by Nalini Singh
Coby's father pointed a shaking finger toward the black garbage bags on the ground beside the Dumpster. "Who does that?" Making his hand into a fist, he thumped it against his heart. "Who just throws a human being away?"
Ashwini had no answer for him. "Did you come out here earlier in the day?"
"I did," Coby said. "I do the cleanup after the lunch rush. It would've been maybe two thirty, three at the latest." He rubbed his hands over his sweater-covered arms. "She wasn't in the Dumpster and I didn't see no one hanging around."
Ashwini made a note to check for surveillance cameras anywhere nearby, the cops having already ascertained that the restaurant didn't have one. She didn't have high hopes; the area wasn't wealthy enough for cameras to be an automatic add-on, but not crime-ridden enough that surveillance was a prerequisite for insurance. Here, neighbors looked out for one another, but most places would've closed at least an hour before, and while this restaurant butted up against the Vampire Quarter, it wasn't on a popular pedestrian route for clubgoers, making it doubtful she'd be able to locate any eyewitnesses.
It all added up to tell her that the person who'd chosen this Dumpster knew the area well; he or she was either a local or lived nearby. Unfortunately that left her with a massive pool of suspects. Meeting Coby's dark eyes, then Tony's, she said, "Do either of you remember if there were other footprints in the snow when you came out tonight? Your own from before?"
"No, there was fresh snow, with only a cat's paw prints," Coby answered. "I remember, 'cause I stood in the doorway and thought about how it would make an awesome decoration for a cake, tiny paw prints on white icing, maybe a cat sitting on the edge." He began to smile, but it faded a heartbeat later. "That was before . . ."
His father reached up to pat his boy's face. "No, you don't let anyone steal your dreams, especially some piece of scum who'd hurt a woman that way." Pulling down his son's face with weathered hands on his cheeks, Tony said, "We'll go bake that cake and we'll share it with our guests tomorrow, celebrate this woman's life, give her something better than the ugliness of her death."
Waiting until his son had nodded in response to his empathetic words, Rocco looked at Ashwini. "If she doesn't have family, we'll take care of her funeral, make sure she's treated right."
"Thank you," she said, conscious it would be a monetary sacrifice for what appeared to be a small family business. "I'll contact you once we know her circumstances and the details of when the pathologist will release her remains." It would be as ashes, the state of the woman's body too explosive to risk further exposure.
Tony nodded and led his son away. "I'll leave the door open," he said over his shoulder. "Anyone needs coffee, you come in."
The older cop accepted his offer on behalf of herself and her partner, both of them having been out here for over an hour. Shaking her head when the cop stopped in the doorway to check if Ashwini wanted some, she walked over to Janvier and showed him the photos Coby had taken. "She was dumped sometime between two thirty in the afternoon and eleven at night, when the boy discovered her. We can narrow that down if we find out when it snowed in this area after two thirty."
Janvier handed back her phone, his anger an icy film over the green of his eyes. "Before we do anything else," he said, his voice rigid with control, "we have to make sure news about the condition of the body won't spread. She deserves better, but this could affect an entire territory."
Ashwini normally had no time for politics, but this particular political situation could quickly turn deadly--the archangels were all watching New York for any signs of fresh weakness. More, as Janvier had pointed out earlier, the city had only just started to heal from its losses. One more kick could tear the wounds open again.
"The senior cop told me she didn't radio in any details, only the fact that they'd found a deceased female." Ashwini had serious respect for the officer and her quick-thinking response in contacting the Guild by using her phone rather than the radio. "With this location, anyone listening in would've assumed she was a honey feed who serviced one of the fringe clubs. The media aren't going to respond to anything as 'routine' as a honey feed death."
The honey feeds--male and female--were part of the gray world. Light didn't penetrate that world and it was one that "ordinary" people didn't like to think about. Once lost, the people in the gray were forgotten, and that was both sad and an ugly indictment on society.
This time, however, that callous attitude would work to their advantage.
"That leaves the restaurant owner and his son," Janvier said, his eyes on the open doorway through which the senior cop had exited a couple of minutes earlier with two steaming mugs of coffee. Both patrol officers were now at the open end of the service passage. "Boy had the photos."
Ashwini frowned. Yes, she'd deleted the images, but Coby had had plenty of time to e-mail a copy to himself, or to someone else. "I'll talk to them," she said, fairly certain the teenager wasn't the type to leverage fame out of atrocity.
"No." Stripped of any hint of charm, Janvier's expression exposed the relentless will at the core of his nature. "We'll talk to the boy and his father together."
"These are good people." Ashwini folded her arms. "They don't need to be terrified in repayment for being honest enough to call in the body when they could've allowed sanitation to pick it up, no one the wiser." Where Coby and his father had seen a person, many others would've seen garbage.
Janvier touched his fingers to her jaw, a cool, slightly rough brush that was over before she could protest. "Fear is what keeps the mortals alive in a world of predators." Unspoken was that he was one of the predators.
Ashwini had always known that, always seen the complex strata of him, because the charm? It was real, too. "I'll do the talking." Taking a minute to speak to the crime scene techs to make sure the victim would be transported to the Guild morgue as fast as possible, she headed toward the restaurant.
"You don't want her out in the cold," Janvier said, stopping her on the doorstep.
Ashwini didn't deny her irrational but visceral impulse. No one should have to lie in the cold dark after having been so brutally tortured. "Come on," she said, forcing her eyes away from the body so emaciated that it made barely a ripple underneath the tablecloth that was its shroud, "let's do this."
11
Inside the restaurant, father and son were cleaning up, the scent of baking in the air.
"Would you like a cup of coffee?" Coby asked.
"No, thank you," Ashwini said to the sad-eyed teenager and reached out in unspoken sympathy--to close her hand over his where it lay on the counter. She saw Janvier start to move toward her, shot him a look that told him to back off. His expression became flat, shoulders unyielding, but he didn't interrupt, though his gaze remained locked on her face.
Coby was too young for her to sense anything accidentally. It would've been different had he been a friend or family. That painful quirk was why she'd known things as a child no girl should know--like the fact that her divorced aunt picked up strange men in bars every Friday and that her grandfather mourned the death of the unsuitable girl he hadn't been permitted to marry.
Tonight, she consciously focused her ability as she did only in rare circumstances, and all of Coby slammed into her: naked pain and heartache, love for a girl and for his family, the horror and pity he'd felt at seeing the body, worry for his father . . . so many pieces of the teenager's soul.
Ashwini didn't like drowning in another's life, was afraid one day she'd go under and not find her way out. But she didn't want Coby to be hurt, didn't want Janvier to become a monster to the boy and his father. So she ignored the fear, found what she needed in relation to both, the boy's memories of his father enough to reinforce her gut feeling about the man.
Breaking contact, she said, "Thank you for what you did today."
Eyes shining, the teenager looked away, while his father allowed his tears to fall.
"Please don't mention the details of what you saw to anyo
ne."
"I don't ever want to put that nightmare in anyone else's head," Tony said to his son's jerky nod.
Janvier held his silence until they were outside and far enough away from the patrol officers that they wouldn't be overheard. When he spoke, his voice vibrated with fury. "You opened yourself up to everything in the boy's head."
"Yes, I did." It had been a violation, but she told her conscience that she'd saved Coby from a far bigger violation. Should the Tower even think Coby or his father had--or would--disseminate any information, the reprisal would be icily cold, darkly terrifying.
"I've survived far worse than the memories of a sweet boy and his father." An angel had once gripped her wrist, twisted it in an effort to haul her close so he could "taste" her. She'd thrust a heavy-duty hunting knife into his eye, because there really was no way to escape an angel that old except with surprise and speed and smarts.
She'd done so by the skin of her teeth--and with so much of the creep's life stuffed into her head that she'd thrown up the instant she was in a hideout. "You might have lived more than two hundred years," she said to Janvier, "but I don't think you know the depth of cruelty and horror some immortals are capable of."
Jaw working, Janvier lifted his hands as if to grab her upper arms but dropped them halfway. "You infuriate me." She had no care for herself. He'd seen her in agony after unavoidable contact with an immortal old and twisted--never in public, of course, never where anyone could see the weakness.
Janvier had simply happened to be there and he knew her well enough to pick up the signs of pain she was so good at concealing. So he'd engineered their exit, gotten her into a room where she could collapse, her hands clutched to her stomach. He'd never felt as helpless as when he'd had to watch her suffer without being able to do a fucking thing about it.
Now, she planted her feet in a combative stance, hands on her hips. "Yeah, well, you're infuriating me right back."
The two of them went silent as the morgue van pulled in, the body loaded into it with care, the doors shut. The crime scene techs continued to work, but it was obvious they weren't getting much.
However, that wasn't Janvier's priority right now. "You took a dangerous risk."
"He's a boy. There was no horror in him, only sorrow."
Janvier knew she hadn't given him the right, but he took it anyway, reaching out to grip the side of her neck with his hand, shift his body close to hers. "You didn't know that when you touched him." He was so angry at her for putting herself in that position. "You didn't know what would rush into your head, sorciere."
"I told you"--her eyes burned into him, full of a thousand secrets--"witches were burned at the stake. I'm just a woman."
A woman who saw through the veil people put between themselves and the world, who could strip away lies to reveal the heart of darkness that lived within mortal and immortal both . . . and for whom immortals were the enemy of her sanity. He ran his thumb over her pulse, but she wasn't there any longer, having escaped his grip with hunter slickness.
Walking to the techs, she hunkered down to talk to them, clearly hoping to find something, though she had to know the chance was low. Criminals could be stupid, but Janvier didn't think this was one of those times. There was something very cold about throwing a human being in the garbage. It took a soul of ice to do that and walk away, and someone that devoid of feeling would cover his or her tracks with the same calculated coldness.
Again, he thought of Lijuan and of how the Archangel of China had fed from her troops. Naasir had run through brutal fighting to get word to Raphael about the enemy archangel's ability to regenerate using the life force of others, had ended up with his back all but sliced open. Still behind enemy lines, Ashwini and Janvier had worked to slow down the hostile forces any way they could.
"Is she yours?"
Naasir's question, silver eyes gleaming against the rich brown of his skin.
"Touch her and find out."
"You better hurry, Cajun."
Janvier was going as fast as he dared, but he feared it wasn't fast enough. Ashwini was a hunter; hazard pay was a standard part of hunter contracts for a reason. And if--when--war came to the city again, she'd fight the enemy right beside him. The diagonal slice through her torso in the final hours of this battle had come within a hairsbreadth of nicking her heart and perforating other internal organs. Death could've stolen her from him had the vampire who'd attacked her shifted position a single inch before he struck.
Furious defiance burned under his skin.
He'd watched everyone he ever loved die of old age. They had wanted to go, having lived happy, contented lives, and he hadn't tried to force them to hold on, to apply for a chance at vampirism and near-immortal life. He was too selfish to be that understanding when it came to Ashwini; he would not watch her star go out.
Not her.
12
Dmitri moved his bishop on the chessboard in the flickering light of the candle that burned in a holder to his left. It put him in prime position to capture Aodhan's king.
Illium leaned back on his hands, wings lying spread on the carpet. "Looks like he has you, Sparkle."
"I need to kill you. Later," Aodhan muttered, staring at the board.
The three of them were sitting in the aerie at the very top of the Tower. It had been Dmitri's lookout during the battle, the wraparound windows offering three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visibility. New York glittered beneath them in every direction, the Tower planted on a field of stars.
It reminded Dmitri of the brilliant quiet of a tiny cottage on a small farm long ago, before either Illium or Aodhan had been born. The nights had been so clear above his long-ago home that he'd stayed awake long past when a farmer should be asleep, simply to watch the stars with his wife.
The memory of Ingrede's smile, her kiss under the starlight, it no longer drew heart's blood. Because his heart had come back to him. She was changed and so was he, but they were who they needed to be for each other.
Honor loved it in the aerie and often kept him company when he had care of the Tower at night. Tonight, however, she was working on an intriguing historical document in their apartment, having laughingly told him to have fun with the "boys." The "boys" were the two lethal angels with him--one sprawled to his left, the other frowning in concentration in front of him.
The aerie had no furniture, the three of them seated on the floor.
Not that it was spartan now that it was no longer a war room. The floor was covered by a fine Persian rug Dmitri had brought out of personal storage, having picked it up a hundred years past, in a market along the old Silk Road. It had been hand-knotted by a gifted artisan, the colors ruby red and yellow-gold with hints of midnight blue.
On top of it lay the large, flat multihued cushions Montgomery had supplied from the warehouse where he stored so many things, Dmitri had no idea of the inventory. That was strictly Montgomery's domain--except when the butler took offense at how another immortal was treating a priceless work of art and decided to "relocate" it to his own care.
Thankfully, Dmitri had only had to handle that once. It had taken him three hours in the warehouse to unearth the four-inch-tall statue of a goddess of the erotic arts. The piece had been exquisite enough to prompt Dmitri to offer to buy it from the vampire who owned it, but the man wouldn't part with his treasure until a decade ago. At which point Dmitri had placed the statue in Montgomery's private sitting room at the Enclave house.
Most often, the butler displayed his purloined items in Raphael's home, and the archangel made sure each piece was quietly reunited with its owner. Many men--angel, vampire, or human--would've dismissed a servant with such a peccadillo, but Montgomery was as loyal to Raphael as any of the Seven, and the sire understood the value of such loyalty.
"A flaw does not make a man worthless," Raphael had once said to Dmitri. "Else I would've been discarded long ago."
Now, Illium snacked on the sugared dates Montgomery had supplied, the sweetmeats
part of an array of food that would tempt any appetite. Reaching out, Dmitri took a single grape, enjoying the fresh, sweet flavor and imagining feeding Honor the taste from his lips.
"Date?" Illium said with a glint in his eye.
Dmitri ignored the painted wooden bowl the angel held out. "I'm going to help Aodhan kill you--after I torture you by making you drink champagne while listening to Mozart." The blue-winged angel hated both.
Illium grinned, unafraid of Dmitri and Aodhan's combined wrath. "Don't tell me you're still heartbroken over Favashi," he said, naming the archangel who had vast date plantations in her lands. "I won't believe you--I admit I wasn't even a twinkle in my mother's eye during your liaison with the lovely Archangel of Persia, but I've since seen you together, and you never looked at her the way you look at Honor."
"Illium has the right of it in this, Dmitri. Honor is your heart." Aodhan's crystalline eyes refracted Dmitri's face into countless fragments, the fine grooves around the angel's mouth the only sign of the pain he continued to bear as his injuries healed.
The neck wound had closed first, his immortal body concentrating its efforts on the most dangerous threat. His damaged wing had come next, but while Aodhan could fly short distances, and had been encouraged to do so by the healers in order to strengthen the weak new muscle, it'd be several more weeks before he could return to full flight status.
His broken bones had healed, but his left arm, as the most minor injury in immortal terms, had only regenerated partway to his elbow at this stage. It was currently covered by a neatly pinned white shirtsleeve in deference to the fact that cold could sometimes retard healing by diverting the body's resources into generating warmth.
It spoke to the power in Aodhan's veins that he'd healed at such speed. Most angels his age would've still been bed-bound, their recovery counted in months, not weeks. The best news, however, had nothing to do with Aodhan's physical health. No, it had to do with a slow but deep healing of the soul.