Madoc laughed with a strangled sound that scraped at his throat. “Apples,” he said. Old—very old—rage clawed at the back of his mind and tried to get out. It was the smoke, even though it tasted like paint and gas instead of lantern oil and the charred boughs of the orchard. He scrambled to his feet and grabbed Took’s sleeve to drag him up. “I guess it meant something to someone other than you. Move.”
He gave Took a shove to get him to take that first step.
“We could go out the back,” Took said. He pulled his gun and held it down against his thigh as he took the stairs two at a time. “Fire rises.”
“I know what fire does,” Madoc said roughly. Inside, the flames had started to crawl up the walls and the floor was already pitted and bowed as the heat steamed it, and outside, the fire flickered and flashed as it caught on the wooden slats. It sounded hungry as it bit into the house with a hushed, crackly grumble like a demon’s stomach. “They came armed with holy oil and fire. They’ll have a plan of attack. The back will be covered.”
It shouldn’t have been enough. Madoc could side-step the fire, into the cold shadow and smoke world that lay alongside it, and slip away, like a dead fish against the blood-tide. Even if the bone and star-stuff creature had lingered—and it could have been centuries to it, or a heartbeat—he could slip those stripped raw fingers. He had before. The boyars had been forced to a compromise, not a defeat, when they signed the Accord.
He would be alone, though. Even the eldest among them couldn’t take a passenger into otherworld, where the gods, Gods, and demons lived. Attempts to do so had been fatal for the passenger, disfiguring for the guide. Madoc wouldn’t—couldn’t—lose Took like that.
Was that love, he wondered, or just old, singed guilt?
“Nobody knew I would be at the Aron house,” Took said. He looked back over his shoulder as he reached the top of the stairs. “You?”
Madoc hesitated for a moment and then admitted, “Lawrence.” It felt like a betrayal, even as he added, “She can be trusted.”
“Me, myself, and I can be trusted,” Took said. He paused to cough and looked surprised at the bark of it. “I thought one advantage of death would be no more coughing.”
“You don’tneedto breathe,” Madoc said. He could feel the tickle of it in the back of his throat—the prickled heat in his chest—but his body mended before any of that became a cough. “But you still do, and smoke irritates, especially when the holy oil has filled the air with juniper and myrrh.”
He opened a door with his elbow. It was the master bedroom. This part of the house hadn’t been part of the murder downstairs, so none of the violence had made it up here, and the room had just been stripped instead of redecorated. The carpet on the floor was lightly worn, and the ghosts of old furniture were marked out in dust on the walls.
Madoc stuck to the wall of the room as he made his way to the window. The last thing he wanted was to give anyone a clear shot. Smoke hung overhead in a dour gray pall. He pushed the heavy brocade curtain back with one finger and peered through the crack down into the garden.
The magnolia wouldn’t betray anyone’s location again. The fragile white flowers were withered, and fire crawled up the trunk and turned the spindly branches to kindling. Two men in black, faces masked, sprayed the back of the house with accelerant from tanks strapped to their thighs.
“Hunters,” he said.
“Waring wasn’t a Hunter recruit,” Took insisted.
“Not the point,” Madoc countered. “We’ve had a lot of chatter about an uptick in Hunter activity down the coast over the last few years. They’ve been more aggressive than they used to be.”
“When I’m investigating this case? It’s the point,” Took said. He ducked through the door and made his way around the room to the other side of the window. His voice sounded odd, slightly strangled. Madoc supposed it had been a while since he’d been in the field. “They shut the water off.”
Madoc hissed under his breath. He fished his phone from his pocket and called Lawrence.
“Fire strike at the Aron house,” he said. A quick hand sign told Took to stay in place while Madoc went out into the hall and opened a door into a front-facing bedroom. Smoke hung lazily in the air and glazed the window with grime. He peered onto the street outside, at a row of firmly closed curtains and a man in black with a machine gun cradled lazily in his arms. It would be enough to kill a young vampire, and even a boyar would be slowed down if they got cut in half by high-velocity customized bullets. “Four hunters. Fire and silver. They’ve cut the water, so make sure the fire department is prepared—”
“Sir?” Lawrence spluttered. He heard tires screech in the background and horns blare for a second. Then she flicked the siren on to drown them out. “What happened?”
“Get here in time to take one alive, and we’ll know,” Madoc said. He stared at the man outside as he tried to pick out identifying details in the featureless black. Something happened down the road—a man’s voice raised in worry—and the man turned to fire off a quick burst of bullets. Someone screamed and doors slammed. “We have injured. I—”
Glass smashed in one of the other rooms. Madoc turned toward the noise, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man outside do the same. The gun was hitched up onto his hip, ready to fire.
“Wait for backup,” he clipped out to Lawrence. “I don’t need a dead agent.”
Or not another one, he thought grimly as he headed back to Took, because you only got lucky enough to have them come back once.
Chapter Seven
VAMPIRES’ FIRSTsuspects were always Hunters, just as the first word in a Hunter’s mouth when they raised the hue and cry was “Vampire.” When you needed someone to blame, why not someone you hated? It was easy. Sometimes it was right.
Not this time.
Took leaned his shoulder against the wall and took aim through the window. He pulled the trigger, and one of the men below staggered as it hit his shoulder. He tripped over his own foot and went down in the dirt with a grunt. His hand flew up to his shoulder, groped at the heavy black fabric, and he laughed when he pulled it away clean.
“Stupid fucking wetmouth,” he yelled as he scrambled to his feet. The mask over his mouth muffled his voice. “Didn’t have Kevlar in your day, eh?”
