He watched two animal control personnel in khaki coats transport a dripping lump covered in a white sheet through the lobby on a stretcher. The dark shine of a cloven hoof peeked out from beneath one edge, and it occurred to him that a goat was far more symbolic than a house pet. Dogs weren’t historically used as sin offerings, whereas goats…well, there was a reason behind the term “scapegoat.”
A biblical reason.
Two and two clicked together in his mind like a plug into a socket, and Thirteen smiled to himself, wondering when the “priests” would be arriving back at the hotel.
He’d love to have a nice chat with the albino.
A survivor of the Majdanek death camp in Poland during World War II, Ursula Adamowicz was a woman who had long ago been stripped of fear.
By the age of ten, she’d seen both her parents murdered before her eyes, had survived rape, beatings, starvation, and torture, and been forced to watch as thousands of her countrymen were systematically eliminated by such wonderful means as firing squad and burning alive. Once the camp was liberated in 1944, she went to live with a distant relative in Spain, but they were poor, and life was hard. Life had never been anything but hard for Ursula, and she didn’t expect it to be.
So the man standing before her with a gun pointed in her face was not much of a surprise. Or much of threat, for that matter.
“Which apartment?” the dark-haired man growled, holding up a drawing of a young woman.
Ursula inspected the drawing. Quite good, she thought. The artist had talent.
“Two-oh-four,” she replied calmly, pointing to the end of the hall. “But she’s not home. Hasn’t been in a few days.”
The man stepped forward in a menacing way, taut and wild-eyed, but Ursula merely raised her brows at him, refusing to step back and let him in her apartment. Clearly he didn’t expect that, as he blinked at her, confused.
“I don’t know what your business is with her, and I don’t care,” she said bluntly, staring down the barrel of the ominous silver gun. “But I do care if you get blood on the carpet. Bloodstains don’t come out.” Ursula knew from firsthand experience exactly which fabrics and materials bloodstains could be removed from. “So don’t get any blood on the carpet, got it?”
The man blinked at her again, and Ursula shut the door in his face.
Then, with a better idea, she reopened the door. “She works at the little bookstore on Baixada Viladecols—Antiquarian, something like that. Six days a week. You’ll find her there.”
Then she shut the door in his face once again.
She waited a few minutes, until the sound of his receding footsteps had faded off into the evening, then picked up the phone and dialed a number she had written down a month ago and stuck to her refrigerator with a magnet. The number had been broadly advertised on television and radio, in all the papers internationally and locally, even in the gossip rags Ursula liked to read. It was a reward hotline for any information leading to the capture of the notorious terrorist who’d killed the pope, the man known only by the name Caesar.
Ursula knew the man at her door wasn’t Caesar. But with those midnight black eyes, that dark hair, high cheekbones, and sharp, shiny teeth, he sure looked damn close. He was one of those creatures, she was sure of it.
And she knew where he was headed. That kind of information could be very, very lucrative indeed.
“I have to go out for a little while.”
Obviously startled, Ember looked up at Christian from her chair on the back patio, and covered her eyes to shade them from the setting sun. He’d found her here, staring past the rose garden into the dark line of the forest beyond, with her legs pulled up under her chin, pensive and silent.
“Oh. Okay. See you later.”
Christian frowned at this response. No “Where are you going?” No “Can I come with you?” It didn’t seem like her.
Then again, she’d been acting strange all day. He’d gone to the bedroom after his call with Leander in the morning to find her already showered and dressed, standing at the windows with her arms hanging loosely at her sides, breathing deeply and staring off into space. Much like she was doing now. Senses prickling with the certainty something was wrong, he opened his nose, sniffing for the cool, bittersweet tang of sadness, the sour acidity of fear, the telltale heat and spice of anger.
What he smelled was only the natural perfume of her skin; warmed vanilla and orange blossom. He breathed a sigh of relief, crossed to her and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
“Are you hungry? I can have some food brought out—”
She startled him by looking up into his eyes and blurting in a low, terse voice, “I’m only hungry for you, Christian. Always, only you.”
She reached up, grasped his face, and pulled him down for a fevered and demanding kiss. He broke away with a groan when he felt the all-too-familiar flash of heat to his groin, and chuckled, pulling her out of her chair and wrapping his arms around her. He nuzzled his face into her neck, inhaling the clean, woodsy scent of her hair.
“I’m glad to hear it. But I’ll never get anything done if you keep kissing me like that,” he said, smiling.
“How long will you be gone?” she asked into his shirt, her voice still low.
He stroked his hands over her hair and down her back, trailing his nose down her throat to the warm, steady pulse at the base of her neck. “Just an hour or two.”
He’d arranged a late meeting with the manager at his local bank; he was going to finalize the paperwork that would transfer all his liquid assets to a trust in Ember’s name. He meant what he’d told her: she’d be well taken care of, for the rest of her life. That was the one thing of which he was determined to make sure.
She tipped her head back and looked at him, really looked at him, her eyes shadowed and intense, her gaze lingering over his face as if trying to memorize his features. Slanting sunlight caught in her lashes and tipped them fairy dust gold.
Somewhere in the garden, a bird began to trill a song, notes that rose and fell and rose again, haunting and sweet.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” she whispered, staring deep into his eyes. “Don’t take too long.”
Christian frowned at her, certain there was something he was missing, some hidden meaning beneath those words that her tone and the haunting birdsong hinted at, but then she broke into one of her brilliant, heartbreaking smiles, and his heart melted like a pat of butter on a hot scone.
She kissed him again and then pushed him away, still smiling. “Go on, then. Go get your work done. And when you get back…” she cocked a seductive eyebrow, “we’ll have dinner in bed.”
“Oh, you evil temptress,” he said, smiling back at his love, “you have no idea.”
She blew him a kiss and he turned and left, eager to get the errand over with, eager to get back into her waiting arms.
Eager to make every last second together they had really count.
Ember watched him go and felt all her false bravado, and the tenuous calm it had taken her all day to perfect, unravel.
A sob rose in her throat; she smothered it with the back of a hand to her mouth. She couldn’t cry now—not while he was still so close, not when she still had so much left to do.
There would be time enough for crying later.
Knowing he’d be able to sense her moods, she’d done her absolute damndest to quell any stray emotions with the deep breathing and visualization exercises she’d learned all those years ago when she first went into therapy. Calm was a state relatively easy to achieve if one knew how…but extraordinarily difficult to maintain over hours, with adrenaline flooding the central nervous system. She done it with a strength of will she didn’t even realize she had, because she had to fool Christian before she could save him.
She made her way to the front drawing room and watched Christian’s Audi slowly pull away from the circular driveway and disappear up the long gravel road. Then she turned and ran up the curved staircase, her heart pounding like a dr
um, every nerve on fire.
She checked the master bedroom first. Closets, desks, beneath the bed, in the bathroom. Nothing. She rifled through drawers in the library, she upended boxes that turned out to contain only files, she peered into cupboards and cabinets and the dark, dusty niches of the attic.
Nothing.
Room by room she swept the mansion, looking for anything deadly, any poison or bombs or strange-looking devices, anything that screamed I can kill you!
But she found nothing. She even searched Corbin’s room because he’d left with Christian, the housekeeper’s room because she was out shopping, and the groundskeeper’s room because he was off on the east side of the front of the property, mowing the emerald lawn. There wasn’t a single thing in the entire mansion that hinted at danger, at least nothing she was able to find.
The frantic search took over two hours. The sun had dipped below the horizon. At any moment, Christian would come back, and her window of opportunity would vanish.
Panicked, shaking with tension and about to burst into hysterical tears, she ran out the back door and looked wildly around the elegant patio, the rambling garden, the burbling fountain surrounded by a circle of uneven stones.
That’s when she saw the woodshed.
Dreary and decrepit, it stood off to her left, partially obscured by a thicket of pines. The moment she saw it she knew it was where she needed to go.
The hinges made an eerie groan when she opened the door. It was dark and dusty, filled with cobwebs, and smelled of damp wood and mold. There was no light so she stayed still a moment, allowing her eyes to adjust, and just looked around.
A cord of wood, stacked teetering along one wall. A bare dirt floor, a small rack of saws and tools, a large plastic chest near the back.
The chest sported a large, shiny padlock, obviously new. Unlike everything else in the shed, the chest was not covered in a thick layer of dust.
Ember’s heart began to pound even harder.
Big enough to fit a body in, she thought in mounting dread as she ran her hands over the smooth plastic lid. The realization that Christian might keep the key somewhere in the house, or even on him at all times, didn’t deter her from looking for it anyway. She felt under the edge of the lid, all around the bottom, strained her eyes for any small nook or cranny in the walls where one could hide a key. She looked everywhere, until the dirt floor finally revealed a clue.
In the dust were two sets of footprints. Her own, and one much larger pair. They crisscrossed and obliterated each other in some places, but there was one place her own prints did not go but the others did: to the rack of tools on the opposite wall.
Ember stood in front of the rack and just stared at it, every cell in her body screaming for her to hurry. On the very back of the lowest shelf, past the handsaw, ball-peen hammer, and a rusted, bitless drill, there was a rock. A rock without a speck of dust that sported a perfectly flat bottom.
A bottom that opened when twisted, revealing a tiny silver key.
Ember tossed the plastic hide-a-key to the floor and fit the key into the padlock on the chest. She opened the lid, peered down at its contents, and felt all the blood drain away from her face. Her mouth went dry and her pounding heart stuttered to a dead stop inside her chest.
She had found what she was looking for.
In retrospect, Ember’s plan wasn’t much of a plan at all. In fact, it could quite accurately be called a classic example of delusional thinking.
She wasn’t stupid; she realized what a piss-poor operation this was, but on such short notice it was really the only option available. As the cab slid away from the front gate of the mansion, she wished she were religious. Given the circumstances of the moment, prayer seemed apropos.
The cell phone in her jacket pocket rang and she gasped, startled, nerves frayed. She answered it with shaking hands, swallowing the hysterical sob that threatened to burst from her throat.
“Hello?”
“Ember! Oh my God, did you hear what happened to Dante?”
It was Asher, shrieking at her from the other end of the line. She sat forward on the seat, muscles as rigid as the old leather. “What do you mean? What happened?”
“He was attacked by some psycho with a gun—who was looking for you!”
At the exact moment the breath left her lungs, Ember spotted Christian’s black Audi flying up the opposite side of the mountain road about half a mile away. She threw herself down on the back seat, flattened herself against it, and whispered into the phone, “Oh, God, no! Is he all right? Tell me what happened—is he hurt? Where is he? Where’s Clare?”
Terror, dark and encompassing, gripped her. She clutched the phone so hard she thought it would splinter to pieces in her hands.
“They’re both at the hospital. Clare wasn’t home at the time, thank God! She was getting her treatments for cystic fibrosis. Dante’s going to be okay, but Jesus Christ, Ember—a man with a gun is looking for you!”
Ember swallowed, fighting the panic that wanted to claw its way out of her chest. “I know.”
Asher gasped, “What? How do you know if you didn’t know about Dante? Forget that—where are you? I’m coming to get you and we’re going to the police—”
“No. No police. I’m taking care of this myself.”
Her voice, though shaking, was firm enough to give Asher pause. “What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded. “Does this have to do with Christian?”
She hadn’t told him she’d moved in with Christian, because at the time, she’d thought it was temporary and she’d be back at her apartment before he could find out. She also hadn’t told him she was the target of a mass murderer, that Christian was on a suicide mission, or that she’d decided to take care of that last thing herself. At this moment, knowing she only had a few hours left, she thought there was really only one important thing Asher should know.
“I love you, Ash,” she said, and now her voice went beyond shaking; it broke. Tears began to gather, hot and prickling, in her eyes. “You were the best friend I ever had—the best friend anyone could ever have, and I’m so grateful to have known you.”
She felt his shock, his growing horror at the realization that something was very, very wrong. “Ember. Whatever this is about, we can fix it together—”
“I want you to know that no matter what happens, you did everything right by me. I know you; don’t second-guess yourself. You’re amazing, and I love you, and…and…”
She had to stop because her throat closed. Tears began to stream down her cheeks and she wiped them angrily away with the back of her hand. “I love you, that’s all, okay?”
“Ember! Goddammit! What the hell is going on! Where are—”
“Good-bye,” Ember whispered, and pressed “End” on the phone.
The only sound in the cab for a few moments was the flamenco station on the radio. Ember guessed the driver didn’t speak English—either that or he was used to having hysterical females lying down on the back seat of his cab, saying teary goodbyes to their best friends.
The phone rang again. Assuming it was Asher, she looked at the screen and was shocked to see it was her stepmother, Marguerite.
She remembered a documentary she’d once seen on television about ancient torture methods. The one that had struck her as somehow the worst was stoning; not the kind where angry townsfolk lobbed rocks at you until you died, but the pressing kind where they strapped you to the ground and placed a big board over your chest, then slowly and methodically added weight in the form of large stones until your ribcage snapped and all your organs were crushed.
Looking at the readout on the phone, she felt exactly that.
She clicked the “send” button and whispered a hello.
“Well, hello, September,” came an unfamiliar male voice, silken and purring and dark. “I’m so glad you answered your phone. And your stepmother is glad, too.”
In the background, Ember heard a long, trembling wail of pain, and all
the tiny hairs on her body stood straight on end.
“W-who is this?”
The caller clucked his tongue. “I’ll give you three itty bitty guesses. But I’d advise you to make it quick—I’m not sure how much more mileage I can get out of our Marguerite, here. We’ve had a bit of fun, but the old gray mare is fading fast.”
“Caesar,” she breathed, choked in horror.
“Bingo!” came the delighted response.
“You sick son of a bitch!”
This was screeched as Ember kicked the door, realizing Caesar was, at that moment, doing something very bad to her stepmother. Though she hated the woman and had often wished her ill, falling into Caesar’s hands was not something she would wish on anyone. The taxi driver flicked her a disinterested glance in the rearview mirror, then turned his attention back to the road; just another routine drop off.
On the other end of the line, Caesar chuckled in glee. “Oh, dear! Someone sounds a bit put out. Well, I know how awful it is when things don’t go your way. But surely you must realize I have no interest in you—forgive me, but you really aren’t that interesting. You know who I want.” His voice hardened, losing all its playful lightness, and like a snake he hissed, “Give him to me and your stepmother lives.”
Ember’s mind was a sudden tangle of flying goose feathers. This wasn’t something she anticipated. She’d have to get Caesar to let Marguerite go before she could get him alone—but how was she going to do that?
“I-I’ll need proof that she’s okay. You have to let her go first—”
“Plain and stupid, hmmm? She’s not going anywhere until I have what I want.”
Ember swallowed, shaking hard. “I don’t know where he is right now,” she said, stalling for time to think.
“Let me worry about the details, September. I assume you have a way to contact him?”
She whispered, “Yes.”
Caesar made a noise of approval. “Just come to me and I’ll take care of the rest. Once I have what I want, you and your stepmother can go. As I said, I have no interest in you. You’re just a means to an end. Give me what I want and neither of you will get hurt. Or…”
Edge of Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel) Page 29