Predatory (Immortal Guardians #4)

I should have.

It all happened in one elongated second—my hand closing on the knob; the voices of the contest director and models breaking over the threshold. Me pulling the closet door open. Emerson line-driving me from the darkness.

“What the—?”

“Oh, my God!”

“Are they fighting again?”

Though Emerson jumped out of her closet and pummeled me—then lay there like a dead weight—she was no match for my strength so I quickly rolled her off me, but in that millisecond my nostrils twitched and my mouth started to water. It wasn’t her usual noxious scent. It was something very, very different.

Heavy. Metallic.

Blood.

I felt my mouth drop open and my eyes bulge when I stared at my blood-covered hands, at the smear across my blouse.

And then I looked at Emerson.

“Oh, my—” I started to kick away, felt the inane need to put distance between me and her.

“What’s wrong with her?” one of the models asked.

“Is she okay?” Jason Forbes rushed toward me and Emerson. “Are you okay? What happened? If you ladies can’t—” Jason paused, looked down at Emerson, and then crouched slowly. A chalky white washed over his face. He glanced at me and I knew exactly what the hard look in his eyes meant: Emerson Hawk was dead. When I crawled over to see for myself, I wished I was, too.

Sticking out of Emerson’s concave chest were my lucky scissors. And it didn’t take an X-ray to figure out that their sharp double-blades were wedged firmly and deeply into her silent heart.

From the moment Emerson’s lifeless body hit mine to the second she was being zipped into a slick black coroner’s bag could have been five minutes or five hours. The studio was a buzz of muffled conversations and accusatory glances. I wanted nothing more than to crawl back to the cool, dark cave of an apartment and sort out what had just happened—and what it meant. I was ready to dash when a fat, round detective sidled up to me, flipping open his little leather notebook and breathing at me with his coffee breath. I had expected Officer Hopkins, but the gentleman before me was built like a fireplug and wearing his ill-fitting cotton-poly off-the-rack suit like it was an Armani.

“I’m aware of the previous case but I’m not at liberty to talk about it.” He shifted his eyes as though everyone were about to pounce in an attempt to overhear us.

“It just seems odd that they’d send a detective out for this case but not Reginald’s.”

“You are Nina LaShay, right?” the detective said, completely ignoring my question.

I nodded silently, my arms wrapped around my chest, gripping my elbows.

“I’m Detective Moyer. You were the last to see the decedent alive, were you not?”

“Well—no, not that I know of.” An image of Pike rushing out looking disheveled and nervous flashed through my mind, the image flitting so quickly I didn’t have time to dwell on it. “I saw her last night and then,” I gestured to the closet door, still gaping open, its emptiness a quiet screech that Emerson Hawk was dead.

“Then you found her this morning.”

“She . . . kind of . . . found me.”

“Were you and the decedent friends, Ms. LaShay?”

I wanted to focus on answering the detective’s questions, but every time he asked me anything, he smacked his lips in a weird kind of final gesture and it was turning my stomach. “I wouldn’t say we were friends, exactly. We were colleagues. And competitors.”

If I hadn’t been staring at Moyer’s fat, pale lips making that stupid smacking sound, I would have thought better of telling this man—who was tapping the end of his pen, looking thoughtfully at me—that I might have had motive to kill Emerson. I thought of Hopkins and his accusatory stare and then longed for it as Moyer’s eyebrows went up. He poised the pen over his notepad as though he were about to take down some frantic confession, and any inch of confidence I was harboring wilted.

“Isn’t it true that you two got into some kind of argument last night?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it an argument. Just a little disagreement. Emerson spilled a little wine on my dress, that’s all.” And by a “little wine” I meant half a bottle and by “on my dress” I meant soaked clean through until I had a faint purplish hue when I finally stripped the soaked garment off. I shrugged and tried to smile. “Crowded party and . . . accidents happen.”

Accident my slightly purple ass.

Moyer cocked his head. He was a one hundred percent cardboard cutout of every other detective my San Francisco roommate DVR’d each week, right down to his bulbous red nose and the aforementioned “isn’t it true.”

There was an uncomfortable beat of silence as though Moyer expected me to say more.

“And, that’s it,” I said.

Moyer cocked a single caterpillar eyebrow and shot me one of those “prove it to me” expressions. The kind of expression that is so disconcerting it encourages perfectly innocent and well-read people to start babbling like psychopathic idiots. I was a solid four minutes into my soliloquy that contained a good selection of incriminating myself and backpedaling when my voice was drowned out by the ridiculously loud squawking of a black bird pacing the ledge of the open window.

My God, New York was infested.

Though I pathologically hate birds—not fear, hate—as I mentioned before, I could have run up and kissed this one on its filth-infested birdie beak for creating just the distraction that allowed me a millisecond to give myself a mental head-slap and take the vampire equivalent of a deep, calming breath.

My mouth fell open again at the precise time the bird’s beak cracked wide, as though the foul thing was watching me.

“Someone shoo that bird away,” Detective Moyer said, clearly annoyed.

One of the pup cops used his hat to bat at the screen and the black bird did a patronizing flap of its enormous wings, circling about six inches from the ledge, still squawking like a maniac.

Moyer blew out a disgusted sigh and raked a fat hand over his round face. “We’ll need to have you come down to the station to answer some questions,” he said finally. “Now.”

I swallowed and glanced out the window, the sun catching the heavy leaded glass. Just the glare stung my bare shoulders and I inched away. “Can we finish the interview downstairs? Or in a non–bird-infested room? I just would like to not be here.”

Moyer looked around, his eyes landing on the pattern spread on my table, edged by a heap of fabric scraps.

“What’s all this about? You one of the, er, sewing students?”

I felt myself stiffen even though I knew it was not the time to throw my weight(lessness) around. “I’m a designer, actually. This”—I gestured to the tables, the dresses, the patterns—“is a contest. A competition.” I swallowed, thinking of the swish-swish sound Reginald’s shoes made as they scraped across the dining table, thinking of Emerson’s sightless eyes, the slack in her jaw as it stayed open, forever frozen in surprise.

Moyer eyed the fabric swatches and then eyed me, skepticism written all over his face. “Like a TV thing?”

I was about to correct him, but instead bet on the draw-to-Hollywood that most breathers in this anyone-can-be-a-star decade seemed to have. “Yeah.”

I pumped my head, growing more excited and happy that the majority of my never-lie-to-a-cop morals disappeared when my soul did. “Reality TV.”

Detective Moyer’s spider-veined cheeks reddened and pushed up into a smile. “Is that model going to be here?” He looked around as though we were storing her in a closet or a drawer. “The blonde one? The host? She’s from Sweden or Switzerland. Saskatchewan or something.”

“Uh, yeah, absolutely,” I said.

If necessary, I’m sure I could scare up a Saskatchewan model somewhere, right?

Moyer straightened his tie and yanked his pants up over his enormous keg of a belly, his eyes scanning the studio as if he had simply overlooked an enormous camera crew.

“Are you miked?” he asked in a gruff, low murmur.

“Miked?”

He raised his bushy eyebrows and I was amused and horrified that this man of the law would be so into grabbing his fifteen minutes that he would use a homicide to get there. And to get a piece of prime Saskatchewan model ass, apparently.

“No,” I said, leaning in. “This isn’t part of the show.”

I watched Moyer’s Adam’s apple bob as he considered. “I’ll meet you down in the lobby.”

My feet hadn’t so much as touched the lobby’s deco marbled floor when Pike met me at the elevator.

“What are you doing back here?” I wanted to know. “Coming back to make sure the job is done?”

Pike’s eyebrows went up and I tried my best to gauge everything about him—his body heat, the thunder of his heart—but he stayed completely still and relaxed.

It’s too bad the good-looking ones are always sociopaths.

“What are you—?”

I poked his chest with my index finger. “I know what you did.”