“And?”
“He wants to talk to you,” West said. “I’ve put him off for now, to give you a chance to prepare yourself, but technically he’s still your SSA. Unless you want to make that transfer request.”
A year ago Took had needed that buffer. It wasn’t entirely fair to West that it pissed him off now. Of course, Took thought dryly, when had he ever been entirely fair to West?
“He’s a dhampir, not Medusa. I won’t turn to stone just from looking at him.”
“Are you having doubts?” West asked as he let the door close and sealed the room again. He sounded almost hopeful. It was hard to blame him. If Took was right, then being on his side was dangerous. “I know you think Madoc had reason to kidnap you—and I can’t argue that he’d have liked to fuck you, he didn’t bother to hide that—but just because he was one of the people that knew your schedule doesn’t mean he did it. He knows he’s not a cardinal anymore. He can’t just take what he wants.”
The hole in the center of Took’s memory tried to spackle itself over with that theory. It wanted to accept it, to set the imagined events in stone as a memory. Took didn’t know why he balked at it. This was his theory, his gut-check hunch. He’d accepted the Waring case because of that itch in his brain. Why couldn’t he commit to Madoc’s guilt?
He tried—again—to remember the woozy, blood-dehydrated days in the hospital after his rescue. Something had convinced him that Madoc could be his monster, but the line of thought was lost in a tangle of delusion and denial. He’d thought he was still alive, that it had been days—at a push, weeks—since he’d been taken. Exactly what triggered his suspicion of Madoc was lost in that jumble. All he could pinpoint was the moment when he’d opened his eyes and stared at the cracked old ceiling of his hospital room with an entire, logical case against Madoc nested in his brain.
It had made sense then. He supposed, on some level, it still did—not enough to convince him, but enough to make it hard to dismiss.
“Madoc always hated the wordcan’t,” he said dryly. “But like you said, he’s still my SSA. If he wants to see me, I don’t have a choice. Tell him he knows where to find me.”
“Does he?” West asked, an edge to his voice.
Took reached past West to pull the door open. “I don’t know,” he said. “If he doesn’t, I guess you could always give him my address.”
Chapter Six
SIX GENERATIONSof Warings were buried in the Charleston dirt. On the worn gray headstones, fenced into their own plot, the ashes of their hearts were displayed in sealed lead urns sunk in under the names of the dead. The same slogan was carved into all the stones, just visible under the family name.
Life for the Living
“We already knew they were a family of bigots,” Lawrence said. She squinted as though the moonlight bothered her eyes. It was the Kiss at work, the last defense of her soul as it lost the fight to keep her human. “What new information are we going to find here?”
“Nothing,” Madoc said. He crouched down in front of the graves, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet. “It’s just courtesy to visit the family first, isn’t it?”
Lawrence snorted as though he’d said something odd, and stepped back. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her trousers and turned to survey the graveyard while she waited for him.
The stubs of two older stones on Debbie Waring’s grave had been ground down level with the dirt. When she’d been put in the dirt, Life for the Living had been a posthumously defiant statement of support for breathing rights in a city where the rule of the undead had seemed immutable. She had, based on the history the Warings boasted, campaigned for the right of humans to take public office and had offered up her family home as a way station for Hunters.
Until recently that last had been mostly dismissed as family folklore, a statement of support for Hunters that was safely defanged by time… until Dominic’s arrest. Seven slaughtered families in a staggered path that led from Charleston to San Antonio and a family legacy that tied to the Hunters made a tidy story.
Too tidy maybe?
“It would have been convenient if you’d not been so fervent about death, ma’am,” Madoc murmured to the dead woman as he straightened back up. “Some answers would be useful around now.”
Lawrence watched him out of the corner of her eye. Curiosity and a reluctance to actually ask warred on her face.
“Did you think there was a chance she might answer,” she half joked, half asked as Madoc turned away and headed down the overgrown alleys between less well-tended graves. Spanish moss dangled from the upraised arms of an angel like a spooled-out soul, gray and unnerving in the moonlight. Lawrence fell in next to him. “That would be handy, if the dead could talk.”
He glanced at her and raised an eyebrow. It took her a second to snort dismissively as she caught the mistake.
“Not like you,” she said. “You know what I mean. The real, still dead.”
Madoc reached absently for his medal, the silver cold under his fingers. He twisted it on the chain.
He’d been born dead—blue instead of white and cold despite the coat of blood. His mother had bruised air into him and chafed him warm with handfuls of bloody straw, desperate for something to survive the byre she’d hidden in. She’d been a surgeon’s daughter, and she’d cleaned up enough pints of blood from the floor to know when too much had been lost. The job had been only half-done when she died.
Death had been his twin, his ally, and a loyal companion who never explained why they jilted him at that last smoky altar. It seemed odd that Debbie Waring’s death was more “real” than his.
“If I wanted to talk to the dead, I wouldn’t do it at their graveside,” he said. “That would be like trying to interrogate someone by yelling at an empty suit.”
Lawrence hesitated and nearly tripped over the step she hadn’t quite finished. “But you could?” she asked. Her voice was suspicious. Took had always taken Madoc at his word, but Lawrence wasn’t so sure of him. “Why don’t we do it, then? If we can interrogate the dead, the spirit of the victim, that would make our jobs a lot easier.”
