Dark Heir

“My Jane. You miss me, oui?”

“No.” Quickly I informed him about the state of Acton House and its curator. “Is there anything you haven’t told me about the night Santana disappeared?”

“This is a story like unto the five blind men who feel of an elephant. One touches a leg and says he feels a tree. One touches the trunk and says he holds a snake. One takes his tail—”

“I know the story. What does it have to do with this situation?”

“Eyewitnesses all see something different. Ask Bethany what she saw. Ask Sabina. Ask Adrianna when she regains her mind. Ask anyone and everyone what happened that night. Perhaps they all saw something different. Something useful to your search.” Without a word I closed the Kevlar cover of the cell phone and tucked it away.

“Everything that has happened to vamps in the last hundred-plus years is related directly to this night. And everything that will happen in the next . . . year or more”—I made a waffling hand to indicate who knew how long it might last—“will be related to how we handle the Son of Darkness. I don’t know that we even need to know the sequence of events from that night. I don’t think it matters. But we do need to know where all the players are now, and whose side they’re on. Bethany claims Leo is hers, but if she doesn’t get her way with him,” or with Bruiser, I added mentally, “she might flip and side with Dominique and Santana, against Leo. Because she is seriously nutso.”

Eli muttered, “At which point we might be screwed.” Bruiser slanted a look at me before he turned away and moved back toward the stairs. The look said lots of things: that Bethany was crazy, that Bethany might not know the difference between truth and her own blood-poisoned imaginings, that Bethany might just as soon kill us all as talk to us, that he and Bethany had unfinished business that might make her decide I was her number one enemy, that she wanted her Bruiser back as love toy and dinner, that she was hungry and we might all look like dinner. Lots of things.

We left the house at different times, staggering our departures. Bruiser left last, and he was on the phone calling in a cleanup team for the house. Pinkie would disappear, her death never reported. I knew that. And it made me sick.

* * *

We stopped at three other properties owned by Joseph Santana or similar names. They turned out to be rental properties run by a management agency for a shell-company landlord. Santana hadn’t been to any of them. And though we had had naps, we were dead on our feet. Three days of stress and bloodshed and death had taken a toll. We had to stop or our bodies would stop us.

Back at the house, Eli parked and followed me in, pausing just behind me in the foyer. I pulled off the holster and the vest, tossed the vest across the room to the couch, and hung the shoulder rig over the stair post. I leaned into it, dropped my head, and closed my eyes, both hands on the rail’s monkey tail, gripping it hard enough to hurt, hoping to hide my feelings. There were things that needed addressing. “I won’t leave the house again without telling you, even if I have to wake you up and you need sleep,” I said.

“Thank you,” Eli said his voice quiet. “If it makes you feel any better, she didn’t know she was dying.”

“No.” I shook my head, rubbing my forehead against my arms. My eyes were hard and dry and burning. “It doesn’t make me feel any better. Pinkie’s dead. And I could have stopped it. Get some sleep. We finish this tonight.”

I went to my room, stripped on the way to the shower, and stood under the spray, leaning against the tiled wall, my back to the door, my head cradled again in my arms, as if the water might wash away my misery and my guilt. Tears leaked down my face, mixing with the first mist of rising steam, salty on my lips. The hot water beat into my back.

People were dead because I was . . . not enough. Never enough. Not enough to stop it. Not enough to figure out where Santana was. Not enough to kill him or capture him or . . . anything. Just not enough. And yes, I’d been told that not being enough was a normal feeling, and that wanting to be enough for everything and everyone was me trying to fill the gap where God was supposed to go. That didn’t help; not at all. I was trying to do my job, but I wasn’t sure where God was in all the chaos. I wasn’t sure he was there at all.

The shower stall door opened behind me. I didn’t turn.

Some part of me had known he was there, had perhaps detected a faint tremor through the floor, of him walking, or maybe smelled him, as he pulled off his weapons and clothes. Bruiser shut the door, trapping the steam and the heat, and stepped close, not speaking, not touching. Waiting. I took a breath and felt my ribs quaver on a sob as I exhaled. My fists clenched.

As if that was a signal, he moved closer, closing the gap between us. His body touched mine, paused, as if expecting me to shove him away. When I didn’t, he stepped closer still, and leaned against me, his body long and hard on mine. Skin as hot as the water. His hands went high, bracing his body on the tiled wall, careful not to put too much weight on me. As if I were fragile, breakable.

I shuddered out a second sob.

With his chin, he pushed aside my wet hair and dropped his jaw to my shoulder. His lips found that place, right at the base of my ear. He’d found it less than a week ago and we had discovered that when his mouth touched it . . . like that . . . I started to shiver.

A long, slow tremor went down my body, and my tears flowed faster. I shook my head, not in negation, but in uncertainty. He seemed to understand that. My voice rough with tears, I murmured into the crook of my arms, “You think hot, wild monkey sex is gonna fix any of this?”

“No. Nothing will fix the mess we’re in. Nothing will bring back Pinkie, or the fifty-two, or the homeless, or the three women at the pool.” His jaw rubbed along my shoulder and up my neck, the beginning stubble of his five-o’clock shadow scraping. “But an hour together, here, while the water warms our muscles and slicks our skin”—his teeth grazed the curve of my ear—“will clear our heads and our hearts and help us to sleep.”

I almost said my hot-water heater didn’t hold that much water, but I kept the words in. I knew what he meant. I knew.

Bruiser’s hands dropped slowly down the wall with a slight screech of skin on tile, until he touched the backs of my fingers. Moving as if he were composed of heated caramel, his fingers slid along my hands and wrists, my lower arms, circling the bend of my elbows. His touch warmed some cold place inside of me, and I sighed again, this time in relief that morphed slowly, languidly, into pleasure. Something warmer than my cold misery curled in my core and settled, heavy, low in my belly.