Psychic for Hire Series Box Set

by Hermione Stark

  He looked ever so slightly disappointed at this news, but he masked it quickly. “No matter. I want you to look into my case and find out who really killed Leonie.”

  “You want a favor. Why would I give you one?”

  “Because I am not the monster they say I am. I loved Leonie. But they put me in this goddamn chair for something I never did.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says me!” he roared, his veneer of calm finally snapping. His eyes flashed a dark dangerous green, not black like I had thought they were, and then he threw himself at me. I couldn’t help but flinch. But no way could he escape his restraints. Light flared from the sigils all over his chair and no matter how he thrashed he could not get out. He really was like a bug skewered by a pin. I’d have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been trying to murder me.

  Eventually he quietened and stopped moving. He was panting for breath as if in a serious amount of pain. Interesting. I didn’t know vampires panted. I should really look them up.

  “I didn’t kill Leonie,” he said quietly. “Six years they’ve had me in this chair. Six years for something I did not do. Six years knowing that whoever killed her is out there beyond my reach.”

  “You’ve been in that chair for six years? I asked incredulously. “They didn’t put you in it because you’ve been particularly naughty?”

  He laughed, but there was neither mirth nor self-pity in the sound. He leaned his head back against the chair and nodded. “Six years,” he confirmed. “Six years of stagnating in this hellhole. Six years of not seeing the night. Do you know how long they’ll keep me in here? An eternity. An eternity because I’ll never agree to let them kill me. Never. Can you imagine what it is like when the only freedom on offer is eternal death?”

  “I suppose you think you should be out there being king of the night, huh?”

  He saw that I felt no pity for him so he changed tack. “Do what I ask and I will give you something you want.”

  “Ha! Make a bargain with a vampire? Do I look like a fool?”

  “You look like something I’ve never seen before.”

  The fine hair at the nape of my neck prickled. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, trying not to sound wary. No way could this vampire know the truth about me. I barely knew it about myself.

  “You’ve been looking me right in the eyes this entire time. Don’t tell me those goggles work because I know they don’t. No one is immune to my mesmerism. No one.”

  There went that tingle on my nape again. “It looks like you just found the exception, buddy. Too bad for you I’m not in the job of letting monsters out on the streets.”

  “It could be you in here just as easily as me, I think,” he said. “You and I are alike. I’m something you’ve never seen before too.”

  “You’re right. I’ve never seen a vampire pinned in place like a bug.”

  “Dhampir,” he said.

  “Half living, half dead, huh? Is that supposed to make me feel sorry for you?”

  This made him sneer. “I don’t want your pity. Just your understanding. You know what it is like to crave blood, I think. You’re not a vampire but there is darkness in you. Only something touched by the old darkness could stand in my presence and be so… unaffected.”

  “You really do think a lot of yourself. You can’t handle the thought that a plain Jane might be immune to your charms, huh?”

  “You’re no plain Jane,” he practically snarled. “And had I been free, you and I—”

  “Yuck. No thanks. Great conversation vampire boy, but I think we’re done here.”

  I felt a bit disappointed about it really. Steffane Ronin was certainly interesting. And he was right that his predicament was one I might end up in myself if I was not careful. But I was no closer to discovering why his case had given me an itch. Perhaps I had imagined it. Either way, I was tempted to touch him to make sure. One little touch might give me the vision that I had been seeking. Something to clear this whole mess up for me, so that I could go back to focusing on Zezi.

  One little touch…

  But looking at Steffane Ronin inside his circle of sigils I knew that would be a bad idea. He already knew too much about me. What if foresight was one of the powers of this dhampir? I was hoping that touching him might give me more insight into him, but what if it gave him insight into me? What if me merely being here had given him an advantage over me?

  I stood up decisively from my chair and turned my back on him.

  “Wait!” he said, that word a cold command that would have made someone other than me stop still in their tracks.

  I ignored it and continued going towards the door. My hand was already on the handle when he said, “I can give you the Devil Claw Killer.”

  That made me turn. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him. What the hell did he know about the Devil Claw Killer?

  His lips curled in a satisfied smile. “You want Devil Claw,” he said.

  “So does every department in the Agency,” I told him. “Why don’t you try your tricks on a real agent and not a mere consultant like me?”

  “Because everything else has failed. You think I haven’t tried getting them to re-visit the evidence? There is no evidence. But you — you can find what doesn’t exist. Because someone out there knows who killed Leonie. It’s hidden in their heads. Only you can find it. Do it and I will give you Devil Claw.”

  “I’m bored of this. If you had any information on DCK then you’d have traded it for much nicer digs than this shithole. You can try your tricks on someone else because I’m done with you.”

  “Freedom is the price for my information, and only you can give me that.”

  “You really expect me to believe you know who DCK is?”

  “You’re a psychic. You should know.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him that it didn’t work like that. It was impossible for me to read him. He was like a black hole, sucking everything inwards, taking, but giving nothing back. “There’s a difference between what I know and real solid proof. You have to give me something. Is he a vampire?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Does he live on this world or Otherworld?”

  “You ask so much and give so little.”

  “He lives here, doesn’t he?” I said triumphantly. I was sure of it. I didn’t know why, but I just sensed that it was true. Or perhaps I just wanted so badly for it to be true. Because Devil Claw needed to be in this world for me to catch him.

  “You’ll find out when you free me. I’ll give you enough to catch him. And I know how badly you want to catch him.”

  “So it’s a him?”

  “Him. Her.” Ronin shrugged. The bastard.

  “I don’t believe you know anything.” I turned my back on him, ready to leave.

  “I know many things. I know what only a few people in this world know. A secret that you keep,” he said.

  “Yeah, what’s that?” I said flippantly.

  “I know that he killed your mother.”

  Chapter 6

  DIANA

  My mother. How the hell did he know Magda was my mother? So few people in the world knew that.

  “How does it feel?” Steffane Ronin had said to me. “Knowing that the one who murdered your loved one is out there free and there is nothing you can do about it? Not a damn thing.”

  The bastard had got me there. It seemed we might have something in common after all. If he really was innocent.

  There is only one way that Steffane Ronin could know that DCK killed my mother and that was if the information came from DCK himself. And that meant he must know DCK. He was telling the truth. He had to be! But did that mean he was telling the truth about his innocence?

  I thought back to what I had read in the case file. Leonie Ashbeck had been an eighteen year old girl who had lived in the Ronin household for three years, meeting Steffane Ronin for the first time only a few months before she died. Vampires always kept a number of humans in their nes
ts. They called them their sheep; a source of easily available fresh blood, kept under control by their vampire master’s mesmeric influence. Sometimes vampires enthralled their favorites from among the sheep, forming a closer — almost unbreakable — bond with them before eventually turning them into vampires. According to witnesses, Leonie had been neither a sheep to, nor enthralled by, any of the vampires in the house. So why the hell had they kept her?

  I felt pity for the poor girl, dead on the cusp of adulthood. A mix-up at the morgue had meant her body had gone astray, leading to a huge investigation in itself. The poor girl had never even got a decent burial. Now it looked like she may not have even got justice. Had she been a prisoner in that vampire nest? Had she wanted to escape? I had been in that situation once myself; an unwilling hostage to a cruel adoptive aunt who used me for my psychic powers, back when I had been stupid and always afraid. I had escaped. Leonie would never escape. I wondered if she had dreamed of being free.

  Perhaps I could avenge Leonie and Magda with this one case. For two years I’d been tormenting myself about the sequence of events that led up to Magda’s murder, unable to shake the certainty that I could have changed it if I had just not walked away from her when she had reached out to me. I’d abandoned her when she needed me. I was the reason she died. Magda, the mother I would never know. Never.

  And now, finally, maybe I would be able to lay that ghost to rest. Buoyed by a sense of stunned finality, as if this really was going to happen — I really was going to catch DCK and punish him for what he did to Magda — I was unable to say a word to the cowboy as he drove me back to Grimshaws. No way was I going to tell him where I lived. I saw him shooting me curious looks, wondering what my meeting with his boss had been about, but he did not ask and I did not answer.

  The feeling of absolute certainly that Steffane Ronin was not lying lasted all through the night and all of the following morning on my way in to work at Agency Headquarters. It had me pacing outside of Storm’s office an hour before he even showed up to work. I was in early. Far too early. But I could not help it. I had barely slept all night.

  No wonder I had kept being drawn to Steffane Ronin’s case. I came back to it over and over not because of Steffane Ronin himself, but because of his link to DCK. I must have sensed it.

  The idea that I could finally catch him, that he was within my reach, would have been shredding my nerves if I wasn’t protected by my buoyant sunshiny feeling. Instead I was impatient to get going. I wanted him now. Right now. I didn’t want to have to wait for Storm’s permission. And yet I needed Storm’s permission because I needed him to help me find those lost case files. Plus, Storm would be interested in the DCK angle. How could he not be?

  And was Steffane Ronin really innocent? Was I going to be able to prove it? I had to if I was going to catch DCK. Hell, for the chance to catch DCK, I had to get Ronin out of prison whether he was innocent or not. The only way I was going to get the information he had was to set him free. That was what he was counting on.

  Half an hour of pacing outside of Storm’s office later, I had made up my mind that Ronin must be innocent. I could feel it in my bones. Sort of. Why the hell would he set me this task if he wasn’t innocent? He could have traded his information in for an easier sentence or for more creature comforts. A guilty man would have settled for that and maybe accepted a slightly cushier form of punishment, but an innocent one? No, an innocent one would settle for nothing less than his freedom. Which meant that Steffane Ronin had to be innocent.

  Storm arrived at 8:00 am on the dot and looked surprised to find me pacing outside of his door. I’ll confess that I was not an early bird. If left to my own devices I would have rolled in to work at midday every day. As it was, I barely managed to scrape in by 10:00 am most mornings, but no one minded because all I was doing was reviewing and closing old cases. They pretty much left me up to my own devices. That would change if I was helping on one of their active cases, at which point I would make every effort to arrive on time.

  Storm did not look good. And by that I meant he looked slightly less perfect than his usual hunky self. He still had that smudge of dark circles under his eyes and the tiniest hint of being careworn. I supposed I noticed it because I took an overly keen interest in him.

  “Not another drunken night out on the town?” I asked him.

  His immediate instinct was to glower at me. And then he sighed, and said, “You might as well come in. I have some news for you.”

  He unlocked his office door and let me inside the glass-walled office.

  “I don’t know how you stand it,” I said, looking out at the open plan desks outside. Anyone who worked out there could look in and see Storm all day long. “It’s like being a fish in a tank. People can watch you whenever they like.”

  I much preferred my own pseudo-office, which was a large empty old loft space one level up in this same building. The loft space had not been refurbished in decades, and was underused and draughty, but I had claimed one abandoned room in it for my very own. It had my flying hammock and some throw cushions on the floor and all my papers were up on the walls or arranged in grids on the floor where I could peruse them at my leisure. It was my perfect ramshackle working space, unlike this pristine fish tank.

  Being in here made me feel like the best thing about my own office was its solid walls. God, how I would hate to be watched through the glass all day long. And I bet plenty of people were watching him all the time. Like the pool of secretaries that sat down the hall who could most definitely see all the way across the open plan office to here. And I bet they enjoyed the view. Damn them.

  I was too filled with pent up energy to take a seat, so I paced near Storm’s desk. “I have some news for you too,” I said.

  “Go ahead,” he said promptly, not bothering to tell me to sit down. That was one of the things I liked about Storm. He was always willing to listen. And it was good to be listened to with such attention. He had this way about him that made you feel like you were really there and really important.

  But what I had to say would have to wait since his attention was so clearly on whatever he wanted to tell me. I wanted his full attention for when it came to my turn. Plus I had no idea how Storm was going to react.

  I had no idea how he was feeling after the last time we had seen each other when he had woken up curled up beside me in my bed. From his professional demeanor you would think it had never happened. I didn’t know what I had been hoping for. Maybe a mischievous smile? Maybe a look of amusement or acknowledgment that we had seen each other outside of work for once? Nothing was even different about his music today. It was still that big powerful soothing and wonderful sound radiating out from him. Sometimes when I heard and felt it, I just wanted to give him a huge hug and hold him tight and not let go.

  The current look on Storm’s face told me that this was the last thing that he would welcome. Well, if he was going to be so uptight and professional, I could be that too.

  I said to him, “Gentlemen first. What did you want to tell me?”

  Storm slid a piece of paper across his desk at me. “I got the Chief’s clearance for you to be trained as a professional oracle. The Agency will fund it and sponsor you, and I’ve already narrowed down three oracles you might like to study with. All you need to do is pick one and agree a schedule.”

  He was smiling. He sounded excited, pleased with himself. It was like he expected me to be too.

  I felt sick inside. He wanted me to enroll as a professional auricle? What the hell? I felt like a rug had been pulled from under me. He had mentioned this to me in passing before, but now he was looking at me like I should be jumping at the chance. And if I were anyone else maybe I would have been. But I wasn’t just anyone else. I was the Angel of Death, or maybe I wasn’t. I was certainly something not normal, and the last thing I needed was to spend hours and months in training with a goddamn professional oracle who was going to be able to see right through me. Who was going to find out
there was something wrong with me and report it to the Agency, and probably her own bosses too. Because oracles were fiercely loyal first and foremost to their own people, and I was definitely not one of their people. An oracle would ruin everything I had worked so hard for. What the hell was Storm thinking?

  “Why the hell didn’t you ask me about this first?” I snapped.

  Storm looked taken aback. “I thought this was what you wanted—”

  “No, it’s not!” I said hotly. “Which you would know if you bothered to listen!”

  “You said you didn’t do it because you didn’t have the money for it,” he said.

  “That’s one of the reasons. Who said I wanted to be a registered oracle anyway? Why the hell is that so important to you? If I’m not good enough as I am, why the hell did you hire me in the first place?”