by TA Moore
“Next time,” Madoc promised… when he trusted himself not to moon over Took like a lovestruck, lustful idiot, or snap at him like a jilted never-quite-lover. It would be—was always—a coin toss. “For now, track down any communication between Waring’s family and the Hunters, even sympathy expressed on a message board.”
She looked disappointed but accepted his decision. “Any chance I could get Kit’s viewpoint?” she asked.
Madoc resisted the frown that tried to settle onto his face. It wasn’t that it was a bad idea—Kit Maguire was VINE’s expert on the different Hunter factions—but the price of leadership was that some worries you ate so your team didn’t have to be distracted. Kit’s too-long stint undercover—for the last month with only brusque sporadic check-ins that he was alive—was one of those.
“He’s still in Casper,” he said. “We can’t risk his cover with unnecessary contact. It’s dangerous enough.”
There was a flicker of more-than-professional disappointment in Lawrence’s eyes at the decision. Madoc made a quiet note of it. If she thought her dalliance with Kit had been anything other than a bad idea or a one-night stand—or a secret—that could come back to bite the team later.
And look at that, he thought dryly to himself, now he could disapprove of inter-team relationships without being a hypocrite. At least until Took realized that whatever had happened to him hadn’t changed the fact that he was made for VINE.
“Pally it is,” she said. “I guess I do the talking with anyone connected to Hunters.”
“Probably wise,” Madoc said mildly. For some reason, of all of them, humans could always see the predator in the old vampire. Not that Pally ever made more than a token effort to hide it. They reached the gates that walled the dead away from the rest of the world. The Eclipse was parked at the curb, the hemlock-treated windows only lightly tinted in reaction to the moonlight. He tossed Lawrence the keys.
He waited until Lawrence was in the car—an old, sometimes bad, habit of chivalry—before he crossed the road. It was nearly midnight, the zenith of darkness, and Madoc could feel the sun’s lock on his soul loosen, but not fully. The night wasn’t freedom from the warden’s locks—he was just around the corner—but he’d looked away for a second.
The uneasy union of America—the dead and the breathing, the blow-ins and the ones whose roots were buried deep—was balanced on the compromise of twilight. Diurnal and nocturnal met in the middle, where none of them were exactly happy with it. Usually by midnight, Madoc was buried in paperwork or strategy meetings. It felt good to taste the hot night air on his tongue as he walked.
He could taste the warm bodies behind the walls—the aroma of blood mixed with the spice of sweat or sex, a nightmare tang of fear adrenaline behind one window and the cured edge of insomnia a few doors down, the heady pulse of blood and endorphins that leaked, along with music and laughter, from the neon-lit clubs along the main street. Some vampires spent their nights mourning the varied tastes of mortal cuisine, but Madoc had grown to savor the subtle varieties that spiced blood.
Although he had to admit he still dreamed of rarebit sometimes—the click of his gran’s best knife on the carving board as she carved the sharp cheese, the dense, brown bread toasted over the fire, and the heat of it in his mouth as he chewed. There hadn’t been much kindness to his grandmother, certainly not for her wayward daughter’s bastard, but what there was, she doled out morsel by morsel in that kitchen.
Not, he thought dourly as he padded from shadow to shadow farther into the city, that there was any psychological reason to dwell on people who didn’t love him tonight.
THE ARON house was tall and narrow, old enough to have been squeezed carelessly into a plot between two larger houses. The clapboard siding had been blue in the crime-scene pictures, but it had been repainted with a fresh, bright coat of sage—probably by whomever had inherited the property. It was hard enough to sell a house where a murder had been committed, never mind one that still looked identical to the old pictures. The lights were on, and bright gleams peeked through the narrow windows.
Madoc climbed the narrow steps to the cracked-open door. He stood for a second and listened to the house. The markers of Took that he’d gotten used to were gone—no heartbeat, no soft murmur of blood in his veins—but he still muttered to himself as he worked. It was a stop-go commentary that narrated, dismissed, and edited whatever theory his brain had put together.
“Hide-and-seek is for children,” Madoc said as he entered the open-plan shell of the house. Then, since he’d been put out today, he added, “Or lovers.”
Took looked up from the folder he held in one hand and tucked his thumb into the papers to mark his place. For a second, it was like he’d never been gone. How many times had Madoc walked into a crime scene and found Took already there, in a tailored gray suit paired with polished black combat boots and hair that looked as though he hadn’t brushed it since he left school.
“It didn’t take you long,” he said.
“You know monsters,” Madoc said as he nudged the door shut behind him. “I know you.”
He hadn’t meant it as a jab, but it still made Took grimace and run his tongue over his lips behind his teeth.
“Kind of the same thing these days,” he said. His gaze flicked over to Madoc. “No offense.”
“Some taken,” Madoc drawled sardonically.
It made Took flash a short-lived grin, just a glimpse of recessed fangs behind full lips before the humor faded. Took was in his thirties—Madoc was pretty sure of that, although he usually only kept track of decades—and he’d lived some of them hard enough to leave marks. Lines were grooved into his forehead and deeper ones creased around his eyes when he smiled. Despite that, he still looked almost boyish, all taut jawline and clear, guilelessly blue eyes.
The coin flip in his head landed. Lovestruck and lustful it was, Madoc supposed.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” Took asked as he closed the folder, thumb still in place to mark that one page. He couldn’t hold his blankly curious look under Madoc’s narrow-eyed glare, and he let that faded, oddly sweet smile flicker over his face again as he gave in. “You talked to Sheriff Anderson about the missing girl?”
“Annabelle Franklin,” Madoc said.
Took paused for a second and then gave Madoc a quick nod of acknowledgment. Sometimes he forgot the person behind the puzzle.
“Annabelle,” Took repeated aloud. “She disappeared a month before the Aron family were murdered. Right there.”
He pointed to a patch of empty floor. Madoc’s mind helpfully layered the crime scene pictures over the space and filled the empty room with the ghosts of the Arons’ furniture. Took was out by a foot. The dining table had been angled into the corner of the room. It was glass and the blood had spilled off it onto the floor in sheets. Madoc hadn’t been here when the scene was fresh, but he’d swung by during the Waring investigation. The dead had been taken away and blood sopped up, but the stains had still been on the floor and the white walls. He still smelled the death on the air.
“And she probably knew Waring,” Madoc said. He smirked at Took’s sidelong glance. “VINE did exist before you came along, Agent. I do know how to do this. So what is your theory? That Waring made his bones by killing humans before he graduated to murdering vampires? I don’t think that’s what his parents had in mind when they asked your oversight on the case.”
Took scratched his cheekbone. “I told them when they asked me to do this, I won’t manufacture evidence. If what I find doesn’t suit them, that’s their problem. Besides, I haven’t said that’s what happened. It would make sense. His first kill is impulsive—someone he knows but who isn’t going to be missed. Second time is closer to what works for him, but not quite as difficult a target. Most killers don’t have their brand down with the first few victims, but Waring seemed to know exactly what to do from the start. Unless VINE missed some of his early kills. But look at this first.”
He gestured for Madoc to follow him as he headed around the waist-high island—trekked his boots right through Madoc’s imagined puddle of blood—and into the glossy kitchen. It had been refitted. The parents had died at the table—peas and slices of ham in a broth of blood on placemats in front of them—but the children had fled into the kitchen. The bodies were still missing, but they’d found rope and cracked tiles and one pastel-painted little-girl nail dug into the inside of a cupboard.
“The scene was cleaned a year ago,” Madoc pointed out. “It looks like the kitchen was ripped out and refitted. I doubt there’s anything to see in here.”
“Some things haven’t changed,” Took said. He stopped in front of the sink and laid the folder, opened to his kept page, on the draining board. A glossy, blown-up photo was clipped to the paper, screen-grabbed from some social media account, based on the caption that shorthanded across the bottom. This is one of the photos from Annabelle Franklin’s phone. She took it just before the first time she ran away from home.
“That’s a lot of teenager’s selfies to look at.”
“She didn’t take many,” Took said. “Dom was only all the time. He made vlogs, short films—”
“We saw them,” Madoc said. “They didn’t help his case.”
The glossy, overlit videos, mostly filmed in the Waring kitchen or his mother’s cafe, were a call to action shy of Hunter recruitment, but only just. Waring hid his intent behind “what if,” but he’d already been on VINE’s radar before he disappeared.
“That was homegrown bigotry,” Took said, “not Hunter-led rhetoric.”
“Our analysts disagreed,” Madoc said. They hadn’t, not all of them. The majority thought there was no evidence that the Hunters hadn’t recruited Waring, and with Waring sitting in a cell with the blood of a dead family still set on his clothes, that had been enough to convince them. “Is that relevant, or are you just showing off?”
Took ducked his chin and scratched the back of his neck. Tufts of blond hair stuck out between his knuckles.
“Bit of both,” he admitted sheepishly. “Look.”
He tapped his finger against the page. Madoc leaned in closely to study it over Took’s shoulder. A pretty girl with brown hair and big brown eyes grinned into the camera, her arm slung around a skinny girl with dishwater hair and the hunched shoulders of someone who didn’t want to take up space. Annabelle Franklin must have been the one who’d taken the picture. It had been on her phone. She looked like she was sorry to have wandered into the shot, but her smile was pretty, even with her lips folded over her braces. Behind her a window was open into a small, sunlit garden, where an ostentatious magnolia in full bloom blocked any other details.
“In the big city with my BFFs!” Madoc read out.
“It was tagged Charleston,” Took told him. He stepped away from Madoc and took two long steps over to the wall where he flicked the lights off. The high wattage took a moment to fade as the dull glow of the filament died reluctantly, and then Madoc stared out into the garden. Moonlit instead of sunlit, but the magnolia still blocked the view of the street behind.
“Are you sure you aren’t a sorcerer?” he asked. Took snorted a laugh, but Madoc could taste suspicion in the back of his throat. He glanced from the photo to the window and wondered how much money the Waring family could scrape out of the political coffers. Who could they buy? It worked its way into his voice, a scratch of accusation that was blunt in the sterile, dressed kitchen. “This is beyond luck. Nobody else made this connection, Bennett. Not one fucking member of VINE even heard of Appleton. What made you go there? Who made you go there?”
There was a pause. Then Took abruptly flicked the lights back on, and the actinic glare was enough to make Madoc blink as his eyes tried to adjust.
“Go to hell,” Took said.
Madoc knuckled the water out of his eyes and turned to look at Took. “That’s not an answer,” he said. “I know you wouldn’t… stage… the investigation, but if someone else did?”
“And I just followed along, like a dog on a leash? Might be an issue with Agent Lawrence, but I know what I am doing.”
“So does she,” Madoc defended his new agent sharply. “I’m still your SSA, Bennett, and I did not approve this investigation—”
“It was approved, though.”
“I don’t care. How did you find Annabelle Franklin?” His temper had slipped enough that it crawled into his voice, and there was an edge of command to the words. It was somewhere past the amygdala jerk of a drill sergeant’s bark, but not within the rungs of a boyar’s silky, “this is your idea” compulsion.
It should have worked—not as well as when Took was human and Madoc’s voice had been the goad that got a dazed agent back on his feet after a car crash, but enough to drag an answer out of him, enough to leave Madoc’s gut sour with regret that he’d jerked strings as though Took were his puppet and not his friend. Instead Took just worked his jaw to the side as though his eardrums had popped on a flight and rubbed the side of his head. Madoc wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not. Guilt might be the price he’d pay for a good answer.
“I investigated,” Took said. “You should try it.”
He grabbed the folder from the counter and stalked out of the kitchen, toward the front door. Madoc glared at the span of gray cotton over broad shoulders and refused to chase after Took like some abject suitor. He reached inside instead, through the crack in his soul, to where the smoke and shadows lived.
The world went cold around him, the colors stripped down to tones of gray, and slow. His bloodline dragged at him, a net that wanted to wash him away to drown in the sterile salt sea before it ever got him home, and it took effort to move against the current.
All he’d wanted was the cold shadow, but the effort of it let the smoke slip away from him. It was hot and dry, the cloy of burned apples strong in his throat, but it made it easier to push against the pull of his blood. The walls faded out as he stepped through them and stalked around the house.
Things moved out in the dark. He could hear the click and growl of them, the massive, bony outline of something’s skull against the sky as it turned. A star flared and died in the dry pit of an eye socket, and even Madoc’s mind, armored and set by years and blood, creaked under the weight of the brief illumination.
In the Old Country there were haunts and dark, strange creatures in the shadows of the world, but they knew to skirt the heels of vampires. The gods and spirits native to American soil saw no reason for that. It was one reason that the Anakim had been forced into the Accord. Under the shadow of Tepes’s wing, the living would never have massed enough influence to force a compromise. They certainly never had back home.
The great thing caught sight of him and raised a thin, stringy arm with too many joints. Madoc stepped out of the shadows as it pointed a claw in what might have been a greeting or a threat. He preferred not to think about which.
The weight of his bones settled back under his skin, the warmth of the night air sticky on his skin, as he turned solid on the front porch. Took yanked the front door open. Surprise flashed over his face as he saw Madoc already there. He opened his mouth to say something, but Madoc grabbed the collar of his shirt and shoved him back into the house.
He kicked the door shut behind him.
“You want to hand in your badge and play private eye? Do it,” he rasped out as he let go of Took’s shirt. “You want to be a VINE agent, then you better be willing to justify this. It doesn’t look good that you picked some ghost connection that none of us knew about.”
Took stepped back and impatiently yanked his shirt straight. “Apples,” he said shortly.
For a second, Madoc thought Took had caught the smell of the smoke on the air. He licked the taste of ashes from his fangs. “What?”
“I’m not going to just take poisoned bait,” Took said. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the staircase. The folder dangled from his fingers. “Appleton isn’t any of the leads t
he Warings served up for him. It was apples. Have you ever heard of Apple and Pear Teas?”
Madoc clenched his jaw. He hadn’t missed this part, the walk-through of how smart Took had been with his puzzle. Okay, that was a lie. He’d missed nearly all of Took, but it wasn’t as though he’d ever had the patience to sit through the “Look How Clever I Am” show. He’d understood Took’s need to establish himself when everyone else was a vampire, but never enjoyed it. “I don’t need a lesson in profiling, Bennett. Just give a good reason that you, and only you, found this link. You’re good, but you’re not magic.”
“No, I’m not,” Took said. He slid down the banister and sat on the stairs, long legs stretched out in front of him. “But VINE did a good job on the investigation. There weren’t that many angles you hadn’t already nailed down, so that made it easier. I just chased the ragged ends… and the apples. There was a vlog—”
Glass shattered and a heavy brown bottle rolled over the expensively laid floor. A trickle of liquid spilled over the waxed surface, and the sweet-bitter smell of accelerant and juniper filled the air. It hung for a moment—long enough for Took to lurch to his feet and Madoc to tackle him back down onto the stairs—and then it ignited with a deceptively soft whoof.
Fire spun toward the ceiling, and licks of soot marked over the blistered paint and spilled out over the floor. The heat of it scorched Madoc’s side, leather and metal tight around his ribs, and stung against the exposed skin of his throat and jaw. He tucked his arm around Took’s head and swore into the hollow of his throat.
More projectiles smashed and splashed against the outside of the house. The heat banked and pitched, the sudden alarmed squall of a siren somewhere in the house a too-late warning of fire.
“Get off,” Took growled as he shoved Madoc’s shoulders and hitched his hips to roll him away. He flinched as sparks hit him and left shriveled pocks on his shirt and pinprick blisters across his cheekbones. “I don’t need to be protected. What the hell?”