A part of him wanted to drop this whole damned thing, even now.
He knew he couldn’t, though.
That thing left Karver on its own.
So where the hell was it now?
He needed to know more before Karver got released from the hospital.
“Where are you going?”
Dags came to a stop, not even halfway to the front door from where he’d started by the bar. Turning, he looked at Phoenix, not hiding his confusion.
He didn’t even bother to answer her, not out loud.
She seemed to read the expression on his face easily enough.
“Take me with you,” she blurted. “Don’t leave me here alone. Please.”
Dags felt his jaw harden.
He glanced around the living room, which was still crawling with L.A. County’s finest.
Karver was gone. The paramedics took him to the hospital probably forty minutes earlier. His head injury had been serious enough, they’d wanted to bring him in for X-rays and observation. Asia left about thirty minutes after that. She told the sheriff’s deputies she had to go in to work at one of the studios, and they released her.
Dags didn’t know if Asia was shooting something right now, or if it was just some work-related meeting. Truthfully, he hadn’t thought to ask until she’d already left.
So yeah, Phoenix was alone.
Well, apart from members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department, her private security, and Veronica, who still hovered nearby. Given the small crowd protecting her, she wasn’t in immediate danger here.
Well. Most likely.
Swiveling his gaze back to her, Dags felt his frown deepen.
He tried to think of a reason to say no.
“Please.” Her eyes brightened as he stared. “Please don’t leave me here.”
“Aren’t you going the hospital?” he said. “To see after Karver?”
She shook her head. “No. He told me not to.” Hesitating, she added, “I think he wants some space. You know. To figure out what happened… without either of us there.”
Reading the meaning behind her words, Dags looked at her.
He got where Karver was coming from. He even felt a little guilty.
The actor clearly knew he was missing big pieces of the story, and that his own girlfriend, along with Dags, were withholding those pieces from him deliberately.
“Please,” Phoenix said. “I don’t feel safe here. I really don’t.”
Dags frowned.
He felt the part of him that agreed with her grow louder, complaining in the back of his head. He didn’t want to leave her here, not after the way that demon talked about her. He had no idea what to do with her; his place didn’t strike him as much safer, given Jason Tig found him there, but at least he knew what they were dealing with, unlike her human security.
She was right. He couldn’t leave her here alone.
He also didn’t want to stay here and babysit.
He had things to do.
After what felt like a too-long pause, he looked her over.
She still wore the clothes she’d changed into after she got out of the jacuzzi the night before. They more or less counted as pajamas. Motioning towards her fluffy pink slippers with the cat ears, the white sweat pants, and the oversized, stretched-out green tank top with the name of a punk rock band spray-painted across the front, he cleared his throat.
“You need to put on real clothes,” he said, gruff.
He motioned with his head towards the door.
“I’ll wait outside.”
Relief flooded her expression, filling those green and gold-flecked eyes.
“I’ll be fast,” she promised.
He just stood there while she darted up the ramp for the second floor. She jumped carefully over the broken stair, then took the others two at a time, moving with an agility and grace that fascinated him. He watched her reach the top, then hang a right, still half-running as she made her way beside a pony wall along the edge of the second floor.
Dags made a mental note, without fully admitting to himself that he was doing it, that her bedroom must lie in that direction.
He watched until she disappeared.
When he lowered his gaze, Kara was staring at him.
The look in her hazel eyes wasn’t difficult to read.
Chapter 19
Delicious
When Phoenix exited out the front door of the beach house, she wore black jeans, a hoodie sweatshirt, and laced boots.
The boots and jeans looked designer, but should work well enough for the bike.
He handed her his one helmet wordlessly, holding it out more insistently when she tried to wave it off.
“I’m pretty sure I’m less breakable than you,” he told her.
She hesitated at that, meeting his gaze.
When he held out the helmet again, she took it from him that time, her lips pursing briefly in a frown.
“I heard what that thing said last night,” she told him. “I heard the things it said to you.”
“It?” Dags said, quirking an eyebrow.
She glanced over her shoulder, obviously looking to see if the front door was closed, making sure the cops weren’t close enough to overhear them.
“I know that wasn’t Karver,” she said, looking back at Dags. “You know it, too. If you believed it was him, you would have told the police that.”
“Maybe I was letting them figure it out on their own,” Dags said.
“No.” Phoenix shook her head, still watching his eyes. “No. You don’t like Karver. And he was an ass to you last night. I suspect you would have told them right away, if you truly thought he’d done it. You would have told your friend at least, that LAPD detective.”
Dags felt his mouth harden.
He honestly couldn’t tell if she was fucking with him, or just stating the obvious.
“Why are you with him?” he blurted. “Karver?”
She exhaled, fitting his black helmet over her head and tugging down the chin strap. Lifting her chin a little to better connect the straps, she met his gaze.
“We have a history,” she said.
Dags nodded, noncommittal.
Her answer, like most things about her, frustrated him.
Still, it was none of his damned business.
He reached for the key, clicking over the ignition, then hit the starter.
The bike’s engine roared to life.
“I need to go home first,” he said, speaking loud over the engine as he revved it a bit to warm it up. “Do you mind?”
Still standing in front of the bike, she shook her head.
She walked around him cautiously, approaching on his left. Dags just sat there as she edged closer, adjusting the helmet with her hands, still moving like a rider about to climb on a horse she feared might buck her off.
He made her nervous.
Maybe the thought should have comforted him, since she did the same to him.
It didn’t, really.
“Get on,” he told her, revving the engine again, and kicking up the stand. “Before they decide they need to follow us.” He nodded towards the house.
After a bare hesitation, she nodded.
She threw a leg cautiously over the back of the bike and slid onto the leather seat. Just as cautiously, she curled her arms around his waist, holding him tightly.
“Is this okay?” she said, loud over the bike’s engine.
He glanced back at her, and nodded.
He could have told her she didn’t need to hold onto him.
He could have told her to hold onto the bike itself, the metal bars around the seat.
He didn’t tell her that, though. He told himself this was probably better, especially if she was new to motorcycles, or if motorcycles made her nervous. He tried to pretend having her pressed up against his back and thighs didn’t affect him at all. He tried not to notice the part of his gut that jumped when she wrapped her arms and hands aroun
d him there, clutching his flesh over the T-shirt and under his jacket.
Christ. What was the matter with him?
“Try to lean with my weight,” he said, not looking back that time but speaking louder, matching her volume. “On the turns, I mean. Lean the way I do.” Pausing, he added, “But don’t worry too much if you don’t. You don’t weigh enough for it to really matter, as long as you’re not moving around too much.”
He didn’t mean that as either a compliment or an insult, but he felt her tense a little when he said it.
“…just don’t let go,” he added.
Throwing the bike into gear, he twisted the handle for the gas.
Her arms tightened around him in a brief panic⏤
Then they were off.
He took her to his place, like he told her he would.
Honestly, he considered leaving her there.
As it was, he pulled onto the small path that led onto the back end of his property, and took the bike almost door to door with his underground apartment.
Pulling up close to the flowering tree in the front yard, he kicked out the bike stand and killed the engine.
“I need to check on something,” he told her. Handing her his keys, he motioned towards the door of his apartment. “You can go inside. I have food in the fridge. Drinks. Take whatever you want.”
She nodded, frowning a little as she glanced at the odd, rust-red and scuffed door that seemed to lead directly into the side of the hill.
“It’s bigger than it looks inside,” he said. “Don’t worry. They cleaned up from last night.”
Frowning at the thought, it occurred to him that maybe he shouldn’t let Phoenix be the one to verify that.
He’d never had reason to question his cleaning people before, but it wasn’t often he had to call them up here at night, on a weekend… to clean up after a body.
Kara promised she’d let them in.
She said as soon as they were done pulling all the evidence they needed, she would let them go inside and do whatever they needed to do. She’d been pretty confident that wouldn’t be long, since it was pretty obvious the guy died of natural causes.
Thinking about all this now, he took the keys back from Phoenix’s still-open hand.
“They were supposed to clean it,” he muttered. “Maybe you’d better wait here. Let me check it out first.”
She nodded, looking a little paler than usual.
He wondered if it was because his driving scared her, then realized it might just as easily be that she forgot a man died here the evening before.
It was maddening, having no aura to read on her.
He was walking up to his apartment door, sorting through his keys to find the right one, when a bark to his left, coming down from the direction of the main house, jerked his eyes sideways. The husky-shepherd mix was running towards him through the tall grass, his tongue lolling. When Dags looked at the dog, he barked again, happily, wagging his tail.
Fuck.
Phoenix was right.
He was going to end up keeping the damned dog.
Clearly, the dog had decided who his new owner was.
Anyway, he’d more or less promised Tig.
“Hey,” Dags said to the dog, gruff. “You running away from poor Jane? After she was nice enough to take care of you all night?”
Reaching him, the dog barked, wagging his tail.
Dags scratched him behind one ear, slid the key into the bolt and unlocked it, then switched keys and unlocked the handle.
He probably needed to get something more sophisticated for this damned thing, now that so many people knew where he lived.
It kind of defeated the purpose of keeping the place crappy-looking so no one would care about breaking in, but he might have to upgrade. That, or turn this into a false door, brick it over on the inside, and build a new, high-tech door where no one could easily see it.
Frowning as he thought through the logistics of that, he finished unlocking the door and opened it.
The dog bounded in ahead of him, not waiting for an invitation.
Dags held the door open for Phoenix, who, despite what he’d said about her waiting by the bike, had followed him to the door as well, and stood behind him while he unlocked it. Before she could walk very far into his place, however, he closed the door and stepped in front of her, holding up a hand as he switched on the main lights.
“Stay here,” he said, his voice a touch more warning that time.
He glanced around the long space.
Something was off.
He could smell cleaning solution, so obviously the cleaners had done their work, but he could smell something else, too, something he couldn’t quite pinpoint but that instantly wrinkled his nose. It wasn’t quite blood, wasn’t quite decaying flesh, but something about the smell evoked both things. Whatever the smell was, it mixed with that feeling of wrongness he’d felt as soon as he crossed into his living space.
It instantly made all of his muscles tense.
He was about to tell Phoenix to go back outside, to walk up to the main house and look for Jane, when Phoenix herself sucked in a breath.
The sound wasn’t loud, but something about the way she did it made him look at her.
Before he could ask, she pointed in the direction of the couch.
It was the same couch where he’d been sitting when Tig showed up inside his place.
The dog started barking.
He was barking at the couch, too.
“Wait here,” Dags growled, holding up a hand to Phoenix. “Put your hand on the door handle,” he added, still staring at the back of the leather couch. “If anything happens, or if I tell you to run, I want you to go outside. Don’t run out to the street. The closest neighbor is too far. Run up to the main house.”
Phoenix nodded, retreating.
He glanced back just long enough to verify that her hand gripped the handle of his front door.
Then he relaxed his hold on the angel fire in his chest, just enough to feel a flush of current run through his limbs. The current immediately burned off the last trace of fatigue he’d been feeling, clearing his mind and sharpening his vision like he’d been dunked in a vat of ice water, then shot up with adrenaline.
“Who’s there?” he growled. “Is anyone in here?”
The dog barked again.
Dags glanced at him.
The dog looked agitated, but not aggressive.
He was still staring at the couch, but pacing back and forth now, like he was upset.
Dags didn’t relax his muscles, but paused his steps long enough to try and suss out what he felt, including off the dog itself. The dog wasn’t acting like someone bad was in the room. He wasn’t acting like he was getting ready to attack.
The dog was acting more like⏤
Realizing what he felt off the fluffy, white and sky-blue aura of the dog, Dags swallowed.
Then, throwing caution to the wind, he walked directly to the couch, peering over the back of it to see what was there.
Immediately, he froze.
A body lay on his couch, curled up like a child.
Dags might have thought she was asleep, given that posture.
She wasn’t asleep, though. Her hazel eyes stared out towards the brick wall on the opposite side of the couch, her irises clouded and unseeing, and her skin was so pale she looked like someone had drained her entirely of blood.
On the tile floor beneath the couch, someone had written out a message.
The dried-on, reddish-brown streaks could only be blood.
Dags stood there, feeling paralyzed, as his eyes flickered over the scrawled words.
You deprived me of my dinner, Angel.
You must have known I would have found another place to eat.
Don’t feel too bad.
She was delicious.
On the tile floor, just below the last line of text, lay a human heart.
Chapter 20
Movie Star
They stood in the garden in front of Dags’ place, not looking at one another.
Dags couldn’t tell if Phoenix was looking at much of anything.
He couldn’t really focus on much, either.
He’d cried when they first came out here. He couldn’t help it.
He’d liked Jane.
Now he was filled with rage.
Phoenix watched him go through both emotional waves. She moved closer to him, exuding a kind of quiet sympathy both for his grief and his anger, but she hadn’t seemed sure how to help him with either thing.
The dog snuffled around the grasses and tree roots and mulchy earth around the wild-growth area, zig-zagging back and forth as he seemed almost to be staking out his territory around the back end of Dags’ property.
Dags found himself staring up at the house higher up on the property, the house that used to be the residence of Jane Harrow, the dead woman now lying on his couch.
He should call Kara.
He knew he should call Kara.
But he felt like he honestly couldn’t deal with another visit from the cops. He needed the space to think first. He needed to decide where to take Phoenix, where she might be safe. He trusted Kara, despite how much they bickered. He trusted that she was honest, that she was a good cop, as far as cops went, and she wouldn’t do anything to intentionally put Phoenix or even Dags himself in danger.
There was just too much he couldn’t tell her.
There was too much he had to leave out, too much he had to lie about.
Kara was a good enough cop to know he was lying, and to get pissed off about it.
More importantly, Dags worried he’d be putting Kara in danger too, if he involved her too much before he knew how to stop whatever this was. Hell, at this point, Dags still had no real understanding of what they were even dealing with, much less how to stop it.
He still felt strongly that he needed to trace this back to where it started.
For Dags, it started with Jason Tig.
The beginning of this was Jason Tig.
As the thought locked in, he frowned, making up his mind.
“Okay.” He turned his head and upper body, his arms folded across his chest. “I think you should come with me.”
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