by Jenna Black
I held up my hands. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell Anderson you almost lost it.”
He cocked his head, his brows drawing together in puzzlement. “Why not?”
Good question. I’d kept my mouth shut about one of Jamaal’s little incidents before, and it had come back to bite both of us in the ass. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Except …
“Because you didn’t lose it,” I said. “Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, you know?”
He gave a short bark of something that vaguely resembled laughter before taking another long drag on his cigarette. “Some might argue I am a hand grenade,” he said under his breath as he turned from me and unlocked the car, rounding the hood and heading for the driver’s side. I hoped he would put out the cigarette before he got in, but I wasn’t going to make an issue of it. He probably needed its calming effects more than I needed fresh air.
“More like an atom bomb,” I replied, even though he’d clearly signaled the conversation was over and I knew his sense of humor wasn’t exactly well honed.
He gave me a quelling look over the top of the car, but though he didn’t laugh, he also didn’t fly into a rage. For Jamaal, I figured that was a major breakthrough.
The scene of the second attack was a lot less unpleasant than the stinking underpass in Anacostia, though I doubted the victim had appreciated the upgrade. The neighborhood itself wasn’t such great shakes, but the victim had been killed right against the fence that separated the neighborhood from the National Arboretum, an oasis of stately trees and well-manicured lawns. I wondered if he’d been trying to jump the fence to escape his attackers.
There were some houses across the street from the crime scene, their vinyl awnings and bent chain-link fences declaring them less than prime real estate. It was possible there was enough distance between the houses and the fence to keep anyone inside from hearing a disturbance late at night, at least if they were heavy sleepers. Possible but not likely. The cops had canvassed the neighborhood and gotten nothing, and I doubted I’d have any better success, even with Jamaal at my side.
There was still nothing that jumped out at me and yelled “I’m a clue!” so I had Jamaal take me to the third, most recent crime scene.
The third murder had taken place on the grounds of the McMillan Reservoir, which was, of course, closed for the night when we arrived. Jamaal parked on the street with a lovely view of a cemetery, and we walked to the barbed-wire-topped fence that surrounded a series of huge, empty fields, featuring regular circular depressions in the grass. I had no idea what the fields were about, but I made a wild guess that the rows of circular concrete structures that separated them were water towers of some sort. Our victim had been found just beside one of those vine-covered towers.
The crime-scene techs had found what they suspected was blood on the barbed wire atop the fence, so it looked like this victim had tried to escape by jumping a fence just like victim number two. Fat lot of good it had done him. The police were really scratching their heads over how the dogs had managed to follow him, since there were no breaks in the fence or tunnels underneath, and the gate was clear on the other side.
Come to think of it, I was scratching my head over that one, too.
“How did the dogs get past the fence?” I mused under my breath.
“Like this, I’ll bet,” Jamaal said. He took a quick glance around to make sure there were no witnesses, then walked through the fence like it was no more substantial than smoke. I touched the chain links, but for me, they were solid metal.
“How did you do that?” I asked, amazed. I was pretty sure I’d seen Jamaal walk through a locked door before, but we hadn’t been on speaking terms at the time, so I hadn’t ever asked him about it.
“It’s a common ability among descendants of death gods. There’s no way to keep Death out.”
“Right,” I said, nodding. “And Anubis is a death god.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I whirled around, turning my back to the fence and facing the street.
“Wait a second. He’s a descendant of Anubis … a death god … and there’s a cemetery right on the other side of that street.” Something went click in my head. “And didn’t we pass a cemetery right before we got to the last crime scene?”
Jamaal nodded. “Mount Olivet, yeah.”
There were a lot of cemeteries in the area, so it could have been a total coincidence. But then again, maybe not. I frowned as I thought about the scene in Anacostia.
“There weren’t any cemeteries that I saw around the first crime scene,” I said.
“The Congressional Cemetery is right across the river,” Jamaal said.
“You sure know your cemeteries.”
“Descendant of a death goddess, remember?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a police car cruising down the street. It slowed as it went past us, and I figured we looked kind of suspicious loitering by the fence.
“Let’s head back,” I said to Jamaal, starting toward the car. “I think I’ve learned all I’m going to for now.”
The police cruiser picked up its pace as soon as Jamaal and I crossed the street.
When we arrived back at the mansion after our excursion, we saw a white Mazda parked in the circular drive.
“That’s your sister’s car, isn’t it?” Jamaal asked as he pulled into the garage.
“Yep.”
Things were a little bit … strange between Steph and me these days. We’d always been close, ever since her parents had taken me in as a rebellious eleven-year-old troublemaker, but our relationship seemed to be undergoing an adjustment period since I’d become a Liberi. I’d always loved Steph, but it was becoming abundantly clear that I’d never had a whole lot of respect for her. She was the rich and beautiful socialite who lived the easy life, and I was the street-smart ugly duckling who understood how the world “really” worked. At least, that’s how I used to see us.
Steph had gotten hurt—badly—because of me, and I was finally beginning to see just how strong a person she really was. But I’d been treating her like a child in need of protection for a long time, and I was having a hard time backing off and treating her like the responsible adult she was. Which meant I couldn’t hide my disapproval of her relationship—whatever the hell it was—with Blake. That disapproval rubbed her the wrong way, big-time.
Jamaal stayed outside to smoke another cigarette, and I cautiously entered the house, hoping not to run into Steph and Blake. It was amazing how hard a time I had not editorializing whenever I saw them together.
Seriously, though, who could blame me? Blake was a descendant of Eros, and he had the power to arouse an overwhelming and unnatural lust in anyone, male or female, whenever he felt like it. I knew he wasn’t doing that to Steph, but it made me uneasy that he could. And then there was that other major downside to their relationship: according to Blake, he was such a supernaturally good lover that if he slept with a woman more than once, she’d never be satisfied with another man for the rest of her life. On the surface, it sounded like a ridiculous boast, and yet I knew he was dead serious.
Blake had enough of a conscience to keep out of Steph’s bed—so far—but he was a guy, and I had a hard time believing he would go very long without sex. Which meant that someday, he was either going to misplace his conscience and sleep with Steph, or he was going to break her heart. Neither alternative was acceptable to me, but no matter how logically I argued with Steph, she refused to stop seeing him. Maybe she thought the sexual limitations were convenient. After what she’d been through at Alexis’s hands, maybe a relationship with no sex was all she could handle.
I made it up to my suite without encountering anyone and breathed a sigh of relief as I opened my door and stepped into my sitting room. Living in a house with eight other people didn’t leave me with as much alone time as I was used to.
My first clue that something was up should have been that the lights were already on.
I always turned them off when I left the room. But I was a little slow on the uptake, lost in thought, and I took a couple of steps in before I realized I wasn’t going to get that blessed alone time after all.
Steph was curled up on my couch, drinking a cup of coffee, and apparently waiting for me. I almost jumped out of my skin when I caught sight of her, but I managed to keep things down to a soft gasp and an adrenaline spike.
“Have fun on your date with Jamaal?” she asked with a little smile.
“If you call walking around a stinky underpass in Anacostia a date,” I said, sitting down beside Steph and wondering what was up.
She laughed and took a sip of her coffee. “I’ve seen Jamaal, remember?”
My cheeks heated just a little, because yeah, I had to admit, Jamaal was a thing of beauty, and I would have had to be dead not to have noticed. But he’s beautiful in the way that a leopard is beautiful—nice to look at, but you’re a hell of a lot better off if there are some sturdy steel bars between you.
“Just because he’s a hottie doesn’t mean investigating crime scenes with him is romantic or anything. In case you haven’t noticed, the guy’s a psycho.”
Steph had never seen Jamaal in action, but she knew about his previous vendetta against me, and she knew just how violent that vendetta had been. It should have been enough to quell even the slightest hint of attraction in me, but I had a long history of being attracted to the wrong men.
“Nikki …” Steph said in a warning tone, and I realized I might be protesting just a little too much.
“There’s nothing going on between me and Jamaal,” I said in what I hoped was a calm voice. “I’m not a moron.”
Steph laughed. “You are where men are concerned.”
“Says the woman who’s dating a descendant of Eros.”
That killed her amusement in a heartbeat. “Don’t start.”
I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not trying to start anything. Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re lying in wait for me? I know it’s not because you want to talk about relationships.”
Steph scrutinized me. She’s two years older than me, which means she thinks she’s older and wiser. Sometimes she can’t resist dispensing advice, and I was afraid this was going to be one of those times.
I was more relieved than I liked to admit when she sighed and shook her head. “Actually,” she said, reaching for a briefcase on the floor, “in a way, this is a bit about relationships. Just not the romantic kind.”
“Huh?”
Steph popped open the briefcase, withdrew a manila folder, and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked, taking it cautiously from her hand, as if expecting it to bite.
“Your adoption papers,” she said, and I quickly dropped the folder onto the coffee table.
Despite being a private investigator, I’d never had any interest in trying to locate my birth mother. The woman had abandoned me in a church when I was four, and I wanted nothing to do with her or with the baby brother she’d been carrying in her arms the last time I saw her. I knew my adoptive parents, the Glasses, had a whole bunch of paperwork they’d kept for me, in case I ever changed my mind, but I’d never even given a passing thought to asking for it.
“What are you doing with my adoption papers?” I asked.
The Glasses were still on their around-the-world cruise and would be for another six weeks, so I knew they hadn’t given the folder to Steph.
She gave me a chiding look that told me she thought I was being intentionally dense. Maybe I was.
“There’s this thing called a key. You put it in the door, and, voilà, it opens. I thought you might try out this incredible invention yourself and get the file now that the mystery of your origins has become so much more interesting, but I got tired of waiting for you to make your move.”
I looked at her askance. She knew perfectly well I had no intention of tracking down my birth mother. I didn’t really think what I’d learned about myself changed anything. I wanted nothing to do with my birth mother. Even if I wanted to find her, I wasn’t sure it was possible. She’d done a damned thorough job of abandoning me. The police were never even able to find out my last name, and all I could tell them was that my mom and I had been traveling by bus for a long time before she’d taken me to the church and left me there. It wasn’t like she’d purposely put me up for adoption with a nice, neat paper trail.
“I’m really not interested,” I told Steph, grabbing the folder and trying to give it back to her.
“Yes, you are,” she said with total conviction. “It’s possible you got your divine blood through your mother, isn’t it?”
The thought had already occurred to me. I’d even had a dream about the day she’d abandoned me, and in that dream, she’d suddenly developed a glyph on her forehead. But that had to be wishful thinking on my part. It was nice to think that my mom might have been a Descendant and might have been in trouble with the Olympians. If that were the case, I could tell myself she’d abandoned me in an attempt to sever our connection and protect me in case the Olympians caught up with her. But I’m not what you’d call a Pollyanna. It made a nice fantasy, but I was a big believer in Occam’s Razor, and the simplest explanation for her abandonment was that she hadn’t wanted me. I preferred to keep my faint hope that she’d abandoned me for a noble reason, and if I went looking for her and found her, I would most likely destroy that pleasant fantasy forever.
“It’s possible, but I don’t care,” I said, still trying to get Steph to take the folder back. Of course, she wouldn’t.
“I know you do care,” she said gently. “You don’t think I can see how badly you want to know why she left you?”
With a grunt of frustration, I threw the folder onto the coffee table. “I don’t want to know,” I insisted. “I want there to be a lovely, happy ending, where I go searching for her and find her and discover that she left me for my own good. But that isn’t likely, and if she abandoned me because she didn’t want me, then I’d really rather not know. So stop pushing me.”
“I can’t force you to do anything with the information,” Steph said. “You can look for her or not. It’s up to you. But I think you’re wrong. I think you’re the kind of person who’d rather know the truth than be left with a mystery. I know you’ve never been interested in looking for her before, but I think a big part of that was because you didn’t think you had any hope of finding her. Well, now you do.”
Maybe she was right, but I’d had enough crisis in my life lately. I didn’t want to add to it by starting down this road, one that could so easily lead to a heaping helping of pain.
“I’ve got a lot of other stuff on my plate,” I said. “I don’t have time for any personal crap.”
Steph gave me a long-suffering look. “Okay. Fine. Hang out in Denial Land a little longer. Eventually, curiosity is going to get the better of you, and you’ll go looking for those answers. When you’re ready, the file will be waiting for you.”
She stood up, pointedly leaving the folder on my coffee table. I hurried to stand up, too, afraid she was angry with me again, but there was no anger in her eyes, only a hint of pity, which was just as bad, if not worse.
“I love you, you know?” she said. “And I know getting there sucked for you, but I’m glad you became part of our family. I hope you know that.”
My throat felt suspiciously tight, and I found myself giving Steph a hug.
I’m not the most demonstrative person in the world, and I could feel her little start of surprise. But she hugged me back and seemed to accept that hug as a suitable alternative to the words that I couldn’t force out of my throat.
When Steph was gone, I sat on my couch for longer than I care to admit, staring at the folder.
Did I want to find my birth mother? I’d told Steph categorically no, but I knew deep down inside that she was right, that there was a part of me that had always longed to know the truth. Even if it turned out to b
e painful and ugly.
But maybe now wasn’t a good time to go poking around. I already had a supernatural murder case on my plate. One seemingly impossible task at a time seemed like enough.
I left the folder on the coffee table right where it was, the temptation out in the open and staring me in the face, daring me to go searching. I ignored it, instead popping open my laptop and looking for more information on the two identified murder victims.
It was hard not to keep glancing over at it from time to time, though.
FOUR
A few more hours of research on the two identified victims gave me approximately squat.
Different backgrounds, different ages, different socioeconomic status. The only thing I could find in common between them was that they were both white males, which was about all the police had been able to say about the first victim, anyway. It wasn’t exactly a lot to go on, and I had the uneasy suspicion there would have to be another victim before I’d be able to make heads or tails of the case. If I ever could. A pillar of confidence I was not.
Tired and frustrated, I headed down to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. My plan was to ingest large quantities of caffeine and then continue researching the victims’ lives until I found something or my vision went blurry, whichever came first.
My plans took an unexpected detour when I stepped into the kitchen and discovered I wasn’t alone. Anderson was sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, sipping from a cup of something hot and steaming. A quick glance at the coffee maker told me his beverage of choice was probably tea.
Before Anderson and I had had our little talk, I might have peeked into the room, seen him sitting there, and then beaten a hasty retreat. I was tempted even now to just grab a bottle of water from the fridge, but that smacked too much of cowardice. Besides, I was eventually going to have to get over my discomfort around him, seeing as I was living in the same house with him and he was my boss.