Unlocking the front door, he pushed it open. At first, there was nothing, only the slightly musty smell of a house that had been shut up for a while. Then he caught a whiff of the most putrid odor, that of rotting flesh.
Honor went motionless beside him, her gun smoothly in hand. “There’s something dead inside.”
“Long enough to have decomposed.” Which meant that either Amos had somehow snuck back in past the guards and left a gruesome message, or something else was going on. “Yet not so long ago that the others who came here had reason to be suspicious.”
“Dmitri.”
Following the direction of Honor’s raised arm, he saw her pointing at a flat-screen television on the wall. The power indicator was dead. And when Honor flicked on a light switch, nothing happened. “The electricity’s down. Blown fuse maybe.”
“It’s an older home,” Dmitri said, following the fetid scent. “Such things happen.”
The rank smell took them not into a basement as he’d half expected, but to a large room at the back of the house. There was no lock, nothing to differentiate the door from any other along the corridor.
“God.” Honor put a hand up over her mouth and nose as he pushed open that door—the odor was vile here, so concentrated it felt akin to soup.
The room itself was barren but for a wooden shelf that held a number of books and magazines, and a single armchair that looked as if it had been banished here because it was too ratty for the main living areas. Beside it sat a small burn-scarred table set with a crystal tumbler and a bottle filled with dark red liquid. The rug on the floor was threadbare.
It was the kind of shabby, comfortable den a man might create to get a little peace and quiet . . . except if you looked carefully, it became clear the armchair was angled toward a particular section of the wall. Normally, there would’ve been nothing to differentiate it from the rest of the room, the reason his men had missed it, but right now, water seeped from beneath that section to soak the rug.
“Fridge,” Honor whispered. “There’s a fridge behind there.”
27
“I’ll do this,” he said, because though she’d demanded he not protect her, his need to do so was gut deep.
An intense look from those eyes that pierced him. “All right.” She positioned her body in a way that gave her a sight line to the door, but allowed her to keep an eye on him as well. A slight shake of her head when their eyes met again and he knew that nothing he said would send her from this room. He was more than strong enough to force her compliance, but force was the one thing he couldn’t use with this woman.
It would’ve been easy to explain his reluctance as part of the cold calculation necessary to get her into bed, but the lie would serve no purpose—not when she saw him in ways no other woman ever had. Ingrede, sweet, loving, strong Ingrede, wouldn’t have understood the darkness that lived within him now. Honor did. It felt a betrayal to his wife’s memory to think such a thing but that made it no less true. “Are you sure?”
No hesitation. “Yes.”
Shifting his gaze to the wall, he ran his fingers along it until he found a small indentation. A single push and a section of the wall opened to expose a large, squat refrigeration unit, the water pooled below it mute evidence of the loss of power. Trying not to smell the odor that spoke of putrid decay, he lifted the lid to brace it against the wall.
Then he looked down.
At the bodies.
The freezer was large enough that Amos hadn’t had to cut off limbs or separate the torsos from the victims’ lower halves. He’d simply bent the bodies into the fetal position and crushed them together like so many pieces of meat. “Detective Santiago is currently working on the serial abductions of tall, slender women of mixed race in the greater New York area, is he not? Specifically, women who have one black parent, one white.”
Honor crossed the small distance between them to glance inside the freezer, her expressive face touched with horror. “Yes. Everyone’s working on the theory that it’s a human predator—no trace of feeding or any blood at the scenes. The women just vanish.”
Dmitri ran his gaze over the body closest to the top. In spite of the putrefaction, her underlying bone structure was clear, enough undecomposed flesh visible that he could be certain of her skin color. “Such hatred,” he said, recalculating everything he thought he knew about Jiana and Amos. “Toward the one being who has always protected him.”
“Are you certain?”
Dmitri had made careful inquiries when the unnaturally close tie between mother and son became obvious and had been convinced the bond had formed as a result of Amos’s madness, Jiana doing everything she could to help and protect her son. Now he wondered if he’d missed the far more sinister truth. “No longer as certain as I once was.” He closed the lid.
“We’ll call Santiago, get the cops involved.” Everyone would assume Amos had gone insane with age. That facet of a long life was an unhidden truth, one that stopped none of those who wanted to be Made. Even two hundred years spent as a healthy, ageless vampire was a lot longer than the average human life span. “The more people we have watching for him, the better the chances of running him down.”
Honor nodded, taking small, shallow breaths until they were back out in the corridor with the door closed. “Why did he take me? I don’t fit the profile.”
Cold rage pulsed through Dmitri’s blood at the reminder of what Amos had done to Honor, but he gave the question serious thought. “He hates his mother, it seems, but he also wishes to please her.” A flicker of memory, Jiana at a cocktail party she’d given four summers ago.
“Dmitri, I’m so glad you could come.” A gracious smile, a kiss on his cheek. “Have you met Rebecca?” This time, the smile on her lips held an elegant sensuality.
“A pleasure,” he said, inclining his head toward the curvy brunette beauty with skin of light golden brown who hung on Jiana’s every word.
“You,” he said to Honor, “are not his type, but you are Jiana’s.”
“That’s sick . . . and put together with everything else, it raises certain questions.” She glanced at the closed door to the room that spoke of Amos’s twisted sexuality. “Let’s head outside, call Santiago.”
Dmitri let her lead them out through the back door. The sunshine was brilliant, the heat of it a slicing blade. As he watched, Honor strode down to the grass and used her cell to call the cop who had a way of ending up on cases linked to immortals. While she did that, he made a few calls of his own, including one to a senior vampire under his command. “Make certain Jiana doesn’t leave the house,” he ordered. “I need to have a chat with her.” Hanging up, he waited for Honor to walk back to him.