Darkness Unmasked
He guided me across to the bed and sat me down. He plucked the phone from my fingers, dropped it lightly on the bed, then squatted in front of me and clasped my hands between his. Warmth began to flow through me, gently chasing away the remaining weakness.
“What did she do?”
“Nothing. She just went home and had a bath.” I grimaced. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just jumping at shadows, but she still feels wrong to me.”
“Perhaps our next step should be uncovering whether there are shifters capable of full transformation.”
“Yeah.” I took a deep, somewhat shuddery breath, then pulled my hands from his and picked up my phone. “Uncle Rhoan,” I said, and watched the psychedelic swirls run across the screen as the call was connected.
“Ris,” he said, after a couple of moments. “What can I do for you?”
“Got a weird question for you—are there such things as face-shifters who are capable of transforming their whole bodies?”
He frowned. “Well, I’ve never come across one, but I can’t see why there wouldn’t be. They’re probably rarer than hens’ teeth, though.”
“Would something like that be registered on a birth certificate?”
“I doubt it. Even face-shifters are registered only as shifters—and only if they come from a known line of shifters. If it’s an out-of-the-blue occurrence, or they’re the product of a human-shifter mating, then probably not.” He hesitated. “Why?”
“I was just following a woman who reminded me of someone else, but she looked nothing like her.”
“Could she be a sister or a relation?”
“We can’t uncover much about her, let alone anything about her family. She may exist, but there’s not a whole lot of paperwork to prove it.”
“So you’re thinking a fake ID?”
“Maybe.” I scratched my nose. “I don’t know.”
He studied me for a moment, gray eyes narrowed. “I hope this woman has nothing to do with our two spiderwebbed victims.”
“Not a thing. It’s key related.”
“Huh. Well, the best I can do is run a search for you, but I doubt anything will come up.”
And I doubted whether a search done by Directorate resources would bring up anything more than one done by Stane, but I guessed it couldn’t hurt. “The woman’s name is Genevieve Sands. She lives at sixty-five Greville Road, Prahran.”
“Posh address.”
“Posh woman.” I hesitated. “Speaking of the other deaths—”
“No, Risa.”
“Damn it, I’m just curious—”
“And you know what that did to the cat,” he said with a smile. “You’ve got enough on your plate. Don’t go stealing my work as well.”
I half laughed. “You’re welcome to your work. I’m just curious as to whether you’d uncovered anything interesting—”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be telling you. Talk to you later, Ris.”
“With some interesting information on Sands, hopefully,” I said, and hung up. I tossed the phone back on the bed and sighed. “Another dead end.”
“Possibly not. Despite her assertions to the contrary, she must know who Nadler is, because she would not be named heir otherwise, true?”
“Well, maybe. You occasionally see reports of strangers or even animals being gifted money in wills.”
“But it is unlikely to be the case here.”
“Very unlikely.”
“And we also know she must have some acquaintance with Lauren Macintyre, as that transport portal ultimately leads to her place.”
“Actually, it leads to the house Lucian’s Razan are staying in. There’s another portal that goes to Lauren’s from there.”
“Lucian’s Razan?”
The edge in his voice had me frowning. “What, you didn’t pick that information up from my thoughts?”
“No, I did not.”
“Oh.” I hesitated. “Why the hell not?”
He waved the question away. “The Razan?”
“There was only one there, but his name is Mark Jackson, and he was the one we knocked unconscious in the tunnel.”
“Why are you so sure he is Lucian’s Razan?”
“Because there’s no one else he could belong to.”
“Your father—”
“Would not be dealing with a dark sorcerer. I might not be sure of much, but I’m pretty sure of that.” I shrugged. “Lucian was his chrání, and you said yourself that they often shared the same markings as their masters.”
“It would be interesting to uncover whether—if Jackson is the Aedh’s chrání—he was a recent creation or one that was created before his power was ripped from him by the Razan.”
I frowned. “What difference would it make?”
“If before, then not much. If the latter”—he paused, something close to hatred glimmering briefly in his eyes—“then he has thoroughly concealed his true self and is far more powerful—and dangerous—than I suspected.”
“Meaning he could take on his energy form?”
He hesitated. “No. There is no doubt he has been trapped in flesh form for eons. But it is possible he could not only take on partial form, but have all his other powers available as well.”
I frowned. “What sort of powers would we be talking about?”
“The ability to use magic, for a start. The Raziq are proficient in its use—they have to be, as masters of the gates.”
“I thought the priests were the masters?”
“And the Razan were once priests. Lucian, as your father’s chrání, is very likely to be magically strong. Your father would not have taken him otherwise.”
Meaning Lucian had never had to enlist Lauren’s help to spell me—he could have done it all himself. I frowned. “So why did he get Lauren to make that cube? Why wouldn’t he have made it himself?”
“Because he would have wanted to belay any suspicions. His magic would feel very different from that of his mistress.”
“But I’ve never felt any of his magic.”
“And perhaps never would. As I said, he would be extremely strong and—I suspect—very adept at hiding it after all those years on this plane.”
I blew out a breath. “I really was fooled by him, wasn’t I?”
“But not for as long as he might have desired.”
“Thankfully,” I muttered, then jumped as my phone rang. The tone told me it was Hunter, and I groaned. “Like I need to speak to her right now.”
“Talking on the phone is preferable to talking in person, is it not?”
“There is that.” I hit the ANSWER button and said, “I had nothing to report, which is why I didn’t report.”
Her voice was cool and disbelieving. “So the woman wasn’t there?”
“No, she was there, but she did a runner on us. We chased her to her dressing room, but she escaped and left lots of little friends behind to play with us.”
And the memory of it had my skin crawling all over again.
Amusement briefly touched Hunter’s lips. “Spiders, I’m guessing?”
“Lots of them, as I said.”
“How quaint that you’re afraid of something so small.”
“We all have an Achilles’ heel. Spiders just happen to be mine.”
Something glimmered in her eyes. Something that could have been humor but felt like something far darker. “Oh, you have more than just spiders, my dear.”
I found myself clenching the phone so tight, I was in danger of cracking the case. “What weakens can also give you strength. You might want to remember that sometime.”
“My, my,” she murmured. “Aren’t we all aggressive this afternoon? I wonder why.”
I took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Talking to uncooperative vampires tends to do that to me.”
“I gather you mean those who run Hallowed Ground rather than myself?”
“Of course.” I kept my voice flat, without inflection. To have done anything else would have been dangerous. “I didn’t learn much, but I did get a picture of our suspect.”
“So she is the one we’re after?”
“Hard to tell, because she was using some sort of shield that stopped Azriel sensing what she was. But given she had a boatload of spiders sitting in her dressing room, I think it likely.”
“So she left nothing behind other than the spiders?”
“No.” I hesitated. “But she’s killed two nights in a row, so I’d bet she’ll attempt to do so again tonight.”
“More than likely.” Hunter studied me, a deeper darkness creeping into her eyes. “I believe you talked to Stanford, despite my warning not to.”
I shivered, wondering how she’d known. The bartender, perhaps? Then I remembered—I had a damn Cazador following me around, reporting every little move back to her. “I had no choice. The owner wasn’t there and the bartender didn’t know anything.”
Hunter snorted. “Bartenders know everything.”
“Well, this one wasn’t talking.” At least not to me. “The only way to get any information was to talk to Stanford.”
“And did he have anything interesting to say beyond his lack of knowledge about his fill-in entertainer?”
I hesitated. Stanford might be planning to oust Hunter, but he could also be doing nothing more than stirring the pot. Hell, for all I knew, he’d picked up the phone and talked to Hunter the minute I was out the door. Which meant that no matter what I said, it wasn’t going to make her happy.
Although I could hardly lie, given the Cazador.
“Nothing worth listening to,” I said eventually.