by M. J. Scott
“Can you identify anything from that?” I said, hoping conversation would distract me and stop me disgracing myself by puking at Dan’s crime scene. If a suicide was considered a crime scene.
Dan shook his head. “Unless there’s something in the car, it’s pretty unlikely. No one’s ever been able to extract DNA from vamp ash. Burns too hot to leave any bone fragments.” He stared at the car, face twisted in a frown. He smelled nervous. “Anything from Jase?”
I shook my head and walked to him, wanting to breathe Dan-scent instead of dead vampire. I moved slowly, peering at the car, hoping that maybe there’d be something useful like a ‘hey, I’m not Jase’ sign left behind by the mystery vamp. Nothing. Just various degrees of heat damage and stink. I took another step and a glint of silver by the front tire caught my eye.
“I think there’s something down there.” I pointed.
“Where?”
Dan crouched down to look. I squatted beside him to stay close, filling my nose with his comforting smell.
“What the hell is that?” Dan straightened and yelled for some gloves and an evidence bag. Guess it was treated like a crime scene after all. One of the cops jogged over with the stuff Dan had asked for.
When Dan straightened the second time, he held a charred brownish lump. The top of it was partially covered with twisted silver. The whole thing stank like the burned remains of God knows what.
Dan’s nose flared with disgust and he held it away from his body. “I have no idea what this is but maybe it will help.”
The partially melted silver had formed the sort of angles that could give Escher a headache but something about them tugged at my memory. I leaned closer.
“Ash? Do you know what this is?”
I studied it, trying to make sense of the silver, trying to undo the damage done by the fire and imagine the thing whole and untwisted. Angles. Points. Teeth. An image of the muzzled vamp from the club flashed in my mind and I jerked backward.
“Ash?” Dan repeated, waving the burned lump near my face.
“There was a vamp at Maelstrom,” I said as the returning memories sped my pulse. “He wore a mask, like a muzzle almost. Brown leather with silver fangs over the mouth.”
“You think this could be that?” His voice went deep.
I looked up to meet his gaze. There were shadows under the silver eyes. Shadows in their depths too. Worry. Fear. My fault. Guilt added another thread to the knotted emotions riding my gut. “Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe.” It could be but the damage was pretty extensive and I’d only seen the muzzled vamp for thirty seconds or so.
Dan frowned. “You saw this vamp last night? At Maelstrom? When?”
“When we first came in, just after that bald guy got in my face.”
“Was he alone?”
I closed my eyes, searched for the memory again. “There was a woman with him. Holding his leash.” Dark hair. Dark eyes. Black painted lips blowing me a kiss. The image in my head made my spine crawl.
“Did you know her?”
“I don’t know anyone who hangs out in dark clubs.”
The frown lines between his eyebrows deepened as he stared down at the muzzle—if that was what it was. “I don’t like it. It’s too much of a damn coincidence. First you see a vamp in the club wearing something like this, then there’s a vamp suicide right outside your office.”
“There must be close to two hundred people who work in my building,” I pointed out. “And thousands more in all the buildings round here. What makes you think this has anything to do with me?”
“Instinct,” he said shortly. “I’m going to get the security tapes from the club.”
Esteban was going to love that. But Dan’s expression suggested he wasn’t going to be dissuaded. A legitimate excuse to rattle Esteban’s chains added to the suspicion that this suicide had something to do with me would make him pretty damned determined. I didn’t want another argument. Plus, a small part of me couldn’t shake off the feeling that maybe, just maybe, Dan was right.
I was trying to work out how to say ‘please try not to piss off my new client too badly’ without starting an argument when my cell rang. Jase. Finally. A smile of relief spread across my face as I answered. “Where were you?”
“I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you,” he said with a laugh. “What’s up?”
The sound of his voice made me feel like I could breathe again. Safe. “I’ll tell you when you get here.”
* * *
By the time Dan’s team arrived, so had Jase. He called me from the office.
“I’m here. What’s all the commotion down there?”
“I’ll be up in a minute.” I didn’t want to tell Jase about a vamp suicide over the phone. Most vamps didn’t like to talk about even the possibility of dying.
“I’ve checked the messages. Your aunt called already.”
Aunt Bug? Crap, had she seen something on TV about the suicide? I scanned the crowd and sure enough, there were several pairs of microphone-toting reporters and cameramen. Crap. No doubt there’d be some sensational story on the news already. Or a video on YouTube. There were always people willing to stir up tension between humans and supernaturals. “Did she say what it was about?”
He sighed. “The memorial, what else?”
Oh God. The memorial. I’d forgotten. Next week was the thirteenth anniversary of the Caldwell massacre. The night McCallister Tate had slaughtered thirty people in my hometown.
Including my family. And my best friend.
Damn.
“Give me two minutes.” I hung up and told Dan where I was going. Then walked across the street, trying not to think about the memorial. Which was about as successful as you’d expect.
Every year Caldwell held a service for the victims and my aunt insisted I go, even though I hated it. This year was going to be worse. This year, they were trying to make me into some sort of hero because I’d killed Tate.
If they’d known the details, they wouldn’t be so impressed. Biting someone’s head off—literally—is not so heroic for your average person. But the FBI had kept the specifics of the death quiet and just released pictures of Tate’s coffin being delivered to the crematorium for incineration.
Better safe than sorry, even with no head.
To the general populace of Caldwell, I was the one who’d finally brought some closure to a lot of shattered lives.
Someone to be admired.
But given that most of them had an aversion to supernaturals close-up, I wasn’t sure I wanted them to know all the gory details. Particularly the fact that I was a werewolf now. I wasn’t sure how far that little piece of news had traveled.
Or what my reception would be like once the town knew the truth.
Which was why I didn’t want to go.
And why I’d been avoiding my aunt.
* * *
Jase was waiting for me with coffee and a lot of rapid-fire questions about what was going on downstairs.
I took the coffee and drained half the cup, trying to kick-start my brain. The thirty seconds or so didn’t really reveal a brilliant way to avoid telling Jase the truth so I just said “Vampire suicide.”
Jase went pale. On him pale is very pale.
“Hey.” I reached out to grab his hand. His skin was cool under my fingers and I wanted to warm him up. But you can’t warm a vampire. “It’s okay.”
He nodded but his color didn’t come back and his eyes turned toward the window. “Sunrise?”
I nodded, wondering what he was thinking. Jase had chosen to become a vampire when he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer at twenty-three. Suicide wasn’t a concept that sat well with him. All life was good. “Seems that way.”
“Do they know who it was?”
“No, there’s no ID. The Taskforce will look into it.” I had no idea how you tracked down a missing vampire. I sipped more coffee, waited for the next question.
His gaze came back to me. “You thoug
ht it was me,” he said, sounding hurt. “That’s why you’ve been calling. Ash, you know I would never...”
“I know,” I said, gripping his hand tighter. I knew. Jase wouldn’t leave me that way. We’d been friends before he turned and I hadn’t been able to push him out of my life afterward. I was the one who’d flirted with suicide after I’d been infected.
I shivered. Too much death. Jase was right. Life was something to cling to. Fighting Tate—knowing I might die at his hands—had taught me that. “I know. But Dan was worried because of the location.” No need to tell Jase just yet that Dan was maybe a little spooked because of Esteban. One set of bad news at a time. “And then I couldn’t get hold of you.”
Gray-green eyes studied me for a moment and then he smiled. “Next time have a little faith.”
“Let’s hope there isn’t a next time,” I said with another shiver. If random vampires wanted to start frying themselves in Seattle, they could do it far away from me. The lingering cold feeling stroking my spine reminded me that maybe it wasn’t so random. Maybe Dan was right.
God. When was my life going to get back to normal?
We sat in silence a little longer while I finished my coffee. But procrastination wasn’t going to help anything. I couldn’t help investigate vampire suicides but I could do my job. “If we’re here, we might as well get to work.”
“Call Bug,” Jase called after me as I headed into my office. I stashed my bag and turned on my computer, ignoring the red message light on my phone.
After everything that had happened at Maelstrom and afterward, I wasn’t sure I was up to Bug right now. Not when I was going to have to tell Jase we’d acquired Lord Esteban as a client and ask him about how I might fend off vampire sex mojo. I needed more coffee before I faced any of it.
Coffee rebooted, I fired up my email. More messages. Including one from Rhianna Anders. Bug I could ignore for a little while but Rhi? Tate had killed my family and her big sister, Julie. My best friend. Rhi and I had bonded in grief. She was, after Bug, the closest thing to a relative I had.
And I hadn’t talked to her since before Dan had turned up in my office a few months back.
Great. More guilt. Plus, no doubt, she was emailing to nag about the memorial too.
I opened the message. Yep. She wanted to know if I’d be there. So I fired off a quick ‘sure, can’t wait, see you then, how’s life?’ response then stared at the phone. The red ‘message waiting’ light shone accusingly.
I sighed. Might as well get it over with. If I didn’t call back, Bug would just keep calling. So deal with her, then with telling Jase about our new client. “No time like the present,” I muttered and dialed her number.
“Hello, Aunt B,” I said after she answered with a crisp “Good afternoon.”
“I need to know when you’re arriving on Friday.”
Bug didn’t believe in beating around the bush. “I’m not sure,” I hedged. Mainly because I was actually planning to go down Saturday morning, attend the memorial service and then get the hell back to Seattle before anything could go wrong.
“It makes it hard for me to plan, if you don’t tell me.”
She sounded tired and I pulled a face as guilt pinged. I wasn’t the only one who’d lost someone in the massacre. My family was her family after all. And she’d lived in Caldwell all her life. She’d known every single victim. Half of them had been her students at Caldwell High.
But that was another part of the reason why attending the service was so hard—I hated seeing Bug sad instead of fiery.
“I’ll try,” I said. “But I’ve picked up a couple of new clients recently, so I might not be able to finish early enough to make it on Friday.” No way was I telling her that one of those clients was Lord Esteban. She already gave me enough grief about the fact I was still working on the Tate case. She figured Tate being dead was good enough, problem solved.
“Try hard, dear.” She hung up leaving me feeling even guiltier. I knew she worried that something else might happen to me if I kept working on the investigation and didn’t understand why I couldn’t go back to being just an accountant.
She didn’t know what kept me working with the Taskforce.
She didn’t know about the anti-vaccines that Tate had been involved with, the ones designed to not only reverse immunity to the vamp virus, but ensure that victims would turn if bitten without having to drink the vamp’s blood. And also ensure that anyone they bit would turn as well. She didn’t know because I couldn’t tell her. The existence of the anti-vaccines was pretty tightly wrapped up in layers of government classification.
Tate had tried to use the vaccine on me. Dan had saved me by biting me, gambling on the fact that lycanthropy was more contagious than vampirism.
We still didn’t know whether he’d succeeded because that was true or whether he’d just gotten lucky or whether Tate’s drug had also reversed my were vaccinations. The doctors had been unable to tell once the lycanthropy had taken hold and started working on my DNA.
But no matter why I’d changed, the implications for the vamp population were pretty scary if the anti-vaccines worked. The truce between the races held at the moment because humans had some faith in the vaccines to protect them and because they far outnumbered vamps and weres. If the vamp population suddenly exploded and humans realized one bite could result in them developing a hankering for O positive fresh from the jugular, then everything would change.
And I doubted it would be for the better.
Vampires weren’t my favorite people in the world but I didn’t want fear of vamps to extend to fear of weres. After all, I was one now. As was Dan. If Dan and I actually did walk down the aisle, it was almost certain our kids would be weres too.
I didn’t want my children to grow up being feared and hunted.
We had to track down Tate’s finances and hope the trail would lead us to Dr. Smith and whoever the hell else was behind this lunacy.
All while keeping my aunt happy, not annoying Esteban, and making it through another memorial service.
Simple.
The thought made me laugh. I wasn’t even sure I knew what simple was anymore.
Sighing, I buzzed Jase. If I was going to have any chance of making it to Caldwell and back into Aunt Bug’s good books by Friday evening, then I needed to do some schedule reshuffling.
“What’s up?” Jase slid into the chair on the far side of my desk.
I jumped. Pens and paper went flying. I hadn’t noticed him come in. That was happening more and more lately. Whatever Jase was doing with Marco, it seemed to be strengthening his vamp talents. Or maybe just making him more relaxed about using them.
I told myself it made no difference but it still freaked me out occasionally when he did something really vampy like suddenly appear in a room.
“I need to move some things around. I have to leave early on Friday.” I concentrated on picking up the pens I’d scattered and trying to remember exactly what meetings and client deadlines were in my schedule.
“And?” Jase leaned back in the chair, blue eyes nailing me. He never had to take notes. He had an annoyingly good memory.
“And what? This is the part where you tell me what appointments I can move.” I didn’t look at him. His question had nothing to do with the schedule. He wanted to know what had happened at Maelstrom.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
I looked up. He was frowning. I debated not telling him about Esteban for a moment. It would be nice to have one person in my life who wasn’t mad at me.
But I had to tell him. Firstly, because with Dan persona non grata as far as access to Esteban’s records were concerned, I’d need help and secondly, because Jase’s psychic abilities were getting stronger. For all I knew he might just be able to pluck the truth out of my mind.
“I need you to open a new client file,” I said reluctantly. “High level security.”
Chapter Four
Jase shook his
head. “Please tell me it’s not who I think it is?”
“It’s not who you think it is,” I quipped.
“You’re lying,” he retorted. “Damn it, Ash. You’re taking Esteban on as a client? I’m beginning to think Dan is right about you.”
“Right about me?”
“You have the self-preservation instincts of Bambi.”
I bristled. “Hey, it’s not like I have a choice here. I owed Marco. I do this and we’re clear.”
That earned me another eye roll. “Apart from the blood debt.”
I hunched my shoulders. I didn’t want to think about the blood debt. I had no intention of letting another vampire feed from me. Ever. “Thanks for the reminder.” I gave him my ‘drop-it’ look.
He gave me his ‘as if’ right back. “What makes you think you’re going to get out of this without more trouble?”
I clicked the end of my pen in and out. “It’s a job. We go in, I solve the problem, end of story.” More clicks. The rhythm seemed to go with the chant of fat chance, fat chance, fat chance in my head. I made myself put the pen down. “Simple,” I added, trying to convince myself.
“That’s what you said last time.”
Right. Last time. When I’d agreed to help Dan track Tate’s finances and come out of the job with a brand new ability to change into a wolf and in debt to a vampire. Not to mention in love with a werewolf who didn’t seem so sure anymore that being in love with me was a good idea.
But this time wasn’t going to be like that. Not if I could possibly help it. “And I’ll tell you what I told Dan. Bambi ended up king of the fucking forest. So let’s get to work.”
* * *
After about three hours of stony silences, cool coffee and other behavior aimed at letting me know Jase disapproved of our newest client, the intercom buzzed.
“There’s someone here to see you,” Jase said. His voice sounded strange...distracted almost.