Madoc tucked his medal back under his collar. It felt colder than it should, but that was just imagination. “Only once in history has magic lived up to its promise,” he said. “The consultation of spirits has never led to a murderer’s arrest, Lawrence, and it’s more likely to generate a tragedy. Don’t trust the dead.”
It was her turn to expectantly raise her eyebrow at him as she waited.
“Present company excepted,” she suggested eventually. The dull, background drone of mosquitoes picked up as they walked along the long, narrow moat that symbolically guarded the church from the undead. Lawrence swatted one off her neck, cursed, and slapped her arm to smear one against her skin. They didn’t bother Madoc. Ichor didn’t smell like food to them.
He flicked one of the bugs off her shoulder. “Never trust a predator when you’re prey,” he said. “Hunger erodes good intentions.”
Lawrence scratched her shoulder with blunt, nude-pink nails. “I won’t be prey much longer. Can I trust you then?”
For a moment Madoc considered the truth. Lawrence would always be prey to someone, because no matter how long she lived or how dangerous she was, there’d always be someone older and meaner. Even Madoc, old and mean enough to get by, bent the neck to the Salted Boyars. If Tepes ever found his way across the wide, barren sea, then Madoc would bend the knee. Again.
“Of course,” he lied instead. The last thing he wanted to see when he looked at Lawrence was reality. He wanted to see the reflection of the better world she believed in. That idealism was part of why he’d picked her for the team, and he wanted her to keep it, as much of it as was safe. He abruptly changed the subject back to the case. “I want you to get in touch with Pally and dig into the Warings’ background. Between the family legacy and Liam Waring’s politics, we assumed extremist connections somewhere. However, once we caught Dom red-handed—and everything else—the court decided we didn’t need to chase it down and muddy the waters. Focus on the weeks after Annabelle’s disappearance. If she and Dom were somehow contacted, then maybe what happened to her was the hook someone used to bait him.”
There was already a welt on Lawrence’s shoulder. She scratched it again as she frowned. “That’s just motive,” she said. “It doesn’t change what he did. All those people, Madoc, he still killed them.”
“Maybe not alone.”
“Where are you going?”
Madoc turned slightly and gestured toward the east at the surrounding streets. “The Aron family lived three blocks from here. They were murdered in the middle of dinner, their throats cut as they ate a chicken Kiev, and left there until Mr. Aron’s law firm came to see what had happened to him.”
Lawrence narrowed her eyes as she sifted through the files in her head. “It wasn’t one of the cases VINE liked Waring for?”
“It was considered,” he said. “But the Arons were breathing, until they weren’t. All of Warings’ other victims included at least one vampire. But… if we’re looking for connections VINE might have missed, that’s the one that stands out locally.”
“So youdobelieve Took?” Lawrence asked. “You think we made a mistake?”
Her version of the question lacked the smug edge that West Crane had given it. It still made Madoc want to show fang, just from the reminder. He’d never liked West, but he’d always assumed it was because West had what Madoc wanted. Now neither of them did, and West was still a smug little bastard.
“We’ll see,” Madoc said. “Take the car. I’ll make my own way.”
Lawrence hesitated briefly as she rocked back on her heels. “I’d like to see him work sometime,” she said stiffly. “Took. If he’s that good, maybe I could learn something.”
“Next time,” Madoc promised… when he trusted himself not to moon over Took like a lovestruck, lustful idiot, or snap at him like a jilted never-quite-lover. It would be—was always—a coin toss. “For now, track down any communication between Waring’s family and the Hunters, even sympathy expressed on a message board.”
She looked disappointed but accepted his decision. “Any chance I could get Kit’s viewpoint?” she asked.
Madoc resisted the frown that tried to settle onto his face. It wasn’t that it was a bad idea—Kit Maguire was VINE’s expert on the different Hunter factions—but the price of leadership was that some worries you ate so your team didn’t have to be distracted. Kit’s too-long stint undercover—for the last month with only brusque sporadic check-ins that he was alive—was one of those.
“He’s still in Casper,” he said. “We can’t risk his cover with unnecessary contact. It’s dangerous enough.”
There was a flicker of more-than-professional disappointment in Lawrence’s eyes at the decision. Madoc made a quiet note of it. If she thought her dalliance with Kit had been anything other than a bad idea or a one-night stand—or a secret—that could come back to bite the team later.
And look at that, he thought dryly to himself, now he could disapprove of inter-team relationships without being a hypocrite. At least until Took realized that whatever had happened to him hadn’t changed the fact that he was made for VINE.
“Pally it is,” she said. “I guess I do the talking with anyone connected to Hunters.”
“Probably wise,” Madoc said mildly. For some reason, of all of them, humans could always see the predator in the old vampire. Not that Pally ever made more than a token effort to hide it. They reached the gates that walled the dead away from the rest of the world. The Eclipse was parked at the curb, the hemlock-treated windows only lightly tinted in reaction to the moonlight. He tossed Lawrence the keys.
He waited until Lawrence was in the car—an old, sometimes bad, habit of chivalry—before he crossed the road. It was nearly midnight, the zenith of darkness, and Madoc could feel the sun’s lock on his soul loosen, but not fully. The night wasn’t freedom from the warden’s locks—he was just around the corner—but he’d looked away for a second.
The uneasy union of America—the dead and the breathing, the blow-ins and the ones whose roots were buried deep—was balanced on the compromise of twilight. Diurnal and nocturnal met in the middle, where none of them were exactly happy with it. Usually by midnight, Madoc was buried in paperwork or strategy meetings. It felt good to taste the hot night air on his tongue as he walked.
He could taste the warm bodies behind the walls—the aroma of blood mixed with the spice of sweat or sex, a nightmare tang of fear adrenaline behind one window and the cured edge of insomnia a few doors down, the heady pulse of blood and endorphins that leaked, along with music and laughter, from the neon-lit clubs along the main street. Some vampires spent their nights mourning the varied tastes of mortal cuisine, but Madoc had grown to savor the subtle varieties that spiced blood.
Although he had to admit he still dreamed of rarebit sometimes—the click of his gran’s best knife on the carving board as she carved the sharp cheese, the dense, brown bread toasted over the fire, and the heat of it in his mouth as he chewed. There hadn’t been much kindness to his grandmother, certainly not for her wayward daughter’s bastard, but what there was, she doled out morsel by morsel in that kitchen.
Not, he thought dourly as he padded from shadow to shadow farther into the city, that there was any psychological reason to dwell on people who didn’t love him tonight.
