For a long moment I thought about it. For anything else I would have said yes to Storm. He’d never given me any reason to not trust him completely, to not believe him. And yet, in this case, what I needed more than anything else was for him to believe me. And he didn’t. Nor did the rest of the team.
Because I had put their jobs at risk.
I unclipped my Agency ID card from my belt, and placed it on to Storm’s desk. He looked shocked as he realized what I was doing. “You guys really are the best team,” I said. “I guess you’ll keep catching those bad guys without me.”
Storm and Leo were stony faced, but Monroe and Remi looked upset. I was sure that they’d get over this quicker than I would. I put a cheery smile on my face and saluted them all, and then I walked out.
Chapter 15
REMI
Remi could not believe that Diana had handed in her badge and walked out. She had not seen that coming at all. Diana had worked so hard to get her job as a consultant here, and in these past three weeks she had worked non-stop and closed on average one case every week. One cold case that other teams had worked sometimes for years on, and gotten nowhere. Diana was brilliant at her job. But that was not why Remi would miss her.
Diana was fun, she was unpredictable, she was downright weird at times. And she was the only other woman on this team. Remi liked having her around. Remi liked going up to Diana’s cavernous office in the loft on coffee breaks and swinging around on Diana’s flying hammock that Diana’s wizard friend had given her. She liked talking over old cases with Diana, and she liked trying to figure out how Diana’s psychic skills worked.
So now Remi was hunched over her desk, and having failed to locate an electronic copy of the Leonie Ashbeck murder case file, she had resorted to googling the internet to find out the details instead. The case had happened years before Remi had joined the Agency, and it made for sordid reading. But like Storm, Remi couldn’t see why Diana had got it into her head that Steffane Ronin was innocent. If Diana had real proof, surely she would have told them. Remi was sure that if there had been proof, Storm would have been the first to back Diana up every step of the way.
This team was Remi’s work family, and Diana’s arrival had made the family feel complete. Leo was often too quiet and inside his head all the time, and Storm was emotionally reserved at the best of times. Monroe was hotness made flesh, and he was always under her skin without even trying, and Remi actually liked the way Diana would tease them about it. It was the closest Remi got to speaking to anyone about how she felt about Monroe. And now Diana was gone.
Remi could not believe that Diana had walked out. She had just walked out. Remi wasn’t mad. She felt guilty. She had been thinking about what had happened, and in hindsight she was worried that from Diana’s perspective it was like the whole team had ganged up on her. No wonder Diana had walked out.
And now Remi and Monroe and Leo were back at their desks, and Storm was in his office, and no one was talking about what had just happened. They were in the middle of investigating a case of young woman who had drowned in the River Thames after falling overboard from a party boat. Bruises on her body had indicated a struggle rather than an accidental drowning, and since the girl’s boyfriend and her brother-in-law, both of whom she had been seen arguing with on the night she had died, were incubae, the case had been handed to the Agency for investigation.
It was nearly lunchtime. Remi and Leo should have headed out into the field already to interview witnesses and suspects, but Leo was hunched over his computer typing away, seeming like he had no intention of leaving the office any time soon. Monroe also determinedly had his head bent over his computer, no doubt burying himself in his research so he didn’t have to think about Diana leaving. Men! Why did they have to be so emotionally repressed?
“Are we going to do something about this or not?” Remi snapped
“Doing it,” said Leo.
“I meant about Diana,” Remi said impatiently.
“Yep,” said Leo. He stood up abruptly and walked away.
Remi and Monroe looked at each other, and Remi felt that momentary flutter of delight inside. “Where the hell did he go?” said Monroe.
“Beats me,” said Remi.
Twenty minutes later Leo returned carrying an evidence bag with a notebook inside it. “You won’t believe this,” he said, carefully extracting the notebook with his gloved hands and placing it on his desk.
Remi’s eyes widened, and she rolled her chair backwards until it bumped against Leo’s desk. “What have you got?” she asked eagerly. Monroe joined them, crowding in on Leo’s other side.
As Remi read what was on the little book, her heartbeat quickened. “No way,” she said. She carefully picked up the notebook using the plastic evidence bag, and charged back into Storm’s office without bothering to knock. Leo and Monroe followed her in a little more hesitantly.
Storm had been on the phone, but he hung up, and immediately said, “Whatever you’re going to say, I’ve already thought about it. Diana chose to leave, and now she’s on her own.”
There was a tone of finality in what he had said, but Remi was in no mood to listen. Storm was sulking, which was not like him at all. He was sore that Diana had left like she had, and now he was getting defensive about it. Men!
“It wasn’t fair,” she said. “We all ganged up on her.”
“No we didn’t,” Monroe protested. And then he seemed to play over what had happened in his head and suddenly looked a little shamefaced. “Oh. Maybe we did,” he mumbled.
“What’s done is done,” said Storm in that very rational boss voice of his. “We can’t help Diana if she is set on this world goose chase.”
“Oh just admit that you’re angry with her,” said Remi. “Because she blatantly lied to you about not interfering with the Ronin case and now you think she’s got no faith or trust in your judgment.”
“Are you saying it was any different?” said Storm in his totally reasonable voice, which was beginning to get on Remi’s nerves.
“We were harsh,” she said. “But you were worse. You’ve been super irritable recently, and I hate to tell you this boss, but you did take it out on Diana. She’s only been working with us part-time these past three weeks and she’s already closed three cases that were supposedly unsolvable. She is a member of this team, and she works damn hard. And now it’s our turn to help her.”
“I haven’t been irritable,” protested Storm.
“Yes you have,” said Remi and Leo and Monroe in unison.
Storm glowered at the three of them. “My mood has nothing to do with what happened with Diana.”
“Good,” said Remi, “Then you will agree now that we’ve all calmed down that we made a mistake and we should help her.”
“You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped,” said Storm.
“Of course she wants our help! She’s just too proud to admit it. And can you blame her? This case is personal. He killed her mother! Devil Claw is the whole reason why she came into work for the Agency in the first place, and now she’s got this one chance, and how can we blame her for throwing everything away to try to catch him? She had to have been absolutely desperate if she went to visit a vampire nest by herself. Boss, are you really going to let her put herself in danger that way?”
“I’ve done my best to reason with her,” said Storm. “She’s got it into her head that Steffane Ronin is innocent, that he really does know who Devil Claw is, but Ronin is not innocent. I was part of the team that arrested him, and he almost had me persuaded for a very short time that he really was innocent because he almost seemed to believe it himself. He was adamant. His mesmerism was so powerful that we were afraid that he would influence the jury. In the end it turned out it couldn’t have been anyone but him. He insisted that he was in love with Leonie Ashbeck, but her aunt said the girl had been terrified of him. Steffane Ronin lied about his innocence, and now he’s lying about knowing Devil Claw. If Diana won’
t listen to reason, she’s going to have to come to the right conclusion on her own the hard way.”
“What if there was a link between Stefanne Ronin and Devil Claw?” Remi said. She carefully placed the notebook onto his desk in front of him. “Leo found something.”
Storm scanned the page she had opened it to and his eyebrows drew together as he deciphered the cramped handwriting.
Leo spoke. “Seven years ago, a year before Steffane Ronin returned to the Ronin family fold, a young woman named Tamara Westmoor was murdered by Devil Claw. It was before any of us joined the Agency.”
Storm was still reading through the notebook, his brow furrowed. “I remember reading those case notes. Westmoor worked for the Agency. She was one of our own. She was one of the Devil Claw’s first known killings.”
“This is her notebook,” said Leo. “I just got it from the evidence archives.” He pointed to a specific passage of writing. “This whole notebook is full of Officer Westmoor’s personal notes on Steffane Ronin. She was trying to convict him for his misdeeds and his dangerous lifestyle, and going by the dates in this notebook, it was right to before she became a victim of the Devil Claw Killer.”
Feeling excited, Remi interjected. “Shortly after her killing Steffane Ronin returned to his family fold to take up the heritage that he had so thoroughly rejected before. What if Steffane Ronin knew Devil Claw? Maybe Officer Westmoor was too close to arresting Ronin and he felt that he was in danger. What if his buddy Devil Claw did him a favor and got rid of her? What if Steffane Ronin returned to his family because he needed their money to pay back the Devil Claw Killer?”
She knew that this is only conjecture, but it was incredibly interesting conjecture. Tamara Westmoor had been investigating Stefan Ronin, and then Tamara Westmoor had been killed by the Devil Claw Killer himself.
“Maybe Steffane Ronin wasn’t lying about Devil Claw after all?” said Monroe hopefully.
The three of them looked to Storm, waiting as he leafed through the rest of the notes. When he was done, he leaned back against his chair and rubbed his temples.
“Maybe,” he said hesitantly.
.
Remi leapt on that. “Exactly!” she said with a grin. “Maybe we have something!”
“You do understand,” said Storm, “That the chief made it very clear to me that if this team involves themselves in the Ronin case any further, that we will all be suspended and perhaps terminated with immediate effect? The people from the embassy were not playing. In their opinion this team has already crossed the lines and they want us gone.”
“Uh huh,” said Remi, nodding. She was glad to see that Leo and Monroe were nodding too. They were all on the same page. They all wanted to help Diana.
“And so you understand that I can’t tell you to validate this lead and investigate any further to see if it pans out, because there is no way that I can allow you all to officially work on this case?”
Storm raised his eyebrows, and Remi knew what he meant. She nodded. “You can’t tell us to investigate. Got it, boss.”
“Because if we investigate then we’ll be fired,” said Monroe.
“And we definitely wouldn’t want to be fired,” said Leo.
“All right then,” said Storm, his face deadpan. “So long as we all know what we’re doing.”
Chapter 16
STORM
Remi and Leo had told Storm that they need to head out on a case, and Storm had not asked them which case. He knew full well which case. It was late afternoon by the time they called him again to tell him that they were headed back in, and they had found something interesting.
The evidence would need to be a hell of a lot more compelling than just interesting in order to persuade the chief to re-open the Ronin case. Storm hated the thought of Diana out there alone causing havoc, and he full well knew how much havoc she was capable of creating without even trying. The problem was that this time she was messing with vampires, and she seemed to not understand exactly how much danger she was putting herself in. Magical beings were always dangerous, but all a vampire had to do was look at to you to make you bend to its will. He hated to think of Diana in that position. He had absolutely no idea how she had managed to walk out of the Ronin nest of her own free will. Had the vampires not bothered to use their mesmerism on her? Had she somehow broken free of it?
And what about this accusation that Diana had stabbed Marielle Ronin with a sword? Diana had been evasive about this point. Storm had never seen Diana with a sword. He couldn’t imagine her using one. Diana had always been more about using her words than her fists. She had never seemed to welcome physical confrontation. He couldn’t imagine her coming out of a fight with a vampire alive. So what the hell had happened in that vampire nest? He wished now that he had been calmer and spoken to her about it.
But just like Saskia, Diana seemed to know exactly how to press his buttons. And Remi’s accusations had been all too true. He had been angry at Saskia, and everything that he had been unable to say to his little sister had been all too easy to say to Diana. And now he felt even worse than he had felt when he had left his apartment this morning.
Diana was a hothead. Her walking out on the team had proved it. He was the head of the team. It was his job to protect them. And he could not allow everyone to lose their jobs just because one person refused to listen to reason. Storm rubbed his eyes, feeling tired, and it wasn’t just because of the lack of sleep. His life was all about work. Until Saskia had arrived, he had been perfectly happy most of the time to eat, sleep and dream about work. He had missed having someone to go home to but not given it much thought. There had been one night when Diana had had to stay at his apartment, her own having been invaded by a killer, and it had been good to wake up to her in the house. It had been good to have breakfast with her. Briefly his apartment had felt like a home instead of just an apartment.
He thought of how good it would be to have someone to come home to. Someone who made his apartment feel like home just by being in there. But Diana was off limits for Storm. She was capable of turning his whole life upside down, and not just emotionally. He needed someone cool-headed to be with, a calming presence in his hectic life. Someone he already knew. So he had damn well better stop thinking about what he couldn’t have.
While Remi and Leo had been out on the field, Storm had distracted himself by working his drowned girl case. He had been on the phone for the past hour tracking down witnesses and arranging for them to come in to the office to be interviewed. When his phone rang, he assumed one of the witnesses was calling him back. He answered, but it was not a witness.
“Evie,” he said in surprise, hearing his older sister’s voice.
“Evaine,” Evie corrected him automatically, her voice cool and distant.
It was her who had called him, but now she went silent, waiting for him to speak. Evie had always been good at making him feel uncomfortable. Even when she didn’t mean to do it, it was how he felt anyway. Storm did not know what she wanted him to say. After a lengthy pause, she finally said, “Well? Have you persuaded her to return to finish her last year at university yet?”
“How are you, Evie?” said Storm in a mocking tone. “Husband and children well?” He had not heard from his older sister in a year, and neither had she found any reason to call him either. She had three little girls; the eldest Maya was four, and the twins Zaira and Zoya were two years old now. Storm had last seen them all three months after the twins were born, having dropped in while visiting Otherworld, where Evie lived now, briefly for a case.
“My family is fine, thank you,” she said in a clipped tone. “I trust you are keeping well?”
“I get that you have to speak to people like that in your job, but do you have to speak to me like that too? I’m your brother.”
“Your job,” she retorted. “It’s your job I’m doing, Conn, and if you would only—”
“No,” Storm said harshly. “It is not my job. I’m doing my job here on E
arth. I have no intention of leaving my whole life behind to go to Otherworld and do a job that I never asked for.”
“The Realm,” Evie corrected him. “There is no need for you to call it Otherworld as if you were an outsider. You belong here. Even mother knew that you belonged here, though she tried her damnedest to keep you away from it.”
“Did you ever think that mother was right?” said Storm.
“She was wrong, and she was selfish not to send you back. She should have sent you back as soon as you were born. Our aunt would have raised you to take up the position you were meant to take up. You were meant for great things, Conn. I don’t know why you refuse to see that.”
“I don’t want great things, Evie. That’s you. You’re the eldest. It should have always been you anyway.”
“We both know it doesn’t work like that,” she said bitterly.
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