THE ARONhouse was tall and narrow, old enough to have been squeezed carelessly into a plot between two larger houses. The clapboard siding had been blue in the crime-scene pictures, but it had been repainted with a fresh, bright coat of sage—probably by whomever had inherited the property. It was hard enough to sell a house where a murder had been committed, never mind one that still looked identical to the old pictures. The lights were on, and bright gleams peeked through the narrow windows.
Madoc climbed the narrow steps to the cracked-open door. He stood for a second and listened to the house. The markers of Took that he’d gotten used to were gone—no heartbeat, no soft murmur of blood in his veins—but he still muttered to himself as he worked. It was a stop-go commentary that narrated, dismissed, and edited whatever theory his brain had put together.
“Hide-and-seek is for children,” Madoc said as he entered the open-plan shell of the house. Then, since he’d been put out today, he added, “Or lovers.”
Took looked up from the folder he held in one hand and tucked his thumb into the papers to mark his place. For a second, it was like he’d never been gone. How many times had Madoc walked into a crime scene and found Took already there, in a tailored gray suit paired with polished black combat boots and hair that looked as though he hadn’t brushed it since he left school.
“It didn’t take you long,” he said.
“You know monsters,” Madoc said as he nudged the door shut behind him. “I know you.”
He hadn’t meant it as a jab, but it still made Took grimace and run his tongue over his lips behind his teeth.
“Kind of the same thing these days,” he said. His gaze flicked over to Madoc. “No offense.”
“Some taken,” Madoc drawled sardonically.
It made Took flash a short-lived grin, just a glimpse of recessed fangs behind full lips before the humor faded. Took was in his thirties—Madoc was pretty sure of that, although he usually only kept track of decades—and he’d lived some of them hard enough to leave marks. Lines were grooved into his forehead and deeper ones creased around his eyes when he smiled. Despite that, he still looked almost boyish, all taut jawline and clear, guilelessly blue eyes.
The coin flip in his head landed. Lovestruck and lustful it was, Madoc supposed.
“So what did you want to talk to me about?” Took asked as he closed the folder, thumb still in place to mark that one page. He couldn’t hold his blankly curious look under Madoc’s narrow-eyed glare, and he let that faded, oddly sweet smile flicker over his face again as he gave in. “You talked to Sheriff Anderson about the missing girl?”
“Annabelle Franklin,” Madoc said.
Took paused for a second and then gave Madoc a quick nod of acknowledgment. Sometimes he forgot the person behind the puzzle.
“Annabelle,” Took repeated aloud. “She disappeared a month before the Aron family were murdered. Right there.”
He pointed to a patch of empty floor. Madoc’s mind helpfully layered the crime scene pictures over the space and filled the empty room with the ghosts of the Arons’ furniture. Took was out by a foot. The dining table had been angled into the corner of the room. It was glass and the blood had spilled off it onto the floor in sheets. Madoc hadn’t been here when the scene was fresh, but he’d swung by during the Waring investigation. The dead had been taken away and blood sopped up, but the stains had still been on the floor and the white walls. He still smelled the death on the air.
“And she probably knew Waring,” Madoc said. He smirked at Took’s sidelong glance. “VINE did exist before you came along, Agent. Idoknow how to do this. So what is your theory? That Waring made his bones by killing humans before he graduated to murdering vampires? I don’t think that’s what his parents had in mind when they asked your oversight on the case.”
Took scratched his cheekbone. “I told them when they asked me to do this, I won’t manufacture evidence. If what I find doesn’t suit them, that’s their problem. Besides, I haven’t said that’s what happened. It would make sense. His first kill is impulsive—someone he knows but who isn’t going to be missed. Second time is closer to what works for him, but not quite as difficult a target. Most killers don’t have their brand down with the first few victims, but Waring seemed to know exactly what to do from the start. Unless VINE missed some of his early kills. But look at this first.”
He gestured for Madoc to follow him as he headed around the waist-high island—trekked his boots right through Madoc’s imagined puddle of blood—and into the glossy kitchen. It had been refitted. The parents had died at the table—peas and slices of ham in a broth of blood on placemats in front of them—but the children had fled into the kitchen. The bodies were still missing, but they’d found rope and cracked tiles and one pastel-painted little-girl nail dug into theinsideof a cupboard.
“The scene was cleaned a year ago,” Madoc pointed out. “It looks like the kitchen was ripped out and refitted. I doubt there’s anything to see in here.”
“Some things haven’t changed,” Took said. He stopped in front of the sink and laid the folder, opened to his kept page, on the draining board. A glossy, blown-up photo was clipped to the paper, screen-grabbed from some social media account, based on the caption that shorthanded across the bottom.This is one of the photos from Annabelle Franklin’s phone. She took it just before the first time she ran away from home.
“That’s a lot of teenager’s selfies to look at.”
“She didn’t take many,” Took said. “Dom was only all the time. He made vlogs, short films—”
“We saw them,” Madoc said. “They didn’t help his case.”
The glossy, overlit videos, mostly filmed in the Waring kitchen or his mother’s cafe, were a call to action shy of Hunter recruitment, but only just. Waring hid his intent behind “what if,” but he’d already been on VINE’s radar before he disappeared.
“That was homegrown bigotry,” Took said, “not Hunter-led rhetoric.”
“Our analysts disagreed,” Madoc said. They hadn’t, not all of them. The majority thought there was no evidence that the Hunters hadn’t recruited Waring, and with Waring sitting in a cell with the blood of a dead family still set on his clothes, that had been enough to convince them. “Is that relevant, or are you just showing off?”
Took ducked his chin and scratched the back of his neck. Tufts of blond hair stuck out between his knuckles.
“Bit of both,” he admitted sheepishly. “Look.”
He tapped his finger against the page. Madoc leaned in closely to study it over Took’s shoulder. A pretty girl with brown hair and big brown eyes grinned into the camera, her arm slung around a skinny girl with dishwater hair and the hunched shoulders of someone who didn’t want to take up space. Annabelle Franklin must have been the one who’d taken the picture. It had been on her phone. She looked like she was sorry to have wandered into the shot, but her smile was pretty, even with her lips folded over her braces. Behind her a window was open into a small, sunlit garden, where an ostentatious magnolia in full bloom blocked any other details.
