Madoc perched on the edge of the sheriff’s desk and watched as Anderson took a swig straight from the bottle. The liquor stank of smoke and oak, a nauseating tang in the back of Madoc’s throat as he inhaled.
“My condolences,” he said formally. “If you need someone to put his heart to rest—”
“It’s done,” Anderson said flatly. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and screwed the cap back on the bottle. Once it was tucked back into the file drawer, he gave Madoc a dour look and gave in. “Annabelle Franklin, that’s what brought your boy to town. He rolled up a couple of days ago, flashed his badge, and said she had a connection to one of his cases. It pissed off Gatlin—he’d been the lead on the case—but I figured why not let the hotshot VINE agent take a look. Maybe he’d see something we hadn’t, find something for the Franklin family to put in the ground.”
“Who was she?”
“Nobody,” Anderson said. The taste of the word made him grimace, but he stuck to it. “Sounds harsh, but that’s who she was—not the smartest, not the prettiest, not the most trouble, just nobody much. When she disappeared, nobody even worried at first. She’d run away the year before—some cockeyed notion she got in her head from the internet—and eventually came back with her tail between her legs. By the time her parents got worried and called us in… trail was cold. Never found hide nor hair of her.”
“And Gatlin had a theory?”
Anderson shrugged and leaned against the filing cabinet. “Call it a theory. Call it experience. She wasn’t the first girl to disappear since the county wet its head, and she won’t be the last. We clean out the trap houses when the stink attracts complaints, but there’s always another derelict place for them to move into. This time it was the clinic. A year ago some wetmouth turned old Mattie Sharpe, a God-fearing widow, and she cut the throats of field hands for him. There’s always somewhere for a kid who doesn’t see any future in growing up.”
It was a sad story, all the sadder for being a common one. Madoc had seen it play out more times than even Anderson had, although when he was a cardinal, it had too often been his duty to turn a blind eye. What it lacked was the connection that had drawn Took down here. Vampires weren’t enough. Ninety percent of the Biters’ cases dealt with the undead.
“She ran away before,” Madoc said. “Why?”
Anderson coughed out a sour laugh. “Some boy catfished her on the internet, talked her into some cross-country hitchhike, and then stood her up. If she’d been smart, she would have realized she was lucky.”
There it was. Madoc wasn’t a subtle thinker, but he had learned to follow the tracks of those who were.
“This boy,” he said. “Was she supposed to meet him in LA?”
Anderson scowled at him and reached up to toy with the cross that dangled from his neck. “But the magicians did the same by their secret arts,” he quoted in a mutter as he pinched the sliver of metal between thumb and forefinger. “A man’s heart should be known only by God. Keep your fingers out of my thoughts, sorcerer.”
After so many years, there were few accusations that Madoc could straight-faced claim his innocence against. That he had paid the price for true magic, though, he could deny. He had always been too indulgent to deny himself anything significant enough to buy power.
Still, Anderson’s suspicion was answer enough.
LA. Where Dominic Waring, back when he’d still been the innocent boy in Took’s phone, had been headed. His family had pulled out the stops to get him back, but Madoc had the feeling Annabelle’s parents didn’t have the same clout.
“Tell you what, Sheriff,” Madoc said as he stood up. “Get me all the files on the Franklin girl, anything else Bennett looked at, and I’ll have no call to carve the answers out of your gray matter.”
Not that he could; he could overwhelm but not vivisect the mortal will. Only the true Risen, those who’d gone into the dark and found their way back, enjoyed that gift. Even then, it was rare and a trial as much as a gift. But Madoc found a silver tongue and straight-faced lie just as useful.
Anderson gave him a dour grimace of a smile, a flash of gum between his square, white teeth. “At least you make no pretense about being a monster,” he said. “I thought Bennett was a man until we saw him bleed.”
“A better man than you, Sheriff,” Madoc said coldly. “I leave in a few hours. Get me what I want by then, or I take it.”
Chapter Five
THE CATand Mrs. Waring were at Took’s front door to greet him when he pulled into his drive. Neither should have been there. The cat was supposed to be behind the state-of-the-art security system that was meant to make Took feel safe inside the narrow, sea-green house. As for Mrs. Waring, she was on the right side of the security, but she shouldn’t have known where to find Took.
Not many people did.
Paranoia tapped a nervous drumbeat against the back of Took’s eye as he watched Mrs. Waring get up off the rickety plastic lawn chair and brush the wrinkles out of her trousers with nervous hands. She looked like her son, even down to something in the weakness of her jaw that suggested she was younger than she really was.
None of Waring’s alleged victims had put up much of a fight. Mostly that made sense. Not all vampires were created equal—a Risen trumped a still breathing dhampir, a dhampir outclassed a ghoul—and a blitz attack could put some down and keep them down. But some of them had been old and trained and should have held their own. Others had security systems that never went off, alarms that were never hit.
Had they, Took wondered, found a nervous, stoop-shouldered redhead, young enough that he still got carded at liquor stores, on their porch and thought he was harmless? Maybe he learned the trick from his mother.
Fear was a habit. The black hole in his brain wanted to be filled, and until he found out what happened the night he was kidnapped—the how and the who—it tried to make any other nightmare fit.
Took dragged his mind out of that familiar sinkhole, the mire of it wet and reluctant to let go, and got out of the car.
“Agent Bennett,” Mrs. Waring said as she stepped to the edge of the narrow porch. In all the old pictures Took had of Heather Waring from before her life took a left turn into hell, she’d always been elegant and fashionable, with tailored designer dresses and perfectly manicured nails—the perfect wife for an aspiring judge. The mask was still there, an on-trend mauve dress buckled tightly around her body, and her bag matched to her heels, but her nails were chewed down to the scabbed quicks and her makeup didn’t quite cover her grief. “We got a letter from The Salt. They’re going to execute my son, on his birthday. Please. Tell me you’ve found something.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Took said. “How did you get my address, Mrs. Waring?”
