by L. J. Red
I was getting off track. I needed to focus. I looked back at Kyran. He had sunk back down onto the couch and was quietly sobbing. All I felt when I stared at him was pity. He had really loved her, and now she was gone and he had nothing. I looked over at Valerian and jerked my head to the door. There was nothing for us here.
We closed the door on the sound of Kyran’s tears and walked silently back to the car. “I’ve never seen Kyran express any emotion other than asshole,” I said. “I didn’t think he was capable of love, or grief.”
“I understand it,” Valerian said, resting one hand on the hood of the car. “Michelle was his human.”
I looked up at him sharply, pulled out of my thoughts. “His human? Excuse me? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Tiana, don’t overreact,” he said.
“Overreact?” I snapped. “How is that overreacting? Tell me. Explain it to me. How was she his human? He owned her? Is that what you’re getting at?”
“You know how things can be in the court, the old traditions.”
“So, what am I?” I snapped, talking over him. “Am I your human? Do you think because we spent one fucking night together that you own me now?”
“I would never presume to—”
“Good,” I said loudly, pushing away from the car. I stared at Valerian. If I died would he be emptied out and hollow like Kyran was? I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t imagine it, particularly not while he was wearing that cold and empty expression on his face. Was it a mask? Or was there truly nothing else under there? Had last night just been a way to release tension? Was that how he thought of humans? How he thought of me? A possession, a plaything to be used and discarded? I still didn’t know. I’d thought I could take my feelings out of the equation, but I was wrong. I didn’t want that from him, just sex. I wanted something more. I wanted someone who cared for me, I wanted him to feel something, and I didn’t know if he ever would. Being with him like this. Questioning every moment, searching for some truth I might never find. I couldn’t stand it. It would break me.
“You’re not coming back with me,” he said, reading the expression on my face.
“No,” I said, shaking my head and taking another step back onto the sidewalk. “I need to be alone. My friend died and I spent the night with you. I’m repeating the same mistakes. I can’t do that again; I can’t be hurt again. I have to start making better choices.” I walked a couple steps away, then turned back. “Gloria,” I said, “is she still at the vampire court?”
“Yes,” Valerian said.
“Will you do something for me?” He nodded slowly. “Find her,” I said.
“I thought there was no love lost between you and Gloria.”
“There isn’t,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean I want the bitch to die. Find her and make sure she’s not dead, all right?”
He stared at me. “Very well.”
I turned away. It would have to do. I was exhausted, hollowed out. Part of me wanted to fall right back into his arms, lose myself in him just like I had last night. I walked away from him, waiting to hear his voice, hoping he’d tell me to come back, but he never did.
Chapter 33
I was on the bus, halfway back to my apartment, gripping one of the hanging straps and trying not to zone out. I’d had a full day’s sleep in Valerian’s bed, but maybe because my body clock was all screwed up with these half nights and half days, I was still feeling kind of dazed.
Or maybe it wasn’t exhaustion at all; maybe it was the events of the past night catching up with me. Michelle was gone. Left dead in an alleyway with the rats and the trash. It wasn’t right. She deserved so much more than the tragic end she had met.
And then there was Valerian. What had happened last night. What I had done. I needed to get some distance from him. I needed to start making better choices. My mind kept flashing back to last night, not just the sex, the fight before that, the way he’d played with me, not even using half his strength. His smirk, his dark eyes, the glint of the amulet I had given him around his neck. Why had he kept it? If he felt nothing for me, why keep a trinket like that? He was filthy rich. He could buy a thousand pieces just like it, only made of solid gold, not cheaply plated. It didn’t line up with what he had told me at all. And the way he had touched me, so tenderly, like I was precious, like he was memorizing every moment with me, as if he would never get another chance. I sighed, exhausted. I felt wrung out and empty.
The bus pulled to a stop and the doors slid open, people moving past me, shoving up, laden with bags and briefcases. The after-work rush hour still tailing off into the night. I stared sightlessly between bodies, avoiding eye contact as any city dweller would do, when I realized someone was staring at me. Someone I knew. Michelle. Her outline wavering and gray. “Oh my God,” I exclaimed loudly. The businessman beside me jerked and stared at me in confusion, blocking my view of Michelle for a second. When he stepped back, she was gone.
“You all right, miss?” he asked, frowning, edging away from me even as he asked. Clearly, he was afraid crazy was catching.
I stared at him. What should I say? I just saw the ghost of my dead friend? Yeah, that wasn’t going to go down well. “You… you stepped on my toe,” I said after a moment. He looked down at my tough black boots.
“Right,” he said, his frown deepening, and he edged a little further away.
I tried to shuffle past him and get a better look at the back of the bus but the crowd was too thick. I leaned round but I couldn’t see her. Had I imagined it? Had I fallen asleep standing up for a split second and slipped into a dream? No. She had been there, clear as anything, staring straight at me.
The bus drove around a corner, throwing me against the businessman. I pulled myself upright, muttering apologies as the bus slid into the next stop. She was gone as if she had never been there. I must have been imagining it. I raised my hand to scrub at my forehead, turning away from the back of the bus toward the windows. When I lowered my hand she was there again, standing on the sidewalk, pale and silvery, the edges of her body fading to gray. The bus began to pull away and I shouted, “Wait.” And lunged for the closing doors. After a second that seemed to take an age, the doors slid back open and I stumbled out, the sound of the bus engine fading behind me as it pulled away from the sidewalk. I couldn’t see Michelle anywhere.
I spun around, searching and saw a sudden flash of her to my right. I sprinted after it, descending into the half world as I went. Everything around me went shivery and vague. Normally I stood still when I entered the half world. Not everything showed up, and it was easy to walk straight into a table or a chair that had no magical counterpart. It was easier to move through the half world as a spirit, a kind of out-of-body experience. But I couldn’t do that while sprinting down the street. I had to try and keep both the half world and the real present in my mind so I didn’t accidentally run out into traffic.
I didn’t understand how Michelle could be here. How her spirit could reach me when I hadn’t felt any hint of her in the alleyway, the opposite in fact. It had felt like she had been scrubbed out completely. I tried to send tendrils forward to reach her, but there was a sudden loud honking of a car horn and I jumped back into the real world, realizing I had accidentally strayed off the curb. “Fucking crazy,” the driver shouted at me as he zoomed past. I flipped him off, but my distraction had cost me Michelle.
She had to be here somewhere. I reached out, centering myself this time and sending my awareness out faster and stronger than before. The half world around me seemed to pulse with the sudden burst of energy. Nothing, nothing, and then there, at the very edge of my awareness, a kind of flickering gauzy fabric. Something that twisted the normal weft and weave of the veil between the half world and the real. Something aching and strange that set my teeth jangling in my head. It didn’t feel like any spirit or ghost I had ever come across before. I snapped open my eyes, looking in the same direction in the real world and there she was, standing across the stree
t from me. I closed my eyes again, focusing on the half world, and she disappeared, just that scratchy, raw, twisted feeling. It didn’t make sense. How could I see her in the real but not in the half? Had her death affected her spirit somehow? Twisted it? Trapped it? I didn’t know if such a thing was possible but it was the only explanation I could think of. The fact that no vampire bite could do anything of the kind just added to my confusion.
She was speaking, but I couldn’t hear her, too far away, cars zooming back and forth between us on the street. Across the river of cars, she pointed. I followed the line of her finger up, up, up to a glittering apartment building. And at the top, a penthouse, the one I had left only hours earlier. Valerian’s apartment.
Chapter 34
I stared up at the building. Michelle’s ghost was long gone. Why had she led me back here? It didn’t make any sense. I walked into the lobby and pressed the button for the penthouse, stepping into the elevator. I pulled out my phone, intending to dial Valerian, then I hesitated. Should I call him? What exactly was going on here? I needed to get to the bottom of this and I just didn’t know if I could trust him.
I put my phone away, uneasiness twisting my insides. I stared at the keypad. Shit, the code. I cast my mind back to when Valerian had punched it in the night before; the memory bloomed across my eyes. I tapped quickly and the elevator doors closed. It was amazing what your mind could file away under even the most traumatic circumstances. The numbers on the elevator flicked higher and higher until we reached the penthouse floor. The doors slid open smoothly and I walked in. The apartment was as we had left it, our clothes strewn around the place.
For a second I felt a shiver, a kind of echo of a presence, but when I closed my eyes to reach into the half world there was nothing there. Michelle? Or was I simply imagining it?
Valerian was nowhere to be seen. He must’ve done as I asked and gone to the court to find Gloria. I wasn’t sure how long he would be.
Michelle’s ghost must have led me here for a reason. I tentatively walked into the apartment. It felt different without Valerian here. Dangerous, like I was trespassing. The uneasy feeling that had twisted through my guts clenched tight. I didn’t like this. Something was wrong.
I had been so awash with grief, and later desperate lust, that I hadn’t really taken in the apartment. There was a long shining chrome kitchen along one side of the open plan living area. The couch and dining table in the middle and a sunken seating area to the right-hand side. Beyond that the door to the bedroom where I had woken up.
I turned in the other direction and went to the first door, pushing it open. A massive glass desk occupied a corner of the room, tall bookcases filled with foreign language texts and leather-bound tomes, the leather so aged their titles were incomprehensible. I exited the room silently and opened the next, a gym room filled with pristine equipment. I wondered if Valerian ever even used it.
The third was a guest room. The bed was neatly made; I didn’t think it had been used recently. A corner table to my right holding an empty vase. Nothing else. I almost closed the door when I noticed a second door leading off it, a bathroom? I don’t know what it was that made me walk toward it. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find. It certainly wasn’t a pile of bloodied clothes in the middle of the tiled floor.
I stared down at the pile of clothes, vertigo clutching my mind, feeling like I was standing on the edge of a precipice. A black bra, underwear, the torn up remains of what once had been a white shirt, tiny red bows printed on the cuffs. I recognized it. It was Michelle’s.
I hit the ground, my knees cracking hard against the tile, but I barely even felt the pain. How? How could this be here? How could there be a pile of Michelle’s bloodied possessions in Valerian’s apartment? There was no way he could have missed this. A vampire’s sense of smell, like all of their senses, was dialed up to eleven. This couldn’t have been here without him knowing.
The world tilted crazily. Had it been here the whole time we were fucking? I scanned the clothes again, half-unseeing. A man’s sweater, far too small for Valerian, with the same logo that had graced half of the clothes in Oliver’s closet. Next to that was a beautifully hand-embroidered scarf, the red and black pattern the exact same as the coverlet on Sevda’s bed.
My lungs were frozen, I couldn’t breathe. I was choking, gasping. I forced myself up to my feet and stumbled out of the room, the door wide open. Stumbling away until the backs of my knees struck the bed and I collapsed onto it.
“No, no,” I was whispering, shaking my head from side to side. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be Valerian.
I heard the elevator doors chime and I shot to my feet. He couldn’t find me here. I couldn’t let him know what I’d seen. I didn’t know what I was going to do, what I was going to say to him. I was reeling with what I had just found. Where could I go? There was only one way out of the apartment. I stumbled into the corner table, the vase on the top tilting. I reached to grab it, too late, and it crashed to the ground.
“Police, come out with your hands up.”
Wait, police? I raised shaking hands and shouted out, “I’m unarmed.”
“Tiana?”
“Detective Pierce?”
“Stand down, guys, stand down.” Then closer to me “I’m coming in.”
Detective Pierce walked into the room. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m…” I hesitated. “What are you doing here?”
She stared at me. “We received a tip that someone was holding a woman hostage in here. They said they heard screams.”
“Screams?”
“Are you okay? Is he here with you?”
I shook my head, realizing there were tear tracks on my cheeks. I didn’t know when I had started crying. “It’s not that; he’s not here. It’s just, I found—”
She took another step into the room, far enough to see the open door and the pile of bloodied clothes on the floor. Her eyes widened and blood drained from her face. “Holy shit.”
I sobbed. “It’s Michelle’s,” I said. “I recognize the shirt. And the rest, Oliver’s and Sevda’s. I think there are things from all three victims in there.” My words tripped over each other. I stumbled backward, sunk down onto the bed.
“Okay, okay,” she said, raising her radio to her mouth. “Seal off the building,” she barked into it. “This entire area is a crime scene.” She turned to me. “You know where he is?”
“Valerian? He is at the court I think.” I swallowed and forced myself to focus. “I sent him to the court to check on one of the vampires. I don’t know when he’s coming back, if he’s even coming back. I don’t understand how any of this could be here.”
“Did you touch anything?”
I shook my head “No, I walked in a couple places, that’s all. I didn’t move anything.”
“Good,” she said. “All right, I want you to come with me into the other room and give me a statement. We are going to find him, okay? We’ll keep you safe. He’s not going to get you again.”
Get me again? Fuck, was that what this was? Had he missed his chance to kill me the first time and everything else that had come since was just his way of drawing me back into his web, just waiting until he could drain me dry just like he did the others?
It didn’t make any sense. He’d had ample opportunity ever since I gave him the invitation to my apartment. Hell, before that if he had really been watching me all this time. But the evidence. How else could this have gotten into his apartment? His elevator had a code that only I had seen and there was no fucking way he could have missed the blood-soaked clothes being here.
I forced myself up from the bed onto my feet. “Yeah, okay,” I said, taking one last look at the bathroom. Something glinted, looped around the handle of the tap in the sink. I hadn’t been able to see it from where I had been crouched on the floor. My lungs froze. I turned toward the bathroom, taking a trembling step toward it.
“Tiana? What are you doing?”
I ignored Detective Pierce, moving closer as if in a dream, no, in a nightmare. The air around me seemed to solidify and time slowed. I knew what I was going to see even before I got close enough to peer down into the sink. The gold chain trailing down, and at the end, bright gold against the white enamel, was a delicate amulet shaped like a violet. The exact same necklace I had last seen around my sister’s neck three weeks before she died.
No,” I whispered, all my breath escaping me in a rough exhale.
The reason I had never been able to find Violet’s killer was because he had been right there all along, guiding my every move, covering his tracks with seduction. And I had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I had suspected Gloria, I had suspected Kyran, I had suspected any number of vampires at the court, even the queen herself. But not once had I realized the true culprit. Valerian. Valerian had killed Michelle, killed Oliver, killed Sevda. Valerian had killed my sister.
My phone rang, shrill and loud, and I jumped a foot in the air, knocking into Detective Pierce as I spun. “Whoa, steady,” she said.
I scrambled for the phone. Valerian’s name flashed up on the caller ID. “Fuck.” I stared at Detective Pierce.
“You need to answer it. You can’t risk tipping him off.”
“Okay, okay.” I took a deep breath and tapped the speaker icon, holding the phone with a trembling hand.
“Tiana?” Valerian said. “I have seen to Gloria. Where are you? I thought you would be in your apartment.”
“No, I’m not… I’m not in my apartment,” I said.
“I do not like this,” he said. “I can feel something… the connection. There is something wrong.” Something wrong. I choked. Yeah, something was definitely wrong. The man I was starting to fall for all over again was a murderer. “I fear we were followed. There was a black car—” He broke off. “No matter; it is no doubt paranoia. You do not get to be a centuries-old vampire without it.” He laughed softly, but for the first time his laugh left me cold. A centuries-old killer, he meant. “Tell me where you are,” he said. “I’m coming to you.”