28

Elena had decided to see Nisia after all. Just in case. The healer made no attempt to hide her concern about the new tears in Elena’s wings, but she didn’t ground her. To a being born to flight, Elena realized, such a step was an absolute final recourse. “Can you sense anything about my left forearm?”

Nisia spent several minutes checking it, even taking a scan. “Your bones have tunnels through them,” she said afterward, her expression grim. “As if your immortal ringworms have eaten their way through.”

Too bad it wasn’t actually anything as prosaic as worms. It was fire and an energy that sought to reshape the world. “Can you fix it so my arm won’t fracture?”

A curt nod. “I am still able to stir your body to heal enough for that, but Elena, we are merely putting plasters on the wound. I cannot define a cause.” Hot flags of color rode her cheeks, but her hands were calm and competent as she worked.

“I know,” Elena said, though her throat was dry and her head stuffy with all the emotions she couldn’t afford to feel right now. “But before I ground myself so you can run as many tests as you want, I have to make sure my sister is safe. That her daughter is safe.”

Nisia pursed her lips. “Work quickly. You’re not just regressing—this bone is now weaker than a mortal’s.”

Fifteen minutes later—after a huge meal she bolted down—Elena began to go over the file on the fire that had claimed the lives of Nishant Kumar and Terence Lee, while Vivek tried to track down Jade. There wasn’t much there. The entire thing had so obviously been arson that it was as if the arsonist were advertising his work—or didn’t care about being subtle.

The investigator believed said arsonist had also rung the fire alarm to empty the building of other residents; he’d based his conclusion on the fact that multiple residents had reported a man knocking on their door to warn of a fire before they’d so much as caught a hint of smoke. All had described the man as white or Hispanic, wearing a long coat, a hat, and a scarf wrapped around his mouth.

Nishant Kumar and Terence Lee had been the sole casualties.

It held to the pattern: leave unconnected innocents alone, even save their lives where possible. But as Raphael had pointed out, Beth and Maggie were intimately connected to one of the killer’s targets.

Muscles bunching, Elena read on.

Thanks to a liberal dousing with accelerants, paired with the materials used to construct the old building, the two vampires had burned down to—as Vivek had put it—crispy critters. The problem with using fire to murder vamps was that the older ones could survive it—Elena had once rescued an eight-hundred-year-old vampire from a malicious fire. He’d been charred bone barely held together by warped tendons. Lighter than a small child in her arms. But when his eyes opened, they’d been moist and bright with pain.

She’d nearly dropped him, unable to believe the impossibility of it.

Later, another vampire had told her that the one she’d rescued couldn’t bear to be without sight and so had used the rest of his body to protect his eyes. That had been over a decade earlier and the old but not very strong vampire was yet recovering. His face had regenerated, as had most of his body, but he needed a cane to walk and his endurance was limited.

Nishant Kumar and Terence Lee had been barely out of their Contracts. Nowhere near an age to survive the fire had they been alive when it was set, but there was a good chance both men had been dead at ignition. “He amputated Blakely’s genitals and Acosta’s hand while they were alive,” she reminded herself. “And he threatened Beth and Maggie to Harrison.” The man liked to torture his victims.

She revised her conclusion: Kumar and Lee must’ve been alive but immobilized when the fire was set. The two had been burned alive.

Flexing her left arm to ease a muscle ache deep within, she turned the page with her right hand. With no viable DNA samples recovered and the fire so hot it had damaged the men’s teeth—though the pathologist had made a note the teeth damage could’ve been perimortem—Kumar and Lee had been identified by the process of elimination.

No one else in the building was missing; further, neither man had accessed any of their accounts in the aftermath. A neighbor had seen the two come home that evening, but no one had seen them leave—and neither had been spotted since.

Nevertheless, was it possible either Kumar or Lee had pulled off a hoax and was the murderer?

Possible, Elena decided, but unlikely. Especially since both victims had been of a slender and short build, while the man who’d knocked on doors the night of the fire was uniformly described as tall and well built. Muscular. That coincided with what Elena had seen on Al and Anita’s security footage.

Flexing her arm again, she turned another page.

As the victims had been vampires, the police had copied the Tower into their investigation, but the Tower hadn’t interfered, leaving the seasoned human detective in charge to do his job. That detective had uncovered Nishant Kumar’s qualifications as a chemist, been able to link him to new designer drugs that catered to the vampiric market.

Elena sat up straight at the drug connection.

Bored old near-immortals were constantly hunting for a new rush. Ninety-nine percent of the designer drugs just didn’t work, the vampiric metabolism simply too efficient—it was why honey feeds were so popular. However, every so often, one of the designer drugs would work just enough to make it viable . . . and deadly.

Umber, the last big vampiric drug to hit the market, had turned ordinary, law-abiding vampires into murderous machines. One of the saddest cases Elena had heard of involved a vampire who’d torn the woman he loved to shreds.

Picking up the phone on Raphael’s desk, where she’d set up shop, she called the detective in charge.

“Santiago,” was the gruff response on the other end.

“Hello, detective.” Detective Hector Santiago and Elena had worked more than one case side by side over the years, where the Guild’s job intersected with the police force’s. Their relationship had hit a wobble when she first became an angel, became consort to Raphael, her loyalties different, but the two of them had figured out a way through it.

“So now you call me.” A mechanical groan on the other end, probably Santiago’s chair straining as he leaned his big body back. “After blowing off my cookout.”

“Gimme a break, Santiago,” she said, settling into the familiar banter as if it was a favorite old coat. “I was on the other side of the freaking world at the time.” She and Raphael had flown to visit Caliane.

“Excuses, excuses.” Rasping sounds this time, Santiago probably rubbing the salt-and-pepper stubble on his jaw. “You got a case?”

“No, I wanted to ask you about a recent one of yours. Nishant Kumar and Terence Lee.”

“The deep-fried vamps,” Santiago said at once. “We figured the vics to be humans at first—my whole career, I’ve never seen vampires burned down that bad.”

Elena squeezed her forearm to ease the increasing ache even Nisia’s healing abilities couldn’t keep at bay. “The drug connection, you ever track down specifics?”

“Nothing but rumor—and I dug deep.” A rumble of frustration down the line. “Ash and that slow-talking smart-ass husband of hers hooked me up with folks who’d normally rabbit if they smelled a cop, and my own informants were happy to talk, too.”

“Unusual.” Quarter residents usually clammed up to outsiders; they couldn’t afford to shit in their own pond.

“Kumar and Lee had a history of running scams,” Santiago told her. “Penny-ante stuff like mixing up an innocuous substance and telling low-level buyers it was a powerful designer drug—you know, poisonous shit the junkies would never be able to afford.”

Elena nodded. “You have a note in the file that it’s possible they did stumble on a dangerous drug at some point.”

“Yeah. I got approached by a couple of vamp street hookers—Red Cutie and Monique Darling—who swore up and down that Lee and Kumar had given each of them a taste of a ‘high’ that caused psychotic hallucinations then a blackout. When the women came to—in a back alley in Red’s case, and dumped in the stairwell of her building in Monique’s—their clothes weren’t quite right, and both were sure the bastards had raped them.”

And these men had been Harrison’s friends? Fuck.

“No memories, though—couldn’t even get dates from them because their sense of time is fucked up after years on drugs,” Santiago added. “But both women remembered that they woke up wet, their clothes sticking to their skin. Their take was that the two rapists hosed them off inside and out to get rid of DNA. Not that they would’ve reported it.” Tiredness in his voice now. “You know what it’s like in the Quarter.”

“Yeah. Quarter takes care of its own—except it’s vamp-eat-vamp.” Elena’s stomach churned at the idea of Harrison being involved in such repugnant crimes. If it proved true, it’d destroy Beth. “If a woman did remember what had been done to her . . .”

“Hell of a motive,” Santiago agreed. “But then I had the guy who warned people too early. No smoke, none of the early evacuees saw any sign of a fire. I had him as the doer.”

“You had no luck tracking him down?”

“People were so happy the bastards were dead, they weren’t particularly interested in finding out who’d done it. If anyone knew the identity of the firebug, they weren’t telling. I got handed plenty of dirt on the dead guys, but other than the two street girls, no one came forward as a victim of rape.”

Laric walked in during the last part of Santiago’s statement and placed a fresh glass of Nisia’s energy drink in front of her. Smiling her thanks up at him, she said to Santiago, “The pros weren’t suspects?”

“Had airtight alibis for the time the fire was set—one locked up for public drunkenness, the other admitted to a local clinic after a john broke her collarbone. I checked to see if they had pimps who’d maybe taken exception to the lack of payment for use, but these two are individual operators.” More mechanical groans, followed by tapping, a pen hitting a desk over and over. “Don’t vamps get a payout after their Contract?”

Putting down the glass after drinking most of the mixture, she said, “Yes, some more generous than others.”

“Add in a hundred extra years to figure life out and they end up selling their bodies to losers on the street. I don’t fucking get it.” Not waiting for a response, he said, “Why’re you so interested in the deep-fried rapists?”

Elena told him the truth. There were many things she could never tell him, secrets that would endanger his life, but three connected attacks against vampires didn’t fall under that umbrella. “Asshole threatened my sister and niece.”

“Fucker.” No give in his voice; Hector had a prettily plump wife he doted on and four energetic boys who were his pride and joy. “Blakely and/or Acosta might’ve been dealers, but strong case for saying Blakely at least used the rape drug on women—would explain the amputation of his genitals.”

Elena had been thinking the same. “Eric Acosta was a honey feed addict who sourced his own drugs. Could be he bought the rape drug for Simon Blakley, had his hand hacked off for his trouble.”

“Works,” Santiago said. “But I’ll tell you one other thing—there are flat-out insane vampire gangs in the Quarter. Crazy bastards don’t blink at disemboweling a man to make a point. Lee and Kumar could’ve been whacked for encroaching, same with Blakely and Acosta.”

“It feels too personal.” Elena went to drink the last of Nisia’s concoction but almost dropped the glass when her forearm spasmed.

Clenching her jaw to withhold her grunt of pain, she put the glass back down. “There’s also the timeline,” she managed to say. “Lee and Kumar were murdered two months ago, Blakely and Acosta only the night before the attempt on Harrison.”

“Serious escalation,” Santiago agreed. “Boy’s on a rampage. More bodies are gonna start turning up.”

They wouldn’t, Elena vowed, be of Beth or Maggie.

After hanging up on the call with Santiago, the detective having promised to talk to a few informants, Elena swallowed hard and pushed up the sleeve of her top. Her forearm was rigid, the muscles bunched tight, but nothing was translucent or lava-like. The good news ended there.

Because what she could see was a new crack in her skin. She brushed off the lint clinging to it. Where the hell was that stuff coming from? It must’ve been the tissue to end all tissues that had gotten in with her laundry.

With her skin clear, the discoloration around the break in her flesh was impossible to miss. Bruise-colored, it spread out from the cut in a strangely delicate bloom. That wasn’t the worst part. When she turned her arm to look at the underside, she found more breaks. Not only that, but her wrist protruded noticeably, and the ring she wore on her right pinky finger fell off in front of her eyes.

She’d lost more weight.

Curling her fingers into her palm, she decided against going to the infirmary. No one knew what was happening to her, Nisia couldn’t help her any more than she’d already done, and the threat to Beth and Maggie remained. She’d be smart, take several of the Legion with her in case of a sudden decline, but she had to keep moving on this. Time was falling away from her like water from a gushing tap.

Child of mortals. Vessel unawakened.

She jerked to her feet, her head swiveling to the balcony doors out of instinct. But no ghostly woman with lilac hair stood outside, her hand pressed to the window. No, it was a golden-eyed owl that sat on the edge of the balcony, its feathers whiter than the snow.

Don’t be afraid of the owls.

Mouth dry and heart thudding like a live creature trapped inside her ribcage, she walked to the doors and slid them open with quiet stealth. The owl just watched her, unperturbed. When she stepped out into the icy air, it turned its head and lifted a talon to preen its feathers.

Elena held her breath until her chest ached . . . and hunkered down to touch the bird.