would make every effort to arrive on time.
Storm did not look good. And by that I meant he looked slightly less perfect than his usual hunky self. He still had that smudge of dark circles under his eyes and the tiniest hint of being careworn. I supposed I noticed it because I took an overly keen interest in him.
“Not another drunken night out on the town?” I asked him.
His immediate instinct was to glower at me. And then he sighed, and said, “ You might as well come in. I have some news for you.”
He unlocked his office door and let me inside the glass-walled office.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” I said, looking out at the open plan desks outside. Anyone who worked out there could look in and see Storm all day long. “It’s like being a fish in a tank. People can watch you whenever they like.”
I much preferred my own pseudo-office, which was a large empty old loft space one level up in this same building. The loft space had not been refurbished in decades, and was underused and draughty, but I had claimed one abandoned room in it for my very own. It had my flying hammock and some throw cushions on the floor and all my papers were up on the walls or arranged in grids on the floor where I could peruse them at my leisure. It was my perfect ramshackle working space, unlike this pristine fish tank.
Being in here made me feel like the best thing about my own office was its solid walls. God, how I would hate to be watched through the glass all day long. And I bet plenty of people were watching him all the time. Like the pool of secretaries that sat down the hall who could most definitely see all the way across the open plan office to here. And I bet they enjoyed the view. Damn them.
I was too filled with pent up energy to take a seat, so I paced near Storm’s desk. “I have some news for you too,” I said.
“Go ahead,” he said promptly, not bothering to tell me to sit down. That was one of the things I liked about Storm. He was always willing to listen. And it was good to be listened to with such attention. He had this way about his that made you feel like you were really there and really important.
But what I had to say would have to wait since his attention was so clearly on whatever he wanted to say. I wanted his full attention for when it came to my turn. Plus I had no idea how Storm was going to react.
I had no idea how he was feeling after the last time we had seen each other when he had woken up curled up beside me in my bed. From his professional demeanor you would think it had never happened. I didn’t know what I had been hoping for. Maybe a mischievous smile? Maybe a look of amusement or acknowledgment that we had seen each other outside of work for once? Nothing was even different about his music today. It was still that big powerful soothing and wonderful sound radiating out from him. Sometimes when I heard and felt it, I just wanted to give him a huge hug and hold him tight and not let go.
The current look on Storm’s face told me that this was the last thing that he would welcome. Well, if he was gonna be so uptight and professional, I could be that too.
I said to him, “Gentlemen first. What did you want to tell me?”
Storm slid a piece of paper across his desk at me. “I got the Chief’s clearance for you to be trained as a professional oracle. The Agency will fund it and sponsor you, and I’ve already narrowed down three oracles you might like to study with. All you need to do is pick one and agree a schedule.”
He was smiling. He sounded excited, pleased with himself. It was like he expected me to be too.
I felt was sick inside. He wanted me to enroll as a professional auricle? What the hell? I felt like a rug had been pulled from under me. He had mentioned this to me in passing before, but now he was looking at me like I should be jumping at the chance. And if I were anyone else maybe I would have been. But I wasn’t just anyone else. I was the Angel of Death, or maybe I wasn’t. I was certainly something not normal, and the last thing I needed was to spend hours and months in training with a goddamn professional oracle who was going to be able to see right through me. Who was going to find out there was something wrong with me and report it to the Agency, and probably her own bosses too. Because oracles were fiercely loyal first and foremost to their own people, and I was definitely not one of their people. An oracle would ruin everything I had worked so hard for. What the hell was Storm thinking?
“Why the hell didn’t you ask me about this first?” I snapped.
Storm looked taken aback. “I thought this was what you wanted—”
“No, it’s not!” I said hotly. “Which you would know if you bothered to listen!”
“You said you didn’t do it because you didn’t have the money for it,” he said.
“That’s one of the reasons. Who said I wanted to be a registered oracle anyway? Why the hell is that so important to you? If I’m not good enough as I am, why the hell did you hire me in the first place?”
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 finishedSstorm’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. Put it could have gone seriously wrong. My throat under his fangs wrong. Willing 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.”
<
br /> “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 I it was not quite doubt. He said, “Steffane Ronin was in his sealed crypt bedroom with the murder victim. 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 Madga 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 mean 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.
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