Bruiser bent over her body and inspected her throat, though I had no idea what he could possibly be looking for. He pulled two silver stakes and took them in one hand, like chopsticks, which made a totally inappropriate and half-hysterical giggle well up into my throat. I swallowed it down, but the exhaustion was so strong that I knew it wouldn’t be long before I did something thoroughly crass. Or fell asleep on my feet. Carefully, Bruiser lowered the stakes into Pinkie’s throat and pulled out two long black threads.
I realized he was both collecting trace evidence and testing for vamp blood. If vampire blood was present, it would burn and stink in the presence of the sterling. The familiar smell sizzled into the room. I had no idea how vamp blood got on Pinkie. I couldn’t imagine a scenario—
“Hair,” Bruiser murmured. “He couldn’t drink so he ripped out her throat and buried his neck in the flow. He left behind his own blood and hair.” Bruiser pulled out a roll of small paper bags from a pocket, removed one, and put the roll back. He inserted the hairs into the bag and sealed it. I just stared at the body. Why had Santana come here? What had he hoped to gain?
Pinkie hadn’t been dead long. Maybe only as long as since dawn. If I had known about the property in the name of Jesreal St. Anna, Royal Santana, and others, and if I had been smart enough to put two and two together with Joseph Santana as a possible way that a long-lived vamp might cling to property between generations, back in the day when they were still in the vamp closet, I might have been there when he came calling. Pinkie might still be alive. I might have saved her life. Or maybe he’d have killed me dead instead of Pinkie. Might. Maybe. But at dawn, I was too busy bandying words back and forth with the chief suckhead to think, to use my brain, to keep people alive.
I shoved my shame deep inside along with all the other guilt and anger and fears and misery I didn’t want to look at. So deep I’d never have to look at any of it again.
Bruiser said, sotto voce, “By the smell, I’d say that he’s no longer on premises, but I could be wrong. And others might be here.”
“Understood,” Eli said, just as softly.
They were talking about Dominique. And more humans. We moved through the lower level, little of which I had seen, making sure we were the only ones there. Every closet, every cabinet, every place a vamp on fire might have gone to lair by day. There were plenty of null spaces, wide gaps between walls, their presence hidden by the old-fashioned architecture: behind the kitchen wall, access was through the pantry. In the floor of Pinkie’s bedroom closet, we found access into a coffin-sized hidey-hole. A long, narrow room on the back wall of the house could have hidden ten standing vamps in a pinch, with access from upstairs via a brass fire pole of all things, and access to outside through a trapdoor in the floor.
Upstairs was more of the same, though all the bedrooms were as neat as pins and currently unoccupied. Except for Santana’s old room. The door was hanging open at an angle, the upper hinges ripped clean away, screws showing pulverized wood. The straps had been replaced and were now twisted and stretched, torn in two. The place had been trashed, the bed torn apart, the armoire tossed across the room, and the dead vamp on the floor stamped into ashes and shattered bones, boot prints clearly seen in the rotten cloth. The Son of Darkness had been in a rage. And though the stench wasn’t as bad as it had been before he ripped into Pinkie, he was still on fire. Smoldering, maybe.
I held up a hand and stepped inside the open door, breathing shallowly, then deeper, trying to separate the smells of the day from the weaker, dryer scents of a hundred years ago. I really should have shifted into a bloodhound before we came there the first time. Any chance of ever determining a scent pattern was gone now, buried beneath the stink of burning vamp and pheromones comprised of toxins from both anger and severe pain. I shook my head and waved the guys in. They made sure the SoD wasn’t hiding under the bed or in the bathroom, and then holstered their weapons as they studied the room.
“He tore the satchel with the old papers in it to pieces,” Eli said.
“Soooo. He came back for it, not knowing that the contents were ruined. And when he found that it had been destroyed, he had a temper tantrum.”
“He took the stake with his blood on it,” Eli said.
I bent over the pile of vamp dust and toed a bone fragment away. “The remains of the crystal that contained his arcenciel is crushed,” I said. “He came back looking for something.” I dialed vamp HQ and was put through to a sleepy Leo. When he answered, his voice was nearly purring, thick and rough with sleep.
“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, a
nd 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.
His hands traced my upper arms, biceps, triceps, and deltoids, his fingertips giving no more pressure than the water trickling down me. The pressure increased slightly as he outlined my shoulder blades, the points and wide planes of scapulae. He massaged my shoulders, digging gently with his thumbs into the pressure points between blade and spine. When my shoulders finally relaxed, he feathered his fingers beneath my armpits and, even more slowly, languidly, down my sides, almost ticklish, almost. Not quite. Just on the edge of . . . something . . . but not quite anything. Not yet. But heated fingers, slick and slippery.
He eased his weight away, our bodies still connected at our hips, and paused, hands spread wide just at the curve of my lower back. My bones went liquid. Beast purred deep inside me. Ours, ours, ours. Mate.
Bruiser whispered, “I hear your cat when you breathe,” as he massaged up the long muscles of my spine. I moaned, the pitch deep and low, a vibrato of need.
My eyes slitted open, to see the steam that was rebuilding in the shower stall, swirling around our feet, Bruiser’s and mine. His need pressed up against me. Insistent, in contrast to his patient, languorous, stroking hands.
I smiled as his palms slid down my spine and between our bodies, to cup my buttocks. The heat of the water and of the Onorio radiated into me. His hands glided around and caught my hips, his long fingers splayed over my abdomen.
My arms skated down from cradling my head, my fingers covering his hands and interlacing. My right hand was traced with reddish streaks, still not healed from the wyrd spell damage. I leaned back into him, and his head came down again, close to my cheek.
We stood like that, for a long time, body to body. Silent. Content. I felt his lips curl into a smile before he spoke. “The last time I was in your shower, I had been nearly drained by Leo and beaten into a bloody pulp by his other Enforcer. And I was alone. Totally alone.”
“That sounds so sad,” I whispered, my smile widening, my face relaxing.
With mate. Not alone now. With mate, Beast purred.
“It was very sad,” Bruiser said. “Positively wretched. And to make it worse, there was this body wash that smelled like a greenhouse in bloom. No bar soap. No unscented anything. Just . . . floral bouquet soap. When I returned to the Council House, several days later, unwashed since that time, unshaven, and unkempt, Leo said I smelled as if I had spent an uncommon amount of time at Katie’s Ladies.”
A giggle slipped out. I do not giggle. But one slipped out. Bruiser laughed with me, his breath hot at my ear. I said, “I didn’t know you showered then. The soap was a Christmas present from one of Katie’s girls. If it makes you feel better,” I said, “I dropped that bottle of body wash some time ago. It accidently drained out and away before I had a chance to pick it up.”
“Accidently.”
“Absolutely accidently.”
He bit my shoulder, catching my trapezius, holding me still, like a big-cat would grab his mate. Heat blossomed in me, breasts tightening. Beast hissed and the sound came from my lips.
Bruiser’s hands slipped free of mine and down along my hips, one finger caressing the mound at the center of me. And lower, across the cleft. Clever, skillful caress. I wanted to step to either side, widening my legs, giving him access, but his feet trapped mine. His body pressed against me, a tender prison. My eyes followed the movement of his fingers, such talented fingers. One slid gently between the lips and over the heart of me.
I sucked in a breath, arched my spine and threw back my head, resting it on his shoulder, my hands now spread on the wall, supporting us as he pressed harder, forcing me against the cool tile. My breath came fast as his fingers danced, curling and circling and driving me to a peak. The sound I made was nothing a human throat can mimic. A low, muted growling that vibrated my bones and hissed at the end, “Yesssss. Yesssss.”
The orgasm caught me unprepared, banging my face on the tile as it gripped my body. Shook me like prey. Shot through me like lightning through river sand, burning every nerve end as if crystalizing them all at once. “Yesssss.” It began to fade, singeing me here and there.
Bruiser whipped me around and lifted me, catching me under my buttocks and settling me onto him. He caught my breast in his mouth and bit. And I came again, long before he even started to move inside me.
* * *
A quarter hour later we were lying exhausted in my bed, the covers shoved off to the floor. When I could speak, I mumbled, “Are you sure that wasn’t hot, wild monkey sex?”
Bruiser laughed. “No, love. Hot, wild monkey sex is what you give me when you see the wyrds I discovered in the manuscripts you found and gave me. Wyrds of power. Molly says they are wyrds that she and Sabina can use to ensnare Joses Bar-Judas.”
I managed to roll my head on my neck. “You’ll have to wait a while on any activity that requires more energy than turning my head.” Bruiser gave me that grin, the one
a man used when he knew he had satisfied his partner—part conceit, part lasciviousness, part wicked pride. I ignored it. “You got wyrds? Seriously?”
“I did. I already gave them to Molly.” A smile creased his face and I rubbed my temple against his scratchy beard.
“Fine,” I said, as if measuring his offer. “Next time, monkey sex.”
“Hot and wild,” Bruiser specified, as if this was a bargain we were striking. “But for now, we sleep. We need sleep. Even a skinwalker and an Onorio can’t fight well on no sleep.”
I rolled over and pressed my backside into his lap, scrunching into him until we were skin to skin from top to toe. “Okay. Wake me when it’s time to kick SoD heinie.” I closed my eyes and slept.
* * *
I woke when Bruiser rolled to his feet and stretched, our mingled scents coating the air, wafting from his heated body. “Don’t forget your promise,” he murmured to my ear.
“Yeah. Whatever,” I said, and closed my eyes. Moments later I heard Bruiser leave the house. I flipped back the covers and showered off our fun-time smells. Playtime was over. Now might be a good time to wake up a vamp from her daytime nap. Never a fun thing to do. And made doubly unfun when said vamp was as crazy as a mattress-full of bedbugs. I braided my wet hair and twisted it up into a tight fighting bun, in case I didn’t have time to do so later. While I pulled on my jeans, I dialed Eli, and when he answered I said, “Get up and armed. We’ve got about three hours before dusk to figure out all the causative factors of this mess, devise a plan that will make the witches happy, avert a vamp war, and have time to prepare to capture Santana sometime tonight.” Eli groaned and I could hear the sheets move as he rolled over in his bed. “You said to call,” I added, trying not to taunt. “I can do this alone. But if you’re coming, we need to conference in the kitchen.”