by Jenna Black
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Enter the dark and seductive world of
JENNA BLACK
The Descendant Series
Dark Descendant
Deadly Descendant
Pros and Cons (e-novella)
Rogue Descendant
The Morgan Kingsley Series
The Devil Inside
The Devil You Know
The Devil’s Due
Speak of the Devil
The Devil’s Playground
Guardians of the Night Series
Watchers in the Night
Secrets in the Shadows
Shadows on the Soul
Hungers of the Heart
The Faeriewalker Series
Glimmerglass
Shadowspell
Sirensong
Writing as Jennifer Barlow
Hamlet Dreams
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
Playing hide-and-seek is fun when you’re a kid. At least, it had always looked like fun to me when the other kids played it. Since my mom had abandoned me in a church when I was four, I’d been shuffled through so many foster homes I never had a chance to make a lot of friends, and the other kids weren’t that eager to play with me. I couldn’t blame them; considering the attitude I’d had on me, I wouldn’t have wanted to play with me, either.
Playing hide-and-seek as an adult isn’t as much fun, but I was on a mission.
The longer I could dodge Anderson Kane, the leader of our merry band of Liberi—immortal descendants of the ancient gods—the longer I could avoid the confrontation I knew was coming. The one where he asked me to hunt his nemesis, Konstantin, who until recently had been the self-styled “king” of the Olympians, a rival group of Liberi. I was all for using my power as a descendant of Artemis to serve the common good, and it was hard to argue that the world wouldn’t be a better place without Konstantin in it. But revenge killings just aren’t my thing. If the best I could do was delay the confrontation, then so be it.
Living in the same mansion with Anderson made it hard for me to avoid him, so I made it my personal mission to be out of the house as much as possible. Which was why I was meeting a potential client at a D.C. coffee bar despite having officially put my business as a private investigator on hiatus. I insisted on thinking of it as temporary, but I knew deep down it could well turn out to be permanent.
Heather Fellowes had not been deterred by the message on my answering machine, which informed callers that I was not accepting new clients for the foreseeable future. She’d left a total of three pleading messages, and since I needed an excuse to get out of the house anyway, I decided I would take her case.
Tracking people down had always been my specialty, even before I’d become a Liberi and gained supernatural hunting skills. Skills that were terribly hard to pin down and that I didn’t come close to understanding, unfortunately. And since Ms. Fellowes was looking for the father of her child-to-be, it was a cause that was near and dear to my heart, what with my own parentless childhood.
The coffee bar Ms. Fellowes had selected for our meeting was apparently the place to be at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. There were people at every table, and the line at the counter was so long people had to scooch over to let me in the door. The roar of the espresso machine coupled with the voices of too many people in too little space made for a noise level that would discourage all but the most determined eavesdroppers.
In short, it was the perfect place to discuss sensitive matters, now that I no longer had my own private office.
All I knew about Ms. Fellowes was that she was a redhead, but I spotted her in about two seconds anyway. She was kind of hard to miss, although my immediate impression was that she was trying to blend in. She was wearing jeans and an unattractive fleece sweatshirt. He hair was twisted into a messy knot at the back of her head, and she wore little or no makeup, but even so, she was beautiful enough to turn more than one male head. She sat at a tiny corner table, guarding the one free chair and scanning the crowd. Looking for me, no doubt, although her eyes passed right over me. I doubted I matched her mental image of what a P.I. should look like. She was probably expecting an intimidating tough chick who could beat bad guys into submission. Instead, she got me, Nikki Glass: an ordinary-looking short chick with delicate bone structure that made me look far more fragile than I was. I wouldn’t intimidate anyone.
I shouldered a couple of people aside and made my way toward the table. When Ms. Fellowes saw me coming toward her, her eyes widened in surprise for just a moment before she gave me a tentative smile and rose to her feet.
“Ms. Fellowes?” I asked.
She firmed up her smile and stood a little straighter as she reached out to shake my hand. “Please, call me Heather.”
“All right. And you can call me Nikki.” Her hand was ice cold, and even a little clammy, when I shook it.
“Do you want some coffee before we get started?” she asked.
I glanced at the line, which hadn’t gotten any shorter in the last five seconds. “No, thanks.” Heather already had a half-empty cup in front of her.
She looked relieved that I wasn’t going to keep her waiting and quickly sat down and grabbed her cup as if it were a security blanket. She seemed nervous and fidgety, which I guess was understandable under the circumstances.
“Tell me what happened,” I prompted her. She had, of course, laid out the basics of her case for me over the phone, but I wanted to hear it all again in person, when I might pick up clues from her facial expressions and body language. “Be as detailed and specific as possible, and don’t leave anything out, even if it doesn’t seem important to you. Okay?”
Heather grimaced and squirmed in her seat. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that the reason she’d ignored the message on my machine was that she’d had a hard time finding a P.I. who would take her case.
“Don’t worry,” I told her as gently as I could. “I know you don’t have a lot of details. Just tell me everything you can remember, and we’ll start from there.” I pulled a pen and a notepad out of my pocketbook.
She nodded and bit her lip, then swirled her coffee around in her cup and took a sip as if fortifying herself. She sighed and put it down, looking me squarely in the face.
“I went to a bar called Top of the Hill on the first Friday night of December,” she said. “I don’t usually go out to bars alone, but I’d just broken up with my boyfriend, and I wanted to, you know, take my mind off things.”
I nodded at her encouragingly. “Go on.”
She cleared her throat. “Well, I met this guy, Doug. He was really hot, and he seemed to like me. We flirted, and I drank a little more than I probably should. We really hit it off, and, uh, I invited him back to my place.” Her cheeks pinkened. “We drank more when we got there, and I guess I was really plastered. I swear I’m not the type to fall into bed with a guy on the first date.”
/> I held up my hands. “I’m not the morality police,” I assured her.
Heather nodded and started playing with her coffee cup again, her eyes downcast. “When I woke up in the morning, he was gone,” she said sadly. “He didn’t leave a note or anything. I never got a phone number. Hell, we never even got around to telling each other our last names. I guess we both knew from the beginning that it was a one-night stand. I’m usually really good about using protection, but like I said, I was pretty plastered.” She reached down and laid her hand on her belly self-consciously.
It was less than a month since she’d had her little fling, so it sure hadn’t taken Heather long to figure out she was knocked up.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said in a small, plaintive voice as her eyes shone behind a film of tears. “I can’t afford to be a single mom, but the only other option I’d even consider is to give my baby up for adoption.” Her voice hitched, and she had to take a moment to collect herself before continuing. “Obviously, I don’t know a whole lot about Doug. Not even his last name. But he’s the father of my baby, and I believe he should have some say in what happens to it.”
I leaned back in my chair and eyed her with what I had no doubt was an expression of skepticism. She sounded sincere, and the expression on her face was one of imploring innocence. Maybe she was telling me nothing but the truth, and she wanted to find Doug out of some sense of moral responsibility. However, I was familiar with Top of the Hill, and it’s a decidedly upscale joint. The kind of place where you can’t throw a dart without hitting a millionaire. (Well, I could, thanks to supernatural aiming skills, but you get my drift.) I suspected Heather wanted to find Doug in hopes that he would be her sugar daddy, but it wasn’t my job to make judgments on her motive. If I found Doug for her, and he ended up making generous child-support payments, that was his business.
“So,” I said, sidestepping the issue of the white lie I felt fairly certain she was telling me, “what else can you tell me about Doug? The more information you can give me, the more likely I’ll be able to find him.”
There was a hint of panic in Heather’s eyes, and I suspected this was the point where the other private investigators she’d tried to hire had balked. “I can give you a description,” she said, “but not much else. We were flirting, not sharing life stories.”
No wonder her case had been turned down. How do you track down a man with nothing but a physical description and a first name? A name that could be fake, for all I knew. He wouldn’t be the first man to use a phony name when trolling a bar.
“Go ahead and give me the description,” I prompted her. “I assume you can tell me more than ‘he’s hot.’” I gave her a smile and a wink, trying to put her at ease. She forced a returning smile, but she didn’t seem any more relaxed. She looked almost scared, like she’d just confessed to some terrible crime and was waiting for the cops to haul her away. It made me wonder about her background. Had she been raised in a really conservative environment? Was she afraid I was going to start stoning her or something?
Heather swallowed hard. “He was about six feet tall. Short dark hair with a little gray at the temples. Brown eyes.” She shook her head. “I know it’s not much to go on, but—”
“I knew that from the beginning. How old was he? Approximately?”
“I’d say around forty.”
I nodded and scribbled a few notes in my notebook. If Heather was more than twenty-five, I’d be shocked. Forty seemed a little old for her, especially for a one-night stand, but what did I know? “How was he dressed?”
Heather frowned slightly, like that was an odd question. What I was really trying to figure out was whether Doug was the typical Top of the Hill patron. I didn’t want to ask flat-out if he looked rich, because Heather might be insulted by the implications of the question.
“He was well dressed,” she said, a slight narrowing of her eyes telling me she’d seen through to my real question. “Tailored slacks, a Ralph Lauren shirt. And he had a really nice coat. I think it might have been cashmere.”
Bingo. The fact that she’d noticed and remembered these particular details was more evidence that she was looking for a sugar daddy. I found that way more distasteful than her irresponsible one-night stand. I don’t get women who want to depend on a man for their livelihood. However, if I only took cases from clients I respected and admired, I’d have been out of business long ago.
“Is there anything else you can remember about him?” I asked. “Was he wearing any jewelry?”
“You mean like a wedding ring?” she asked with a touch of frost, her expression suddenly forbidding.
I shrugged, not wanting to make a big deal out of the issue. “A wedding ring, a class ring, a watch . . . anything.”
My matter-of-fact tone—and my refusal to apologize for the implications of my questions—seemed to disarm her, and her expression thawed. She was still awfully fidgety, her fingers moving restlessly from her coffee cup to the plastic stirrer that lay discarded on the table to the extra Splenda packet beside the cup.
“No ring,” she told me. “And there wasn’t a mark on his ring finger or anything. I wasn’t drunk yet when we first met, so I checked.” She drew herself up a little straighter in her chair. “I’m not a home wrecker.”
I could have told her that I didn’t care if she was, but I doubted it would help. She had a chip on her shoulder about this whole affair—no pun intended—and I didn’t feel like trying to put her at ease anymore. Instead of saying anything, I merely sat there with my pen poised above my notebook and waited. There were a couple beats of silence. Then Heather realized she wasn’t going to get a rise out of me and continued.
“He was wearing a Rolex. A real one, not a knockoff. I swear, that’s all I can remember.”
Before I’d become Liberi, I’d have had severe doubts that I could handle a case like this. When I’d talked to Heather on the phone, she’d told me she’d already asked around about him at the bar and no one had seen him before or since. Other than stopping by Top of the Hill and asking the same questions myself, there wouldn’t have been much I could do. Searching for Doug on so little information would have seemed like a waste of my time and Heather’s money.
However, now that my powers had awakened, anything was possible.
I would go to Top of the Hill and ask around, and even if no one could give me any information about Doug, it was possible I’d be struck with some kind of hunch or notice some small detail that no normal person would.
I can’t say I had high hopes that I’d be able to track down the father of Heather’s baby—my powers were way too mercurial for me to put a whole lot of confidence in them—but I did what no other P.I. had been willing to do: I took the case.
TWO
Top of the Hill is located in Capitol Hill—hence the name. The decor is classy—or pretentious, depending on your point of view—the clientele upscale, and the drink prices outrageous. I’d been there before a couple of times but only because my adoptive family sometimes ran in elevated circles. I’ve never had much patience with elevated circles or the people within them.
I hoped I wasn’t wearing my attitude on my sleeve when I stepped through the door the following Tuesday night.
Like every bar I’ve ever set foot in, the place was dimly lit, so my first impression when I stepped through the door was that I’d entered a cave. Tuesday isn’t what I generally think of as a happening night at most bars, but Top of the Hill was crowded, the VIPs and wannabes flocking to the place in droves.
Unlike many trendy places, Top of the Hill wasn’t designed to lure in twenty-somethings. The club reeked of power and money—things we twenty-somethings don’t generally have a lot of—and I’d guess the median age of the patrons was in the mid-thirties. Most of the men had at least some gray at their temples, and many of the women would have had wrinkles if they weren’t di
pping into the Botox. It struck me that Heather would have looked out of place here, too young and unpolished. Why had she chosen this particular bar to drown her sorrows in after a nasty breakup? If it’d been me, I’d have been looking for somewhere . . . fun.
I made my way through the crowd toward the bar, looking all around me as I walked, searching for something that would ping my subconscious radar. Whatever mysterious hunting powers I’d inherited from Artemis functioned on a strictly unconscious level. The harder I tried to look for clues, the less likely I was to actually find them. I’d been overthinking things for as long as I could remember—a hard habit to break.
The music playing was something jazzy and instrumental, and the buzz of conversation was subdued for a bar. People were drinking, but at first blush, at least, no one seemed to be drunk. It made the place seem even stuffier than it was, and I felt like I was intruding on some country-club cocktail party rather than a public watering hole.
If the main room, with its decor of mahogany, crystal, and marble, wasn’t exalted enough for you, there were a couple of semiprivate alcoves that, judging by the velvet ropes and bouncers around them, were the VIP areas. There was a crowd of younger folk in one of those alcoves, their voices louder than anyone else’s. They’d probably be getting louder as the drinks flowed, and I wondered if that area might be more like a quarantine.
In keeping with the generally staid and stodgy theme of the club, the bartender was in his forties and wore a crisp white shirt that just dared drinks to spill on him. He moved with brisk efficiency, not being unfriendly to his customers but not hanging around to chat, either. I ordered a margarita I didn’t really want and tried not to wince at the price.
The bartender, whose name tag declared him to be Mike, gave me a polite smile as he served my drink, but he was quick to move on to his next order. He was also the only one on duty behind the bar, and he was clearly overworked. Getting him to hold still for a conversation might be a challenge.