Dark Heir

Which meant later, privately, and not for any listening ears at coms. I nodded. I needed to know what was wrong with Del. I needed to know about Adrianna. I needed to know a lot of stuff, and Bruiser hadn’t been at his apartment last night, which meant he had stayed at HQ. I assumed. I didn’t really know. And I was too chicken to ask, fearful of sounding like a lovesick schoolgirl, whining, Where were you last night? You didn’t answer my text. Were you with your old girlfriend? Which I knew he wasn’t, since his old girlfriend was Katie of Katie’s Ladies, my former landlady, and Leo’s heir. And Leo’s lover. Vamp bed jumping was normally hard to keep up with, but Alex was currently handling the security cams and console for Katie’s place of business, until we could train Deon, her chef, for that job. We had access to all the cameras, and Bruiser hadn’t been there. Katie had been otherwise entertained last night. I tried to ignore my own relief at that. I trusted Bruiser. I did. But we hadn’t established the boundaries of our relationship yet. I wasn’t sure we really had a relationship yet.

Into my earpiece, I heard Alex ask, “Did I just see Leo carrying Adrianna, still with her head, up to his office?”

I nodded, then said, “Yeah. Creepy, I know. But he wants her alive.”

“But she tried to kill you. More than once. She was a pig. And now she’s a brain-dead pig. Hungry for a good meal of bacon and scrambled brains, anyone?”

I chuckled at the sophomoric humor, the laughter bumping my arm, the pain reverberating all through me. “Stop. Please. And follow Del on the cams. Tell me what’s up with her.”

“She took the stairs to Leo’s office. She was standing in the hallway when he went past.”

“And he didn’t look at her.”

“Correctomundo. A bad case of lovelorn, brokenhearted girl stuff?”

“Yeah.” And something else to ask Bruiser. How to make Leo fall in love. I grinned, picturing his face when I asked.

CHAPTER 3

Not My First Time at This Rodeo, Sugar

I stood out of the way while Eli, stinking of sweaty leather and failed deodorant from his dual runs in the sun, took ambient magical readings. The psy-meter needle was everywhere, flipping from one side—zero magical ambiance—to one hundred: redline magical activity or resonance. Most of the activity was on the wall where Joses had hung, crucified for a hundred years, give or take.

Yeah. Lots of magic juju, its distinctive pins-and-needles taint brushing my nose, as if trying to induce a sneeze, the stink of vamp and human blood, the reek of fear and anger. And if purpose had a scent, it too was part of the miasma of sub-five.

No one had said so, but I knew that Leo was in danger from this guy, a threat like I had never fought before and had no way to look up or research. And the world’s best research guy, Reach, was gone, vanished in the wind. Not that I missed him, the two-faced, backstabbing bastard. But. I was still worried about him. How stupid was that?

No, there was no Reach with his in-depth database to help me discover how Joses might intend to twist witch magic and vamp mojo together and turn them into a weapon, one served up with vengeance and a side dish of insanity. Alex was good. But he wasn’t Reach. Or Reach before he’d been tortured by Satan’s Three and gone on the run. Assuming all that story he’d given me was true. Which it might have been. Probably was. Reach had disappeared, gone off the grid. No one in the vamp-hunting community—which was small and growing smaller by the day—had heard from him.

When Eli finished measuring once, he did it all again, this time marking the measurements down on a tablet that was synced to Alex’s console, like a map of magical stuff—substance and activity. Smart. If I hadn’t been hurting so bad and fighting the need to hurl, I’d have applauded.

When he was done I let him come to me, and I looked over his work. “Deets and conclusions?” I asked.

“The Headless Wonder,” he pointed at Mario, “has marginal amounts of magical residue on his clothes. His hands are suffused with it, and so is his right wrist.”

I looked at Mario, remembering the egotistical guy who had thought I was coming on to him and slobbered all over me while I used him to get down the elevator. I wasn’t proud of that, nor the “means to an end” mentality that had gone along with it. I bent and studied Mario’s wrist, noting that the skin was abraded in a circular pattern. I imagined what Mario would do if someone had offered him a magical bracelet, and yeah, he’d have put it on. He wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge. And the bracelet had left residue on his flesh.

Eli pocketed the tablet and went to the wall where Joses had hung. He pulled a packet of sterile gauze from a pocket in his pants that held medical supplies and opened the paper packet. With the roll of gauze, he scraped at some dried gunk left on the wall—blood, skin cells, gross fluids—and put the gauze back in the opened packet and into his gobag.

I grunted in approval. I should have thought about it and hadn’t. Evidence gathering was my bag, not my partner’s, but Eli had been studying the how-to of the PI business, saying he wanted to know everything about the business he had bought into. It had paid off.

“Mario and Adrianna brought something—or maybe more than one something—magical down to the basement,” Eli said, his words echoing my own conclusions. “Using it, or them, and the humans, they freed Joses.”

“Why the humans?” I asked.

Eli looked at me strangely. “Because the stakes are silver. And there’s no device or cloth or gloves on the floor or on the vamps that they could have used. No claw hammer. No burned fingers. Hence, they had a human or humans to help.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Of course. Obvious. Except when pain was thrumming through your gut and brain, short-circuiting everything logical.

“You okay, Janie?” Eli asked.

Alex said over the headphones. “No. She’s hurt. She did that thing again where time slows down for her, and she was nauseous from that, though she seems better now. From what I could make out in the vid, the spell hit her right hand first, and it’s bandaged into a sling, so I’m guessing she has burns on her right hand and arm.”

Eli closed the psy-meter, clamped it between his left arm and his body, and held out his right hand, a signal that demanded I let him see. The gestures were efficient and military. I just stared at his hand, the dark skin outlining the pale palm. “Jane?” he asked.