I turned to Westley. “What happened?”
He gave me a glance jagged with guilt. “Liberty.”
After a long, stunned second, a string of low, soft curses, mostly in Tenebrial, began flowing from my mouth. The time we’d bought was up. And once again, the victim was connected to me. At least Peter was exonerated.
“You’ve mentioned Liberty before. Who is he?” said a tiny, uncertain voice. I whirled. Naomi stood in the bedroom doorway. Dove, hovering at her elbow, got my best dirty look before I answered Naomi.
“He’s a serial killer. He targets Lumii that are abusive, that he feels deserve to die. The Formyndari think I’m behind it, somehow.”
“Why?”
“Well, they know it’s a Shadow. All the victims have been connected to me somehow. And they don’t like me.” Audrey finished the bag of blood. I handed her another before she could pull in enough air to scream, and unbuckled her other hand so she could hold it better. “But mostly because, on the wall above his victims’ bodies, he writes — in their blood — the words ‘Liberty or Death.’”
“It’s quite melodramatic, really,” Westley said.
Adonis gave a strained grin. “And it also happens to be Damon’s signature phrase.”
“It is not.”
“He say it at big speech to Tenebrii in Miami,” Dove said. “Is how I hear of him. He say better to risk dying than live slave to bad Lumi.”
“I never told anyone to kill their Lumi,” I said, and could hear the anger of a dozen Formyndari interrogations in my voice. “In fact I expressly discouraged it. It’s not necessary.”
We all jumped as Audrey began screaming again, straining against her bonds with a strength that would inevitably break them.
“Dove, go get more blood,” I said.
“That stockpile’s supposed to be for you,” Westley said behind me. I turned to see him holding Audrey’s shoulders down while Jewel stroked her forehead, desperately murmuring endearments and encouragement.
“Because I clearly need it more than Audrey does.” I had to raise my voice to be heard over the screams. They seemed to rip right up my spine, more so than usual. That could be me. That will be me.
“How long is she going to be like this?” Naomi asked. She was huddled against the wall, shaking.
“Three days, give or take. It’ll get better gradually.”
“How can anyone survive that?”
“Most don’t,” I said bluntly, and acknowledged to myself for the first time that this could be Audrey’s final night. And mine. It generally took the whole Orphanage to get one person through a breach. Two at once was going to stretch our resources very, very thin.
“I don’t understand. She’s breaching? I thought she was already an orphan.”
“Not quite. She’d left her Lumi but hadn’t made up her mind to breach yet.”
“You can do it on purpose?”
I glanced at her sideways. “If a Shadow strikes their Lumi in anger, the bond breaks.”
Dove tossed a bag of blood from the doorway; I heard someone catch it, and the screaming mercifully stopped again.
“You’re going to run out fast, at this rate,” Naomi said shakily.
“After the first couple of hours, she’ll stop screaming so much.”
“She’ll get better?”
“She’ll get worse.” I wiped blood off my face again, absently. “Wes, how do we know it was Liberty?”
It was Adonis who answered. “I saw the calling card. Audrey felt Martin Calling her — not just wanting her back, but screaming for help — and she went, but it was too late. If I hadn’t followed her, I doubt she would have made it back.”
“Have we heard from the Formyndari?”
“No,” Westley said. “For heaven’s sake, the man hasn’t been dead fifteen minutes.”
A very long fifteen minutes. And no end in sight. I looked at Audrey, her pretty face turned to dead eyes in a mask of blood. Her hands shook violently as she tipped the bag up to get the last swallow from the bottom.
“Do we have any sedatives?” I asked.
“That didn’t work last time,” Westley said.
“We waited too long last time. I want something in her system now. Consciousness is the enemy.”
“That could really backfire, Damon, you can’t fight for life if you’re unconscious—”
“I know where to find some barbiturates,” Darling said, and I did a double take as my eyes focused on her for the first time. She was covered in blood. Not just spattered — almost all of us were, by now — but washed in it, great smears and swaths of it around her mouth, down her neck and chest and legs, sleeves of it up to her elbows.
“Darling, what the—”
“Hunting,” she said, curt with embarrassment. “I messed up. He’s okay, though, we dropped him off at an ER. He’ll be okay.”
“Is true,” Dove said. “We just come to clean up when Audrey start screaming.”
Dove would say that either way, of course. I stared at Darling in silent unease. Wherever Liberty was right now, he had to look almost just like this. “Who saw you arrive?”
“Nobody. The room was empty.”
“I saw them,” Adonis said, “when I came back with Audrey.”
After Martin was dead.
Audrey screamed again. “Go get the barbiturates,” I said, and Darling shaded out.
“I swear we hunting,” Dove said.
“I know you do. Adonis, who was here when Martin Called?”
“Umm… Westley was around somewhere. Jewel was in the shower. Me and Audrey had just gone out to the garden.”
Meaning no one but Audrey, who might never remember, could say whether Adonis had left with her, as he claimed — or some time before… Like our alibi chart didn’t have enough holes as it was.
Charts. Photographs. Crime scenes.
I started circling the room, shuffling through papers and books.
“What are you looking for?” Adonis said. He was holding Audrey’s hand, I noticed, with no sign of pain despite the fingernails buried in his skin.
“A picture of her house. I need a visual. I’m going to look at the crime scene.”
Adonis handed me a framed photograph that had been knocked over on the bedside table. It showed two people standing before an abstract red-and-orange painting; Audrey in white and a weak-chinned young man in black, complete with red ribbons at neck and wrists. Befasting wear.
“They were befasted from Martin’s house?”
Adonis nodded, and handed Audrey another bag of blood as her gasping breaths began to rise into cries.
I focused on the background of the picture. Metal bookshelves, floor-to-ceiling windows, the circular swirls of the painting. Yes, I could shade there.
A hand closed around my arm, startling me. It was Naomi.
“Please do not leave me here,” she said quietly.
“You’d rather come to the scene of a murder?”
“Yes.”
I looked at Audrey. “Good,” I said, “because there’s no way I’m leaving you here, with her like this. Come on.”
We arrived at the house with our feet in a puddle of blood. I swore and lifted Naomi out of it. “Now we’ll have to tell the Formyndari we were here. Ugh. Take off your shoes, Naomi, we don’t want to track it around.”
I soon realized it wouldn’t make much difference. Martin Iverson’s loft had once been an artsy-industrial kind of place, all white paint and chrome and glass. A great deal of red had now been added to the color scheme, and the air sagged with the salt-and-metal smell of it. I tried not to be aware that I was hurt and inches from breaching, and alone in a room with Naomi.
What remained of Martin Iverson was sprawled before one of the window-walls, and the glass above him was smeared with letters in blood.
LIBERTY OR DEATH.
I grabbed Naomi’s shoulders and turned her before she could catch more than a glimpse. She let me, her shoulders trembling und
er my hands.
“Like I said, melodramatic,” I said. “The various local news services have been all over it, but so far our Formyndari contacts have been able to keep them from connecting the different murders, which have all been in different states. I think we’re in Illinois now.”
“How many?” Her voice sounded choked.
“Martin here is number four.” At least I assumed this was Martin. They would probably have to use dental records to be sure.
“They actually think you would do this?”
I regarded her thoughtfully. None of my nearest and dearest had implied for a moment that I might be guilty. But they hadn’t implied I was incapable of going berserk on an abusive Lumi, either. This was an unprecedented level of faith in my basic morality. “I have iffy alibis,” I told her, “and somehow the Formyndari don’t find it comforting when I tell them I wouldn’t be nearly this messy.”
“Well, I believe you.” Her voice had gone dry.
“There’s also the fact that, as I said before, all the victims are connected to me.”
“Which means?”
I started counting on my fingers. “Martin Iverson, Lumi of one of my orphans. Four months ago, Terry Fitzroy and his Shadow, Dolly. Dolly was Darling’s cousin. Eight months ago, Ray Jimenez and his Shadow, Mia. Ray’s sister was Adonis’s Lumi. And the first victims, just over a year ago, Steve Stobar and his Shadow, Kitty. Kitty was Westley’s sister.”
“Oh. Oh, no. Poor Westley.”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t taken it well, and I’d been more thankful than ever that, of all my orphans, I didn’t have to worry about Westley fading on me.
Now that I thought about it, his odd behaviors mostly stemmed from the time of Kitty’s death, though they had gotten steadily worse. Did that make it better, that there was an explanation?
Naomi swallowed, making no attempt to turn around and see what lay before the window. “Why did you want to come here?”
“To see if I could figure anything out before the police bagged it all up and carted it away. I don’t know how much good it will do…” I turned in a slow circle, surveying the room. I was no forensic scientist; the blood spatter told me nothing. There were handprints here and there, which I found interestingly small until I realized Martin had downright tiny hands for a man. I looked closer at the body, waving Naomi further back. I did not need her within arm’s reach right now, in this room.
I knew the difference between a knife wound and the marks of kathair teeth. Between one and the other, there wasn’t much of Martin left unscathed. I could imagine what the attack had been like; something coming at him out of the shadows, no warning, no chance of escape, no way to fight back. He had probably bled out quickly, but then again, if Liberty deliberately stayed away from major blood vessels, he could have kept up his game for some time.
Poor Audrey.
Poor Naomi, if we didn’t get out of here, and there was an issue I didn’t want to deal with at all. What had happened to hunting as medical necessity? There was no reason for it to be tangled up with… anything else, Lumi or not.
“Let’s go,” I said, and she stepped eagerly into my arms.
As the walls of the Orphanage formed around us, we could hear Audrey screaming.
NAOMI
Sometime in the early evening, Audrey started lunging toward me against the restraints, eyes wide and unoccupied, and to my silent relief I wasn’t allowed to be in the room anymore. Dove came with me to the kitchen. Eating and its big sister, cooking, seemed to be popular coping mechanisms among vampires, and I was happy to join in.
“Audrey is sweet girl,” Dove said, beating eggs into cookie dough with unnecessary force. “I hope she live. She not been here long, but she good girl.” She slammed the bowl onto the counter. “I hate having breach in house. Everyone hate it. But what we can do? In a few days she better. And better off without Martin. He never stop beat her. Not him.”
“You knew him?”
“No, only hear Audrey talk. But I know his type. Little man want to feel big.” She scooped cookie dough onto a spoon and put it in her mouth.
“Is that what your Lumi was like?” I winced. “Okay, wow, that was insensitive. Look, I’ll unsay it.” I pantomimed shoving my words back into my mouth. “What I meant was, where are your drinking glasses?”
She pointed at a cupboard above my head, looking just a little amused, which was a great alternative to offended or, worse, devastated. “My Lumi never beat me. He just… not understand things. He a good man.”
I was still trying to fit her words into my previous concepts of orphan-Lumi relations when she handed me the bowl of cookie dough. “Here, put this in oven. I take food to Darling. Make her feel better.”
I spent the rest of the evening making batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies, until I ran out of eggs and started putting together cheese-and-cracker sandwiches instead. Orphans — all but Damon — drifted in and out of the kitchen, seeking comfort food. At least I hoped they were only coming for the comfort food. They did tend to stare at me when they thought I wasn’t looking, in a disconcertingly hungry kind of way.
Okay, guys, repeat after me. Naomi is friend, not food. I didn’t have the nerve to say it aloud. It might give them ideas.
At one point I turned, a fresh plate of cheese crackers in my hands, and ran smack into a muscular young man with titian curls and a perfect Roman face. The one who had punched the wall.
“Sorry,” he said, steadying the plate I had almost dropped. “Invading your space. Sorry. Hi. My name’s Adonis.”
“Of course it is,” I muttered, balancing the plate on one hand to shake his proffered one. Dirt lurked beneath his nails, in the drying sweat at his hairline, and all over his ‘I’d rather be gardening’ T-shirt. Dirty was a good look for him. “I’m Naomi.”
“Sorry if we’re all being a little weird,” said Adonis the gardener, still staring at me in a kind of wistful awe. “New Lumi, you see. You’re very… bright.”
“So I’m told,” I sighed, and edged past him into the dining room to set the plate of crackers on the table.
“Eat, Darling, come eat, you feel better,” came Dove’s voice down the stairs, and her bare feet came into view alongside a pair of combat boots.
“Why would I feel better, Dove?” snapped the boot-wearer, visible now as the girl with the combat boots and red-streaked hair. The blood that had coated most of her upper body was gone now, her hair flat and wet. “Will my eating a cookie magically decrease Audrey’s soul-crushing pain? Will it make her need less blood? Will it even make me less excruciatingly hungry? Let go!” She shook Dove off her arm and turned back for the stairs, leaving the Chinese girl biting her lip, on the edge of tears.
“You should really listen to Dove, you know,” Adonis called. “I’d say you kind of owe her for the alibis that have kept you alive.”
Darling clomped back into the room, jaw set. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just awfully fortunate that Dove — and only Dove — was with you when your cousin’s Lumi was murdered. And again, just now, hunting together.”
“Oh, just as it’s fortunate,” Darling said, “that Liberty tore up the man who accused you of killing your Lumi?”
Adonis surged forward, wild-eyed. I stepped back, well clear of the argument, while Dove leaped forward, between Darling and Adonis.
“Both you stop this! We have bigger things right now!”
“Do we?” Adonis said. “Audrey wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for Liberty. If he — or she — isn’t stopped, we’re just going to have more Audreys on our hands. I think ending this madness is pretty important.”
“Maybe, but fighting will not do it!” Dove shoved Adonis further away from Darling. “And shouting at Darling will not do it.”
“Darling wanted Kitty to breach, wanted Dolly to breach — maybe when they wouldn’t, she decided to help them out, huh? Give ‘em a little nudge?”
“I didn�
��t kill anybody,” Darling growled, “and I don’t have to prove anything to you. You’re the one the Formyndari arrested—”
“It wasn’t an arrest.”
“What in the world is all this shouting?” Jewel came down the stairs, looking exasperated.
Darling ignored her. “You know, Adonis, unlike me you don’t have an alibi at all for the night Dolly died.”
“Why would I give a care whether Dolly breached? I barely knew the girl or her Lumi. I can’t say I’m heartbroken about Ray Jimenez, but you know very well I have proof I was hundreds of miles away—”
“Yes, and how convenient that is, that you just happen to be on an ATM camera at Ray’s time of death! What are the odds! Almost like someone planned it! I mean, come on, you could have been at Ray’s house three seconds after you left that ATM, there’s no such thing as an alibi for a Shadow. It could be anyone. You; you, Jewel; Damon — and where’s Galatea? Does anyone know? Where’s Paris? No one ever knows where he is!”
“Paris was with me during the first murder,” Jewel snapped. “You keep your mouth shut about him, Darling. Don’t throw him to the wolves trying to save your own butt.”
“My butt doesn’t need saving! I haven’t done anything!”
“Come on, Darling.” Dove tugged her sleeve. “We just go for a while, huh? Everyone upset about breach, we come back in little while.”
“Dove takes such prodigious good care of you, Darling,” Jewel said. “I bet you don’t do anything without her permission. Maybe that’s why she’s the only one who’s with you at the time of the murders, it would be easier with two people. I should point that out to the Formyn—”
Darling launched herself at Jewel with a near-shriek of a snarl, and Dove tackled her to the ground only just before her teeth closed on Jewel’s smirking face.
“Stop it!” Damon barked, snatching Jewel belatedly out of the way and hauling the other two to their feet. “What is all this? What can you possibly find to argue about at a time like this?”
Secondhand Shadow Page 13