by Lyn Gala
“There won’t be a next time. If I ever see you again, I’m going to shoot you in the kneecap.”
“Fuck, Silver, don’t be like—”
“I suggest you get out of town. Immediately.”
“How the hell do you think I got into hunting? You think I don’t know how pissed you are? Damn. I actually took a shot at the man who set me up.”
“I didn’t choose to be part of your fucking war,” Paige hissed.
“I made the same choice you did. I told him that I never went to war without enough information to make a tactical decision about how to hit the enemy. I wasn’t prepared at all and the cars were a lot farther away. I survived.” Hunter didn’t sound apologetic at all.
“And you developed such empathy and moral excellence from that experience.” The sarcasm felt good, but shooting Hunter in the knee would feel better.
“Fuck you. I get the job done and I’ve never lost a runner. Well, actually now I have. I couldn’t find you, and I don’t mind telling you, you scared the life out of me. Luckily you sound pretty damn alive this morning.”
“Oh I knew you were shooting at the guys coming after me,” she whispered as she tried to hide her mouth with one hand. She really didn’t need anyone to overhear this conversation. “Funny enough, after someone lies to me and sets me up, I’m not going to trust them.”
“You’re a smart one. You’d be a hell of a hunter.”
“Get your ass out of town and take your partner with you.” She hit the end button and leaned against the brick building as she tried to stop her hands from shaking. Her body still remembered the terror of last night and it took her a second to regain her slipping control. This week was quickly challenging her impression of herself as a strong woman because more and more she just wanted to crawl in a hole and forget everything she’d seen.
Instead she shoved her cell phone back in her pocket and headed for the station. The police reports hadn’t been interesting, but maybe she could find something interesting in the coroner’s report.
Her gut kept telling her that these attacks were linked, and if she could solve the rape cases, she could figure out what the hell was going on with their sudden vampire problem. If she couldn’t figure anything out, she’d track Hunter down and shoot him in the knee. That would definitely improve her day.
Paige headed back into the precinct station just in time to hear two patrol officers gossiping about the latest news.
“It must have been a meth house because it went up like dry kindling.”
“Someone should tear down those old houses,” the second patrolman commented. “Was anyone killed?”
The first guy shook his head. “They found some bones, but the coroner says they’re old…like hundreds of years old. I wonder if someone had stuffed bodies in the attic or something.”
“That’s just macabre.”
Paige sighed. Macabre didn’t cover it. At least they weren’t looking for the vampires who might have escaped the burning building. Paige frowned as she remembered the woman standing on the second floor. Now that terror wasn’t clouding her judgment, Paige felt like she should recognize the woman. She wasn’t local. However, something nagged at the back of Paige’s mind.
Worrying at a memory never made it come faster though, so Paige headed back into the station.
Chapter Thirteen
Paige stared at the screen, her skin turning to goose pimples. John Monagas raped fourteen women in the Memphis area. He’d been shot by police while fleeing. Paige was going to ignore the fact that the cops were not supposed to ever shoot fleeing suspects. This guy deserved to have an overeager officer put a bullet in him.
Most interestingly, the coroner’s report included a long addendum attempting to explain how the body of John Monagas had vanished. A week ago, Paige would have said some victim’s family member had stolen the body to have a good old-fashioned bonfire where they could spit on Monagas’ remains before letting coyotes eat his bones. Now…now she wasn’t sure.
Pulling up the arrest file, she read about how the sick bastard had set up in an abandoned house and targeted women who had walked past. In Memphis, he’d been a garden variety asshole. She looked around, desperate to talk to someone about the lead. If he was still using abandoned houses, then they’d probably walked right past him.
Paige hit print on his official mug shot. He had a wide face and big eyes—he didn’t look particularly dangerous, although he was a large and muscular man.
“Have something?” The profiler came out of nowhere with his smile.
“A dead man,” Paige said as she tried to keep from showing her aggravation. The last thing she needed was the profiler or the captain demanding answers.
The profiler pulled the picture off the printer. “John Monagas? He’s dead.”
Paige bit her tongue before pointing out that she’d already figured that out. The date of death at the bottom gave that away. The profiler looked at her, confused. Paige gave a shrug. “I don’t know, but something about this guy is ringing bells,” Paige said, scrambling for some sort of explanation.
“So you’ve seen him?”
It would be so easy to say yes, but then detectives would be off chasing some connection between locals and John Monagas. “I don’t know. I’m probably just imagining things.”
The profiler went over to Paige’s computer and scrolled through Monagas’ file. “This looks like our guy’s M.O.”
“But this guy’s dead,” Paige pointed out, hoping to get him off the trail before he started jumping to conclusions. She figured he could jump for a long time before landing on the same conclusion she had. However, she couldn’t exactly explain her logic.
The profiler didn’t look as put off by that as Paige had expected. “Let’s run this by Captain Foley.”
“But I don’t know anything,” Paige protested. However, the asshole was already on his way to the captain’s office. Gritting her teeth, Paige trailed along behind him. The captain was on the phone and the profiler waited, Paige’s printout in hand, until the captain put the phone down. He didn’t even have time to knock before the captain was gesturing them to come into the office.
“What ya got?” he asked, leaning forward and reaching for the printout.
“Officer Silver was looking for homicides and assaults in the surrounding counties, seeing if our boy had a temper problem with men as well as women, and she found this.”
Captain Foley scanned it quickly, and his frown made it pretty clear he didn’t understand why this was a lead. Paige leaned back against the door when she really just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. From the captain’s point of view, this was a dumb idea, and Paige did not like being the bringer of dumb.
“He’s dead.”
“Yes, but he looks familiar to Silver and he has the same pattern of behavior. We may be looking at a sibling or a partner who still has Monagas’ picture up on a shelf in his living room as some sort of memorial. Sometimes these predators will work in pairs, and if Monagas was the dominant partner, then the junior partner is going to be missing his friend. Continuing his friend’s pattern of killing is a way to maintain that relationship.”
Captain Foley perked up. “Did Monagas have a partner?”
“Not that Memphis knew,” Paige hurried to say before the profiler could make her look any dumber. “I don’t know why he looked familiar, Captain. Hell, I might have seen his picture in the paper.”
“The profiles are so similar—same age preference, same race and geographical preferences. It seems like too much of a coincidence,” the profiler disagreed.
The captain looked from Paige to the profiler and back. “You think we should run with this?”
“Until we get another lead, yeah. It’s a long shot, but it’s a long shot with a chance of turning something up. David Berkowitz was found because of a parking ticket. Long shots can pay off big sometimes. Of course, it could also be a dead end, but at worst, we’ve lost man-hours. Man-hours are a
bout the only resource we have to spare.”
Captain Foley got that satisfied expression he got on his face when things were going well. “Then we run with it. Good work, Silver.” It said a lot about the case that a lead as weak as this one made him feel so satisfied.
Paige shifted uncomfortably. If the captain believed her, she wasn’t going to be able to check out any of the abandoned houses. Even worse, the cops were going to walk in on a vampire thinking they could order him to the ground and arrest him.
She fought with a dozen different fears. She couldn’t lose more friends. But if she tried to convince the captain that he couldn’t send officers up against a vampire, she was going to be on a seventy-two-hour psych hold with all her friends visiting her in the loony bin. She and Brady had to get there first.
“Captain, finding this…I really want to go home and…” Paige waved a hand. Let him assume whatever he wanted.
The self-satisfied expression vanished and he looked at her with sympathy. “Do you want a ride?”
Paige shook her head. “I can drive myself.”
Captain Foley actually looked more concerned at that. For a second, Paige thought he might protest, but then he just said, “Call if you need anything.”
Paige nodded and started to turn.
“Silver?” he called. Paige looked back. The captain leaned forward. “Matherton thought he could handle anything, and when he couldn’t, he ate his gun.” He didn’t say anything more, but Paige could feel his words sinking in. After a second, she nodded and headed for the time clock to check out. If Hunter or his partner were at her house, she was going to arrest their asses and let them sort the mess out. Actually, she was hoping they were at her house. She felt a need to get pissy with someone.
Even after she got out to her car, Captain Foley’s words still nagged at her. She couldn’t handle everything. And Brady didn’t know much more about demons than she did. As much as she hated to admit it, she only had one source of reliable information.
Pulling out her cell phone, she found the record for the last call and hit redial.
“Hunter,” an annoying cheerful voice on the other end answered.
“It’s Silver.”
“Yep, there’s this thing called caller ID. You have to love modern technology.”
Paige gritted her teeth and fought an urge to hang up on the bastard. “I have a question. If someone was dead and had been dead for a while, could the body still be used to host a demon?”
The silence lasted long enough to get uncomfortable. “Dead for how long?”
“A few hours, maybe up to twenty hours.” That’s how long it had taken for the coroner to notice the body missing. At the very least, they would have kept track of the body during transport and intake. After they had it tagged, it turned up missing.
Hunter didn’t answer right away and Paige had the sinking feeling he didn’t know as much as he liked to pretend. “Not that I know,” he finally admitted. “Usually demons like the bodies fresh. I worked with a doc once. He said that the demons were like puppeteers and if the nerves had a chance to degenerate, then the puppeteer couldn’t pull all the right strings to run the body.”
Paige tried to imagine the kind of doctor who would get involved in demon hunting. She thought of the sad creatures like the Cody vamp and then the sorts of things doctors had a reputation for doing when they didn’t consider their subjects human. That wasn’t the sort of world she wanted to be part of.
“So there’s no chance that someone whose body disappeared might pop up later?”
“You have a specific person in mind?” Hunter was sounding more cautious now, so Paige was guessing that there was something he wasn’t telling her. A little voice in the back of her head told her to go back into the station and have the tech boys trace the other end of the call so she could go beat the answer out of Hunter, but that wasn’t the best way to keep a secret. It really wasn’t the best plan when Hunter outweighed her by about ninety pounds.
“I have a rapist who died in Memphis, shot twice in either the side or the back depending on whose preliminary report you read. The next day the body vanished and now our rapist is using the same MO.”
“A rapist? A bad one?”
Paige felt such a flash of anger that she could feel herself get warmer. “Is there such a thing as a good one?” she demanded.
“Silver, there are degrees of everything and you fucking know it. So get off your politically correct horse and answer the damn question.”
Paige took several breaths. “One of the women here was scared to death. In Memphis, one of the women was tied so tightly that the docs had to amputate her hands because gangrene had set in.”
“Fuck.” All humor vanished from Hunter’s voice.
“Yeah, so I’d call him bad.”
“There’s a pattern to these things, Silver.”
Paige frowned. She was almost sure that answer didn’t make sense. “What things?”
“You pass the preliminary test and you get a chance for some training, a little on-the-job education. If you can hold your own and keep a secret, you might move a little deeper into the community. You don’t find out about demons one day and go digging into their society a day later.”
“Fuck that,” Paige said firmly. “If you don’t tell me—”
“This isn’t an open community, Silver. You’re asking for shit that’s way above your pay grade.”
“Hunter,” Paige said softly, her voice controlled as she chose her words carefully, “I will track you down. I will find you and I will shoot you in the kneecap so you never get to play vampire hunter again and I won’t even feel a twinge of guilt. This guy probably killed my partner and you will not withhold information.”
“Damn, you are a cold woman.”
Paige didn’t answer at all.
Hunter sighed dramatically. “Look up Pijavica. P-I-J-A-V-I-C-A. And if anyone asks, you didn’t get that from me.”
The phone went dead before Paige could even scramble for a piece of paper to write down the word. Since he’d conveniently hung up, she entered the word into her phone’s memory. Now she needed to get Brady and figure out what the clues meant. She looked at the clock. Well, shit. If she went out to the farm, they couldn’t look up pijavica. But if she went back to the house, she wouldn’t have him there to bounce ideas off.
Paige started the car and headed for home. At this point she didn’t know whether Brady was a vampire or a demon or an incubus or a human-demon hybrid or just Brady Ross with a few demonic upgrades. However, she did know that when he wasn’t around, she missed him. And considering that he wasn’t even in the car to infect her with that special brand of lust she felt when he was too close, she couldn’t blame that on his powers.
Somewhere along the line, she’d let Brady past her defenses, and as uncomfortable as it was to admit, she wanted him. God help her, she wanted him.
Chapter Fourteen
Paige pulled the car up to the closed fruit stand and turned the car off. An afternoon at the library had left her more shaken and confused than ever. Google had more on vampires than Paige had expected and pijavica had opened a world of disturbing. She still wasn’t sure what the hell she should do, but she’d figure something out. She always had.
If she had half a brain, she’d go buy a huge load of fresh garlic and tell Brady to get the hell out of town. If she could believe the stories from mythology, pijavica and vrykolakas and jiangshi didn’t even need to drink blood. For the most part, they absorbed life energy, which sounded a lot like what Brady did with her.
Yeah, if she was even a little smart, she’d run for the hills but there was this part of her that couldn’t. Some of that was probably the fact that she wanted him. She hadn’t gotten a case of lust this bad for a lot of years. But more importantly, Brady stood by her, needed her, trusted her. She couldn’t turn her back on that.
Getting out of the car, Paige leaned against the hood, soaking up the warmth. The air was t
urning chilly as the sun sank below the horizon. Pink and orange light streaked through the trees so they looked like black statues standing against the sun. The world looked just as beautiful as it had two days ago.
Considering that the world hadn’t changed at all, that shouldn’t surprise her. It did anyway. The sky should be purple or the trees twisted—something should mark the fact that the way she saw the world had completely changed.
“Paige?” Brady’s voice was soft and Paige turned to see him easing his way around the closed fruit stand.
“I didn’t expect you this soon.” Paige glanced over at the sinking sun.
Brady gave her a boyish smile and Paige could feel her body tighten in desire. “I’ve been practicing. I can go out in the sun as long as I stay to the shade, and it’s not bothering me much.” He sounded as proud of that as he had of the first time he’d gotten all of his bullets into the five-point zone on the paper target at the shooting range.
As much as she didn’t want to burst his bubble, she really would prefer it if sunlight killed demons so she could feel safe for those twelve hours a day.
“Congratulations,” she said with a plastered-on smile.
Brady’s eyes narrowed and he cocked his head to the side.
“So, are you ready to go?” Paige hurried to add as she turned back toward the car.
“Is something wrong?”
“Why would anything be wrong?” Paige swallowed an urge to laugh at her own words. They did sound ridiculous.
“Maybe because you’re not acting like you?”
“How am I supposed to act, Brady?” Page opened her car door and got inside, sitting with her hands wrapped around the wheel.
How was she supposed to act? Part of her wished that she could go back in time and not see that website, go back and tell herself to not go to the library, to not look this shit up. “I think I may have a lead on our killer,” she said, neatly sidestepping his whole line of questioning.
Brady got in the passenger-side seat, looking at her with confused eyes. Staring out the front, she tried to ignore how much he still looked like Brady. After all, hadn’t he told her that he didn’t feel like Brady anymore? “What’s the lead?” he asked.