by Jenny Allen
“Spencer?” She fought to organize her thoughts through the pounding in her head. “Where was he?”
“He sent Miriah to the airport to pick us up while he chased down a lead. He’s pretty freaked out. He hasn’t heard from her since he called her last night.”
Something else was nagging at her, another important question, but she couldn’t seem to get her brain to work. It felt like a jack hammer was trying to split her skull open. “The phone…” She took several deep breaths, trying to form the words. “Why didn’t he answer?”
“He had to switch it off while chasing down whatever leads he was working on. He forgot to turn it back on.”
Something about that didn’t seem right, but the blood pounding mercilessly in her ears made it impossible to pin it down. Lilith swung her legs off the bed and tried to get to her feet. A dizzy spell hit her like a massive wave and her knees buckled. Chance was right there in a split second, catching her before she fell. “What the hell are you doing, Lil?” One hand held her securely around the waist and the other gently cradled the back of her head.
She sucked in a few steadying breaths before opening her eyes. His voice sounded angry, but his face was full of worry. “I should check the last room. Maybe whoever was here was looking for something, something they didn’t find the first time. Maybe they didn’t find it this time either.”
She definitely wasn’t eloquent with a head wound. She squeezed her eyes closed in a desperate attempt to make her brain function, but when she opened them again all she could think of was how amazing his eyes looked. They were a light hazel brown with flecks of green. Her knees were still weak but she thought it might have slightly less to do with the head injury this time. “Lilith…” He kept his voice calm and even. It was so low that it seemed to roll across her skin like warm velvet. “You can’t even stand on your own right now. We can check the room when you’re feeling a bit better. Please, please, Lily. Just relax for now. Okay?” He wasn’t demanding and angry like he was in the car. This was more pleading. His fingers felt warm against her neck and she didn’t even dare to breath.
Chance closed his eyes, taking in a deep breath and reluctantly lowered her to the bed. He backed away and shook his head. She felt confused and conflicted as he left the room, silently. Maybe the head injury had her imagining things. She closed her eyes and remembered how he’d stared down at her hand. Oh yeah, had to be hallucinating. She shook her head, which of course was a huge mistake. Pain flared to life and she sunk down into the bed. Maybe Chance was right. She should rest for a bit. Just as she finished that thought, a wave of pain and nausea dragged her down and the rest was darkness.
When she woke again, her head felt a million times better. There was still a dull throbbing ache but the world wasn’t spinning anymore. She very slowly sat up, moving her legs off the edge of the bed. Carefully, she pulled herself to her feet and stood there for a moment, just to be certain she wouldn’t fall right over. Thankfully, she managed to stay on her feet, especially since Chance wasn’t here to catch her this time.
She pulled the door open and nearly fell over Chance. She yelped in surprise and stumbled backwards, almost falling. He leapt to his feet with surprising grace. “Sorry, Lily.” He caught her elbow automatically but suddenly backed off. “I… uh…was guarding the door.”
Lilith took a few minutes, trying to remember how to breathe. “What? Guarding it with your ass? Who the hell sits in front of a door?” She bent over with her hands on her knees, waiting for the shaking to stop. She felt like a 90 year old with Parkinson’s.
“I got tired of standing.” He snapped and stalked out of the room.
“Ever heard of a chair?” She called after him. Once the shaking stopped and she could finally breathe again, Lilith slowly started to stand up straight. Something on the wall caught her attention and she turned to face an ornate mirror. Her mouth fell open in pure shock. The right side of her face was a mass of purples, greens and sickly yellows. There were a couple butterfly band-aids on her temple with a bit of dried blood around them. She could only imagine how bad it’d looked hours ago. Well, that would explain Chance’s attitude earlier. She looked like she’d been clocked in the head by a baseball bat and Babe Ruth was swinging for a homerun.
Very tentatively, she touched her fingers against the colorful splotches and winced. It still hurt, but a lot less than it had when Chance tried touching it earlier. Thankfully, vampires do heal faster than humans, just not quite as fast as they do in the movies. She really wished it was true right about now. Walking around in public would be problematic for a couple days. Some hick cop would probably throw Chance in jail for domestic abuse. She laughed thinking of explaining to Gregor just how and why his bodyguard was ended up in the slammer.
A very loud thud startled her out of her daydreams. She whirled around, looking through the open door. Late morning light spilled from the right across an empty room. This must be the last room in the basement. Cautiously, she peeked out of the door and saw Chance cradling his right hand. He was standing in front of the shattered glass door with his jaw clenched so tight it looked painful. There was a large dent in the door frame, just about fist sized.
Lilith glanced down at the large pool of drying blood on the floor and her mouth fell open. She couldn’t take her eyes off the brownish-red stain. She’d lost almost a pint of blood in about a minute. If Chance hadn’t reached her as fast as he did, she would be dead right now. Another loud thud shook her and drew her attention back to Chance. She stepped out of the room and stalked toward him. She was silently thankful that her legs were steady. “Feel better?”
Chance looked up at her, his eyes lit up with anger. This was the reaction she’d expected, but now that she was face to face with it, she was terrified. She just barely managed to stand her ground even though her entire body screamed to run back into the room. She steeled herself and walked straight to him, reaching for his wounded hand. He jerked it away from her with a scowl. “Just leave it.”
“Let me take a look at it.” She lifted her chin, put one hand on her hip and simply held out her other hand. His eyes shifted from hers to her hand and back again. “Seriously, let me take a look at it. Now is not the time to be stubborn.” He didn’t move, just stared at her, or more accurately at the right side of her face. “So you think breaking your hand will make us even? What happens if we get attacked again and you can’t stop it because you had some guilt-fueled moment of self-mutilation? Hand. Now.”
He silently put his hand in hers and she began lightly feeling her way along it. “I don’t think you’ve broken anything.” He winced and drew in a sharp breath. “I assume the first aid kit is in the bathroom?” He nodded, still trying to control his anger, but not daring to meet her eyes.
Five minutes later they were both sitting on the bed. Lilith dabbed hydrogen peroxide over the cuts across his knuckles. Chance was still silently sullen.
“Thirty-seven.” Chance mumbled as she reached for the antibacterial cream. Lilith tilted her head and looked at him in confusion.
“What?”
Chance stared down at his hand. “Thirty-seven. That’s how many times I’ve saved Gregor’s life in the last 6 years.” He paused and she somehow knew he just needed to talk, so she didn’t say anything. She just waited for him to continue. “I’m with you for 24 hours and can’t even keep you from getting hurt. Fuck, you almost died tonight. This is my job!” The anger started to seep back into his voice.
Lilith dropped the band-aid she was holding and grabbed his chin firmly, pulling his face up to look at her. “Listen to me. I gave you orders. I almost got myself killed…”
“No!” Chance’s wounded hand clenched in her hand. “It’s my job to determine the safety of the situation. I should never have let you come down her by yourself.”
“Come on, Chance.” His anger made her uncomfortable. “You saved my life, Chance. You did not fail.”
His hazel eyes narrowed as he stared at her
. It felt like being the target of an intense laser and it made her want to crawl to the other side of the bed. She managed to stay right where she was out of pure stubbornness. “If you fail at your job, more people die. How would you feel if you missed some crucial piece and innocent people suffered because of it?” Well, that certainly hit home. It was every investigators worst fear. “I fucked up last night.”
Chance was right to some extent. She didn’t agree that he was the one that screwed up, but if the roles were reversed she’d feel the same way. Still, that didn’t fix the immediate problem. She needed him to snap out of it and focus. “Look, Chance. I get that you feel responsible, but I need you to stop feeling guilty. You have to stop beating yourself up because I see this going one of two ways right now. Either you are going to guilt yourself into a coma which will get me killed, or you’ll become so fucking overprotective that I’ll have to kill you myself. So enough! You had your moment. You beat the shit out of that door. So snap out of it, Chance.” She gestured at the right side of her face. “This, this will heal. So let’s get to work. Okay?”
Chance just stared at her. For once she couldn’t even read his face. Finally, he blinked a few times and nodded. “You’re right. When did you become so brilliant?” One by one each and every emotion left his face, leaving his business-like attitude. Lilith went back to bandaging his hand since she didn’t really have an answer to his rhetorical question. “And for the record…” She looked up at the sound of his voice and saw a glint in his eyes. “I would totally kick your ass if you tried to kill me.”
“Is that so?” She arched an eyebrow and pressed the band-aid down on his hand with a little extra enthusiasm. Chance jumped and yanked his hand back.
“God, you’re evil.” He tried to look pissed off but only succeeded in grinning like a bobcat.
Lilith flipped him off and slammed the first aid kit closed. “Well, if you’re done punching doors, I want to check out Duncan’s office and I’d rather you be there in the room.”
“So you don’t think I’ll compromise the scene?”
“There hasn’t been much in the way of forensic evidence anyway. There were a few drops of blood between the door to his office and the side basement door, but it wasn’t much and now it’s been contaminated with…” She hesitated for a moment, letting it sink in. “With my blood.” She rushed through the words, not just for her own benefit, but for Chance’s as well. “Just don’t touch anything.”
She took her time getting up and looked around the room. “What did you do with my kit?”
Chance nodded toward the door. “I set it against the wall in the main room. You may need to clean off the bottom.” He paled a bit, the whole event obviously replaying in his mind.
Lilith looked him over for a moment. She was worried about him, but saying anything more would just make things worse. Chance looked up at her and smiled, forced at first but it soon spread into something sweeter.
Duncan’s office was full of dark oak furniture. The room wasn’t very large but he utilized every square inch. Any wall space left between the towering bookshelves was covered with antique sketches, old maps and medieval rubbings. Chance leaned against the door frame so he could watch her and still keep an eye on the outer room, especially the shattered glass door.
The hundreds of books stacked on the shelves seemed to center around medieval times. There were tons of books on History from all over the world, a very large section on alchemy, and even some on superstitions and legends. On the desk itself sat a stack of newer books on Quantum Physics, String Theory and Herbal medicines.
Once she slipped on her neoprene gloves, she began flipping through the stack of papers on his desk. “It seems like Duncan was doing a massive amount of research into something.”
Chance shrugged and glanced around. “Or everything. Maybe he just liked to read non-fiction.”
Lilith opened one of the large drawers in the desk and pulled out a handful of notebooks. She scanned a few of the handwritten pages. “He was definitely researching something. These are full of his notes.” She stacked up the notebooks and looked over at her kit on the floor in the doorway. “Hey can you grab a large bag out of my kit. They’re in the bottom center.”
Chance looked confused as he held up what looked like a folded, brown paper shopping bag. “This?”
Lilith glanced up and nodded absently.
He stepped into the room just enough to slip the bag on the table before returning to his guard post. “Let me guess. You don’t have enough funding so you pick up supplies at Apple Tree Supermarkets?” The grin on his face would have normally made her just flip him off. However, this was a hell of an improvement from his earlier attitude and she was grateful for the return of normal Chance, so she indulged him. At least it kept them off the subject of her attack.
“Cute. To answer your question, no. These are issued by the department for most evidence collection. We only use plastic bags for evidence that is air sensitive, like bloody clothes or really anything with a liquid sample on it. Plastic can contaminate some evidence and the restricted air movement can be damaging as well.” Lilith didn’t glance up to gauge his reaction. She just grabbed the brown paper bag and stuffed the notebooks in. She didn’t think this was the mother lode that her attacker was looking for, it was way too easy. On the other hand, she was very curious to see what Duncan was researching.
“Hmm. Interesting.” Chance earned kudo points for actually sounding interested. Typically when she nerded out about work, people gave the deer-in-headlights look and quickly changed the subject. “So it’s not like CSI with all the cool plastic bags for everything. Wow. I feel so disillusioned right now.”
Lilith glanced up and chuckled. “Aww. Did I shatter your sense of reality?”
Chance’s lips spread into a sly smile. “Somehow I think I’ll live.” There was a familiar warmth in his eyes that made her feel better.
Lilith returned his smile briefly before returning to her work searching the desk. She found a digital voice recorder, an old tape recorder and about a dozen cassette tapes amid the chaos on top of the desk and shoved them all into the bag with the notebooks.
Once she had the desk cleaned off, she pulled out a vial of white print dust which would show up better on the dark wood. Using her brush she set out a light coating while Chance watched in fascination. There were only a few prints on the desk and after comparing them, they were all the same.
The blood trail from the hall told her nothing she didn’t already know. It led to Duncan’s chair. Frustration started to really nag at her, making the right side of her head hurt. There had to be something here. Assuming that her attacker was also Duncan’s attacker, he had to be here for something. She just needed to find it.
Well over an hour passed as she dusted surfaces, and finally found a second set of prints. It probably belonged to Spencer or Miriah, but it was worth taping and running through the computer. If it did belong to one of them, she could rule it out in a matter of seconds. She’d been working on a small database, starting with close family members, to make running prints easier. Kind of like a vampire version of AFIS.
TV shows have an impossible turnaround. The average time for results from Automated Fingerprint Identification System was 27 minutes and it isn’t as automated as people think. Several results were kicked to a fingerprint analyst who then determined the closest match. The human element is still considered crucial. Computers were too easy to tamper with. It took longer than a few clicks, some flashing images and instant results.
Of course, the crimes that really concerned her were usually within a small group. There were cases, of course, where vampires were the victims and humans were the culprits, but in those cases she had no choice but to use the same systems as everyone else. Her pet project just made it faster for her to identify her own kind.
When she opened the last desk drawer, it didn’t look quite right though she didn’t really know why. She started pulling out rand
om junk, tossing it carelessly on the floor. Once the drawer was empty she stared at it, the puzzle working through her mind. What was bothering her about it? Her eye caught a dark splotch on the interior face of the drawer. She leaned in to get a better look and a shock ran through her. There was a rough arrow faintly burned into the wood. She’d seen the design before.
“Throw me a pocket knife.”
Chance crossed the room to hand it to her. “I can’t believe you just told me to throw a knife at you.”
Lilith snatched the knife and flipped it open. She pried at the bottom of the drawer along the edges. It had to be a false bottom, not only because the drawer looked deeper on the outside, but also because she needed to find something, anything. Besides, the crude arrow couldn’t be a coincidence. It was the same one that mysteriously showed up at her New York apartment. Someone wanted her to find this, someone who managed to get an envelope all the way to her in New York without using the post office.
She finally caught the edge of the prefab wooden bottom with the edge of her gloved fingers. A thrill of excitement ran through her as she popped it up with a small splintering sound. She stopped pulling and slid her slender, gloved hand between the drawer and the fake bottom, feeling her way around until her fingers brushed over a thin container. Bull’s eye. “Chance, come give me a hand.”
He rushed over and stared down into the drawer. “What do you need?”
Lilith motioned her head toward her hand. “I need you to pull back on the piece of wood, give me enough room to get this out.” She didn’t bother telling him to pull on gloves. Obviously the drawer hadn’t been touched recently.
“I could just pull it out for you.” He started forward, grabbing for it.
“No. Don’t break it. I want to leave it in tact. If whatever’s under here is really so important, I don’t want anyone to know we have it. Maybe no one else would ever think to look under here, but I guarantee if it’s broken, they’ll know something is missing. Until we know what’s going on, I don’t really want to make myself a bigger target.”