“Theo!” I said sharply, interrupting him in mid-flow. “I really did not come here to speak to you about any of this. I wanted to talk to you about the Steffane Ronin case.”
“Then it’s even more important that we should discuss this,” insisted Theo. “It’s important in your psychological recovery after you slay the Devil Claw Killer, if that is indeed what you have decided to do. If you really were the Angel of Death, who was sent to slay enemies, then it’s no wonder you feel a compulsion to kill the Devil Claw Killer. In understanding this you’re going to be able to reconcile yourself to having to murder another being.” Theo’s voice finally quavered and lost its sense of conviction. He did not seem to have reconciled himself to this idea of me murdering another being. Perhaps that was why he was so intent on talking to me about it. It was him who was having trouble with this whole thing.
“You really don’t need to worry about me, Theo,” I said. “It turns out I have a secret weapon after all.” I told him about the sword.
This seemed to agitate him more rather than have my intended effect of calming him. “But this is incredible,” he said. “None of my reading spoke of a sword. I really have to look into this. You said it appeared at the moment the vampire Marielle tried to kill you? Which means that it appeared in your moment of greatest need? That means you should practice with a sword, so you will be ready for it and know how to use it when it next appears.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said to him. “And I promise that I’ll practice but I don’t have time right now.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he argued. “You have to make time. You have to prepare! We are speaking of an experienced and highly brutal serial killer. You can’t go into this situation empty-handed. It’s far too dangerous. Before, I thought this potential confrontation was a long way off, but if everything you said is true, then you may be facing your nemesis far sooner than either of us expected.”
“Chill out, Theo. I will prepare. In fact I plan on spending the rest of the day doing it. And anyway, even if Devil Claw did hurt me, all I have to do is survive long enough to crawl into a hideaway and pass out. It’s a good job I can magically heal while I’m unconscious. It will be fine. Trust me.”
“Not if he kills you. Not if you pass out from your injuries during the fight. You will be entirely at his mercy.” Theo frowned at me. “This is no time to make light of the matter, young lady!”
I giggled. “Did you just call me young lady? Hadn’t we just been discussing that I’m supposed to be the Angel of Death? That makes me a pretty old lady by my count!”
Talking about my sword appearing at my moment of greatest need had cheered me right up. The sword had slid into a vampire’s notoriously hard skin so effortlessly. Which meant that maybe it would slide into DCK like butter too. I didn’t really have to know how to fight with a sword. I just had to know how to stick the pointy end in. But there was some more stuff that I needed to do before my confrontation with DCK. Because it was not going to be enough to only kill him.
I needed some information from him. My mother Magda’s letter had said that she feared that DCK was hunting me because he wanted my navelstone. I had to know if that was true. How and what did he know about me? And who else knew? To find out, I was going to have to tie him up and torture him, horrific as that sounded. And if I was going to do that, I needed somewhere to do it in. Somewhere that couldn’t be linked back to me or to Theo, since it would be the crime scene that I killed him in.
I had seen it on one of the TV shows that I liked to watch. They called it a kill room. I needed my own kill room. And I knew where I was going to find one.
I planted my hands on the counter and hoisted myself up to plant a quick kiss on Theo’s cheek. “Thanks for worrying about me, Teddy bear. You really know how to make a girl feel cared for. But I am going to be just fine. You’ll see. I’ve gotta go now.”
With those words, I left the magic shop, and made my way around London to various hardware stores, purchasing a bunch of things with cash, like plastic wrap. A lot of it.
When I was done with my purchases, I made my way to the tube station and across London, weighed down by the heavy new backpack I had bought, filled with all the tools of a killer’s trade. I got out at Shoreditch station and trudged through the streets of East London, until I reached the abandoned office building that I had once walked through with Remi during a case. We had been hunting for a missing teenage girl and a killer werewolf.
The building was completely locked off, but during our search I had discovered a shutter closing off a broken window that could be opened from the outside. It was one level up, a tricky climb, especially with my backpack. I let myself into the building and trudged up the interior stairs to the very top level. It was kind of dark in here, but I didn’t mind that.
I didn’t know how I was going to lead DCK here exactly, but I would think of it. For now I had to prepare. I selected one of the rooms on the upper level and set about laying down plastic sheeting all over the floor and sticking it to the walls. It was a time-consuming task, particularly since I had to be very careful to make sure that I didn’t get my fingerprints or any of my DNA anywhere. I had covered my hands with plastic gloves and my hair with a plastic shower cap. I had stifled several sneezes from all of the dust everywhere. Most annoying was having to snip each piece of sticky tape with scissors instead of using my teeth, which would have been far quicker. Prepping a kill room was far more laborious and annoying than I had thought it would be.
I had bought along various tools and knives as torture instruments, and after several minutes of debate with myself, I decided to lay them out on one side ready for use. I might need them on hand to subdue DCK once I got him into this room. Mostly I was hoping that my sword would appear, and I could use that instead. I covered the weapons up with a bunch of garbage bags when I was done. Hopefully DCK wouldn’t see them and decide to use them on me.
When I was finally done, I stood back to appreciate my handiwork. Any normal person would be feeling chilled by this whole thing, but I felt positively merry. I was going to bring an end to one of the worst serial killers the Earth had ever seen. If that wasn’t a reason to celebrate, I didn’t know what was.
Grinning, I turned towards the door, finally ready to leave, and got the shock of my life.
Finch Greyiron was standing in the doorway looking at me. His arms were crossed over his chest, and his eyebrows were furrowed. “What the hell is this?” he said.
Chapter 22
DIANA
Late the next morning I was on a train zooming through the countryside towards Edinburgh. It was Friday already. I was impatient to get the interview with Constance Ashbeck over and done with. I was jittery and impatient and far too excited to sit still, so being on a train was the worst thing that I could subject myself to.
Constance Ashbeck was going to tell me what I needed to know. She had to. I had not prepared my damn kill room for nothing.
Nothing was exactly what I thought I would be using it for when I had laid eyes on Finch standing in the doorway of the kill room yesterday. My navelstone had vibrated fiercely the moment I saw him and Finch had been damn lucky that the sword had not appeared in my hand. I was sure it would have slain him on the spot.
As I had mentally debated the various options of what to do, including tying him up and leaving him there until I had decided how to deal with him, he had said, “You missed a spot,” and pointed to the back of the door, which I had failed to coat in plastic wrap.
I had raised my eyebrows in enquiry. “Experienced with kill rooms, are you?”
“Not exactly,” he had said. “But maybe I will be after I find the guy who took Zezi.”
He had meant it too. I could tell that by the feel of the psychic music coming off him, which had been intense and full of a quietly leashed rage. Finch wanted to find the people who had taken Zezi and he was not averse to dealing out harm to them. Looking at him, this defied belief. He looked
nothing more than a harmless chilled-out young university student who should be playing a guitar and smoking weed and passing out from getting drunk. There was definitely more to this guy than met the eye, and I didn’t just mean that he was half goblin.
I had decided to trust Finch. I hadn’t told him what I planned to do with the room, but I had told him it would be in his best interest to never come back to it and to never speak of it to anyone. I had believed him when he said that he would not. In exchange for his silence I had promised that I would use my psychic skills to help him find Zezi — as soon as my DCK case was over. He hadn’t wanted to wait, but I told him that there was simply no way that I was going to be able to concentrate on anything else. I would be of no use. He had grudgingly backed off.
Plagued by the thought of what I wanted to do with Devil Claw once I got my hands on him, the journey crawled by. I didn’t want to think about my doubts about my ability to take him on. I just wanted to believe that when the moment arrived, I would be prepared. That this was meant to be. That everything would be fine, just like it had been in the Ronin house when Marielle came at me.
Several hours later I arrived at the hospital in Edinburgh to find Storm waiting impatiently outside of Grace Newman’s room. The doctor was in there with her, and had refused to let Storm in until she was finished. Storm told me that Remi and Monroe were speaking to the forensic team, and that Leo was off work given that it was the day before the full moon.
Finally the doctor came out of the room and told us we could have fifteen minutes with Mrs Newman, but we were not to upset her. Storm reassured the doctor that we would be as gentle as could be. The doctor practically swooned at his smile. Damn her. We entered the room, and I shut the door firmly behind myself and Storm.
Inside, Grace Newman was sitting propped up against many plump pillows in a bed that was very nice for a hospital bed. She was exceptionally thin, gaunt even. She had a bandage on her cheek and another one on her arm, and seemed to have escaped very lightly for an encounter with the Devil Claw Killer himself. He could have snapped her like a twig without even trying. Clearly he had not made any attempt at all to actually kill her. He had wanted her fully functioning so that she could tell us whatever she knew.
But she had no idea about that. This woman believed that she was Grace Newman now, and she thought that we believed it too.
It was not only her bed that was nice. So was the silk robe she was wearing and the furnishings she was surrounded with. In fact, the whole room looked more like it belonged in a hotel than a hospital. It seemed that someone was providing the best of care for her.
However there were no flowers on the bedside table next to her. No cards either. No rich new lover by her side, which she could have easily had. All those years being fed tiny drops of the vampire Gaius Ronin’s blood — her reward for being his blood-slave — had done much to delay the effects of time on her face and body. Time had caught up with her somewhat these six years, but she was still lovely. A lovely lonely woman in a lavish room, and an angry one too by the look on her face.
“I have already spoken to the other officers,” she said. “I’ve given them my account of what happened. I see no benefit to having to relive the whole experience with you.” Her voice was shaking. She had addressed her comments to Storm, clearly thinking that I was of little consequence.
“Nice room you’ve got for yourself here,” I said. “Who is paying for it?”
She looked astonished at my tone. Her mouth opened, and then it snapped shut again. And then it opened. “I want that woman out of here,” she said to Storm, her voice trembling. “I am a victim! You can’t treat me like this!”
I stalked right up to her bed and took a seat in the chair beside it. Up close, the hollows beneath her eyes were dark and made her look even more fragile, even more the victim that she wanted us to believe that she was. “And what about your victim?” I said. “What about Leonie Ashbeck?”
Her eyes went wide, and then they flicked from me to Storm and back again. Her mouth trembled. “Who?” she said in a faint voice.
I gave her a satisfied smile like a cat that got the cream. “Leonie, your niece. Or have you forgotten her already?”
Storm had come to stand beside me, and he spoke in a far more reasonable tone. “We know who you really are, Grace,” he said. “You may not remember me, but we met once a long time ago, when you were called Constance.”
Her gaze fixed on his face and after a while her stoic expression crumpled. She had recognized Storm, and clearly with that memory had come an influx of other unpleasant ones. She took several deep breaths, clearly trying to halt the wave of panic that was coming her way. When she spoke again, she managed to inject the reediest thread of steel back into her voice.
“Why are you here?” she said to him. “I thought this was about the attack on me yesterday. You have no right to come looking for me in relation to anything else. You have no right to come here. Do you know how hard it was for me to leave that other life behind?”
She was not lying. I could sense the rage and the confusion emanating off her. And the fear too. She had not expected a meeting with her past today. Behind all those roiling emotions was something else that she was trying to hide. I couldn’t pin it down. She was feeling too many things all at once. So I reached out to touch her hand.
It was cold to the touch and felt thin and fragile. She tugged it away immediately. But not before I saw something that she had not meant for me to see. A vision in which she had been younger, half the age she was now, the spitting image of her young niece at the age Leonie had died. She had been in a hospital bed like this, all alone like she was now, wearing a hospital gown, her face flushed with perspiration, panting and writhing as she struggled with the wave of pain gripping her hugely swollen abdomen.
She didn’t know what I had seen, because she said in a small voice, “Did Gaius send you?”
When Storm shook his head to deny it, she looked like she was about to cry. She clutched a small silver cross dangling from a chain around her throat, and said, “Oh.” It was a pitiable sound.
“You still miss him, don’t you?” I said.
“No,” she said. “He was evil. He was a vampire. I don’t miss him. How could I? I went astray. But I’ve found my f-faith again.” She stuttered on the word faith as if it had been difficult to say. She was twisting her cross around and around on her chain, to the point that I thought the delicate chain would snap.
“You do miss him,” I said. “Admit it. Isn’t it against your faith to lie?”
She shot me an accusing look, as if I was some sort of monster. “I don’t want to miss him,” she said. “I don’t. I won’t.” She was shaking her head as if saying it would make it true, but tears were running down her cheeks and soaking into the dressing that covered her injury.
“You do,” I accused. “You miss the taste of his blood, and the way it made you feel. You’re a junkie. You still want it, even six years later. You still want it even though Leonie is dead.”
Constance gasped at my cruelty.
“Diana,” said Storm in a warning tone.
I shot him a brief look of irritation. I almost knew how Constance Ashbeck felt, to want a man who didn’t want you back.
“How is she supposed to tell us the truth if she won’t even admit the truth of how she feels to herself?” I said, doing my best not to snap at him.
I turned back to face her. This woman had been Gaius Ronin’s sheep for nearly two decades. She was still his sheep. It disgusted me, but I also felt a wave of pity. This woman had given up everything for Gaius, including the most important part of herself. All these years later and the lies were so ingrained in her that she would not admit them. Because she still hoped that Gaius Ronin wanted her. She had hidden herself hundreds of miles away from him, but she was still hoping he would come to claim her in some big romantic gesture. Her hero. She was a shell without him. In her heart of hearts she was waiting for the vampire
to come and take her home.
“Leonie was your daughter, wasn’t she?” I said abruptly.
I saw from the corner of my eye that Storm was shocked, but I kept my attention on Constance who was blinking rapidly, and stuttering as she tried to deny it. Then she bowed her head, and whispered, “Yes.”
“And then you met Gaius,” I said harshly. “So you sent her to your twin brother so that you could have fun with your vampire lover.”
“Joshua and Darya wanted a baby,” she said defensively, refusing to meet my eyes. “They were glad to have her. I knew they’d give her a good life. She was safe there.”
“So they raised your baby, and you went off to live in a vampire nest.”
Psychic for Hire Series Box Set Page 86