by Kate Douglas
Dwelling on her lack of a love life since her one-night stand wouldn’t help her. And thinking about Damien-Raines-the scum-sucking-vampire who’d left her for a she-vamp he’d knocked up, which was where her shame spiral had started, wouldn’t help her disposition at all. However, the fact that his ferret familiar was probably still hexed into an ugly lampshade made her lips quirk. Vampires sucked at casting spells. Damien had just sucked, period. Too bad it had taken her so long to figure that out.
She heaved herself out of bed and played soccer with Ophelia’s sinuous body as she tried to twine herself around Chloe’s legs while she walked. Tripping, she hit the swinging door to the kitchen and almost face-planted into the floor. “Damn it, Ophelia.”
The cat sniffed, leaped up onto the counter, and flicked a delicate paw at her food bowl in an unmistakable feline demand. Chloe rolled her eyes and grumbled all the way to the cabinet that contained the outrageously expensive cat cuisine her familiar liked. Dumping the contents into the food dish, Chloe went about retrieving her own sustenance while the cat dug in.
Thirty seconds later, she had a steaming mug of coffee cradled between her palms. The first sip made her moan. “Ahhh.”
Bless the Normal human who’d invented the automatic coffeemaker. Magic did some awesome things, but sometimes Normal technology trumped all. She leaned against her counter and gazed out her kitchen window at the morning mist shrouding her Queen Anne Hill neighborhood and drifting out into downtown Seattle. The city lights were a pretty haze that streaked the skyline. Sunbeams began to pierce the fog, so she knew it would be a rare sunny day in the Emerald City. Yesterday had been wicked hot, too, but Chloe loved the brightness. She’d have to remember to go for a walk during lunch today.
Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” blared from her cell phone, jolting her from her reverie, and she jogged into her living room to grab it from the charger. Her best friend Tess’s name popped up on the caller ID. Grinning, Chloe punched the button to answer. “Dr. Jones, I presume. What are you doing up at the ass crack of dawn this morning?”
“Still haven’t slept from last night.” A huge yawn fuzzed the phone line. “We’re short-staffed so I pulled a double. Budget cuts.”
“Ouch.”
“Tell me about it.” Tess worked as a pathologist for the FBI. The Normal side of the FBI. She was one of the most Normal humans Chloe had ever met. “I haven’t put in hours this awful since my residency.”
Along with werewolf Jaya Nemov, they’d become friends in med school, which was the only reason Chloe and Jaya had gotten close to anyone outside the Magickal community. Most Magickals didn’t bother because it was just too hard to keep people in their lives who they had to constantly lie to about what they were.
Chloe knew she should probably ease out of her relationship with Tess, but when Jaya had died during a full moon Change, it emphasized to Chloe that a good friend was hard to come by, magic or no magic. Tess might never know the truth behind Jaya’s death, but she’d still shared the loss of someone they both loved. So, Chloe kept her friend and did what she had to do to keep her secrets.
Then again, a part of her had always wondered if the reason she held on to Tess was because her long-dead mother had been a Normal. She grinned, and it wasn’t nice. Her family was almost as horrified that she had befriended a Normal as they had been when her father had married one and bred a halfling.
Another yawn sounded through the phone, recapturing Chloe’s attention. Her grin softened, and she cradled the phone closer to her ear. “So, you’re calling because . . . you want to get together for dinner tonight and tell me more about the suckfest of budget cuts?”
Tess chuckled. “You’re a mind reader.”
“Sure. That’s totally a plausible explanation, Doctor.” Chloe inserted as much drawling derision into her voice as possible, and Tess laughed. Telepathy wasn’t one of Chloe’s magical skills, so it wasn’t an outright lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth. This time. A familiar twist of guilt knotted her insides, but she pushed it aside. Tess was Normal, Chloe was Magickal; there was nothing she could do about the need to prevaricate. “How about you meet me here around seven?”
“Perfect. See ya. I’m hitting the hay now.” The call was punctuated with one final yawn from Tess before both women disconnected.
Chloe went to drop the phone in her purse and saw she’d missed a call about an hour before. There was a voice mail message waiting for her. She hadn’t heard the phone ring, but then, why would her subconscious want her to wake up from a steamy episode of her regularly scheduled Merek dream?
She shoved a hand through her disheveled hair and pushed the reminder of her one-night warlock out of her mind. Flipping her cell over to speakerphone, she accessed her voice mail while she wandered into her bedroom to dress for work.
A deep, silken male voice emerged from her phone. “Chloe, it’s Damien.”
Chills crept down Chloe’s spine and a hollow feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. The last person she expected to get a call from was Damien. Hell, the last person she wanted a phone call from was Damien. Shaking off that inane thought, Chloe zipped up her skirt and shoved her feet into a pair of ballet flats. While she walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and hair, she hit the buttons to replay the message she hadn’t really listened to.
“Chloe, it’s Damien.” A muffled thump sounded in the background of the call, but Damien hurried on. “I’m sorry to bother you at home. Don’t erase this.... I need to talk to you about work. It’s . . . It’s important to the project. Call me back. Please.” The call ended abruptly, as if someone had stabbed the End button with more force than necessary.
The please gave her pause. Damien never said please. Then again, he also never said I’m sorry. He was a vampire. They were, by definition, cold-blooded. They also tended to have superiority complexes and thought everyone, from other Magickal species to Normals, was so far beneath them they didn’t even register on their radar. Sure, most of them would stoop to having a fling with a non-vampire, maybe one or two non-vampire friends, just for variety, but anything else was out of the question. They didn’t mix.
Luckily, Chloe hadn’t wanted more than that from Damien, but she had expected fidelity while they were together. Apparently, that had been beneath him, too. She sighed, disconnected the call, and slid her cell into her pocket.
The worst part about dating someone you worked with was when it ended badly. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. They were both team leads in pharmaceutical R & D for Desmodus Industries, but since those teams were working on the same project, they did see each other, though not that often. Thank the gods.
Shoving her arms into a jacket, she picked up her handbag and headed for the side door that lead to her detached garage. If the bloodsucker wanted to talk to her about work, he could do it when she got there.
She wasn’t calling him back.
2
What a fucking mess.
Merek Kingston shoved his sunglasses up his nose and stepped away from the shattered window. His shoes crunched in the glass that littered the living room of the penthouse apartment. He swept the room in a glance. The woman’s body lay crumpled near the entrance, her eyes blank and empty, her fangs still extended in a twisted snarl.
“Allesia Dawes. Thirty-five-year-old attorney. Vampire.” Selina Grayson, his partner of three years, flipped her notebook closed before turning cool, dark eyes on the scene. At over four hundred years old, the slim elven woman had seen more than her share of death.
“Who’s our guy down on the street?”
“Coroner’s still scraping the charcoal off the pavement, but my best guess is the owner—” she consulted her notes again “—Damien Raines.”
“Also a vampire.” It wasn’t a question. Even if the man hadn’t charbroiled in the sun, the Vampire Conclave owned this high-rise, and everyone in it. It didn’t take a genius to do the math on the kind of Magickals who might live here. He tipped his hea
d toward the window and the street below. “Anyone down there see anything useful?”
“No. We have a few Normal gawkers, but the telepaths first on the scene say no one even saw anything worthy of a memory tweak, let alone anything that might help us.”
Only certain Normals were permitted to know magic even existed. If a Normal married into a Magickal family. When officials were appointed or elected who had to interact with the Magickal branches in every governmental organization.
If those people no longer needed to know about magic, their memories could be adjusted. The All-Magickal Council made those decisions, and they were ruthless in upholding the nondisclosure laws. Merek was definitely in favor of those laws. They’d brought witch trials and vampire hunting to a virtual standstill a century or two ago, and that made everyone in Magickal law enforcement’s job a whole lot easier.
Selina tucked her notebook into her jacket. “You get a read on the place yet?”
He grunted in response. Letting his eyes unfocus, he took in the room again, this time with his precognitive abilities. Power tugged in his chest, lifting the hair down his arms as it crackled in the air around him. He shuddered under the lash of magic that was almost painful.
The other officers in the room shifted away. Only Selina stayed near him while he “read” the room. Unlike the clairvoyant abilities of most Magickals, he was cursed with an overabundance of power. He could see the past, future, and present. A roaring sounded in his ears, ripping through his mind. Every historical event in Seattle tried to slam into him. Cold sweat broke out across his forehead, and his muscles shook from the onslaught. He pushed through the chaos and focused on just this building. Dark shadows of twisted memories layered over themselves in his mind as people raced in and out of the room in fast-forward. Then the walls crumbled into dust, and he stood midair over a city he didn’t recognize. What he saw was the stuff of nightmares, the ragged end of humanity thousands of years in the future. Everything destroyed. Pulling back from the vision, he homed in on the room. The recent past.
Here he saw the door breaking wide, a man and woman fighting for survival. The woman begging while sinister shadows loomed over her. The man writhing and screaming in agony. Death. The images were smudged in his mind, without enough clarity to make out the perpetrators. Unusual, because he normally had visions clear enough to sear into his retinas.
Then a familiar face streaked through his mind. A woman with midnight hair and hazel eyes. She was nude, arched for him. The fire of his own desire made his skin feel as though it were too tight. Sweat beaded on his face as the woman whispered his name and reached for him. Irresistible. He wanted her. Always he wanted her. Craved her. His cock hardened to the point of pain, and a shudder racked his body. He groaned and pushed the image away. Not connected to this case. He’d seen her in his mind more times than he cared to admit, but she was a memory, not a vision. Chloe.
He became aware of reality by degrees, the smell of Selina’s perfume, the chill wind blowing in from the window. A storm was coming, despite the brilliant sky. His hand lifted as though to touch the woman in his mind. He snorted and shook the visions away, dragging himself back to the task at hand, shoving away the gut-grinding punch of lust before he embarrassed himself. He didn’t have time for a memory. He didn’t even know her last name. Hadn’t let himself look her up after she’d run out on their night together.
“You all right?” Selina’s hand clamped over his shoulder, stronger than anyone would guess by looking at her. He sensed she used magic to tighten her grip.
He swiped a hand down his face. “Yeah. I can’t get a fix on our perps.”
“Anything? Male or female?”
“Nothing solid. Here’s how it went down. Dawes answers the door, so someone had to knock. Maybe someone she knows, maybe not, but she opens the door for them. The perps force their way in, and things get ugly. They took their time with Raines—worked him over for hours, threatened his woman to get his cooperation. Raines eventually snaps, there’s a struggle, Raines loses and takes a header out the window for some barbeque time on the way down to the street. That left the woman—”
“Medical examiner says it doesn’t look like sexual assault.” Selina dropped her hand from his shoulder.
“Not that I saw either,” he agreed. His gut tightened before he finished telling his partner what he’d seen. “She was on her knees, begging, when she died.”
“They wanted something from Raines, but they already knew it wasn’t here.” Her conclusion was obvious even without Merek’s vision of Raines being questioned and tortured. The place was pristine. The only messes were the dead woman and a few pieces of furniture overturned in the struggle. There were none of the usual signs that the apartment had been tossed.
“Or maybe they didn’t want a physical object. Maybe information.” That felt right somehow, fit with his vision. His gaze swept the room again. “Still, do we know if anything was taken?”
“A patrolman is bringing the parents in for questioning. They might be able to identify anything obvious that’s missing.” Selina slid her hands into her pockets.
He sighed and scrubbed the back of his neck. His nerves jangled from too much caffeine and too little sleep, but that was standard operating procedure for his line of work. “Vampires killed in a Conclave-owned building. I’m guessing a prominent vamp family. This is going to be fun.”
“Is that a premonition?” A rare grin tugged at her mouth.
“Call it a hunch.” He mimicked her pose, shoved his hands in his pockets, and watched the crime scene analysts doing their job. Yeah, this was going to be a bitch of a case. He didn’t even need the visions jockeying in the back of his mind to tell him that simple truth.
“Kingston, I don’t know how you deal with that.” She shook her head, her look half pitying and half respectful.
“The same way we all deal with our premonitions.” Or, at least witches / warlocks, elves, and Fae. Vampires and werewolves had other magical problems to contend with.
“Not all of us have it as bad as you.”
A smile curved his lips, but it held no amusement. His gift was often more of a curse, but he’d found a way to make it useful. “Aren’t I the lucky one?”
“Yeah. Lucky.” She snorted and led the way out of the apartment. “Let’s go talk to the parents.”
Two uniformed officers escorted Chloe into the police department downtown, and though it bustled with people and energy, it felt cold to her. Sterile and ugly.
She tried not to tremble in reaction as the officers flanking her led her to a set of double doors that required pass cards to get through. They stepped into a short, wide hallway. One side held a high counter topped by metal bars. A plump, middle-aged woman sat behind the cage and gave them a pleasant smile. She motioned them toward another set of doors at the opposite end of the hall.
Chloe felt a short burst of magic flick from the woman’s fingers as she waved them on. It flowed over her, made the hair on her arms stand on end. A test for magic? Only Magickals would be able to access this area of the police department. The woman gave her a polite nod. “Welcome to the West Precinct’s Magickal Task Force Headquarters.”
The doors in front of Chloe parted on their own, spilling them out into a frenetic office area. Uniformed police officers mingled with the occasional obvious werewolf or vampire. Some of the people in the room had a hard, scary edge to them. Criminals. Magic-wielding criminals. The flash of spells from a doorway and an angry shout sent a shiver down her spine.
She blinked and tried not to stare too closely at anyone. What was she doing here? An hour ago she’d been hip-deep in work, utterly absorbed in experimenting with their current round of formulas that she felt to her bones were right. They just needed to perfect their project, run more tests, and it would be ready. They were so close.
They. But there was one less to count among the they in their research team, wasn’t there?
Damien was dead. Murdered, the
officers had said. Damien. Murdered. Chloe still hadn’t wrapped her mind around it. There was no love lost between them, for obvious reasons, but she hadn’t wanted the man dead. The whole thing was surreal, and her thoughts skipped around in mad little circles. Who would want to kill a scientist? Chloe had an ugly suspicion she was at the MTF Headquarters because they wanted to ask her that very question. And they thought the answer might be her.
Then everything inside her froze, reality once again taking a nasty turn.
Gray eyes met hers from across the room. Magnetic, they pulled at her. Her dream from that morning, from so many mornings before that, flashed through her mind. It was him. Merek.
She didn’t even have time to hope that he wouldn’t recognize her, because the same involuntary heat that coursed through her body flickered in his gaze.
“Shit,” she breathed.
The officer on her left stirred to alertness. “Something wrong, Dr. Standish?”
She swallowed a whimper when Merek started toward them, his long, muscular legs eating up the distance. Both the officers escorting her snapped to immediate attention. “Detective Kingston, sir.”
His gaze never left her face. “Gentlemen. Dr. Standish.”
A ripple of pure awareness went down her skin at his words. She wasn’t even sure if it was because he knew her name or because he was close enough to feel the intensity of him, smell the faint musk of his scent, see the ebony ring around his silver irises. A lock of wheat blond hair fell over his forehead, but did nothing to soften the sharp angles of his face. He took another step forward, looming over her. His shoulders were huge, the heavy muscles of his torso tapering to his narrow waist and flanks. She sighed and felt a flush heat her cheeks, the warmth spreading through her body to make it throb. He was even sexier than on the night she’d met him. Gods, how was that even possible? How could she be here, in a police station, about to be questioned for the murder of her ex-lover, and still be fighting her attraction for the man?