“I’d bet the sheriff has too,” Madoc said.
Took acknowledged that with a shrug as he closed the laptop. With the need to look over Took’s shoulder removed, Madoc made himself step away.
“And how did you get from there to the Arons?”
The flash of doubt on Took’s face surprised Madoc. Until then, Took had seemed confident that he had the answers.
“I… a hunch?” Took admitted reluctantly. He scratched absently at the still-raised scars on the back of his hands. “They could never find any connection between Waring and the Arons, and once I found out that Annabelle had gone missing, it seemed possible that she had been involved somewhere along the line.”
“You were right.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know why,” Took pointed out with a scowl. “If it isn’t reasoned, then it isn’t analysis. It’s just a lucky guess.Kitdoes lucky guesses. I work out what the evidence means.”
Madoc snorted. “And I don’t care as long as I get a result,” he said. “We know that Annabelle visited the Arons. Do you have a guess as to why?”
Took shot him a sour look but dug into a drawer to unearth a repurposed folder, the original title scored out and written over in Sharpie. Madoc didn’t need to open it. The wordMISSIONin Took’s neat block capitals was enough to jog his memory.
“They were Proverbials too,” he said. “Two years before they were murdered, they sent a missionary group to Europe, lost half their faithful to Russian fangs.”
It was centuries on since Madoc had followed his old master across the sea, but it was different in Europe. Or rather, still the same. The blood cardinals were still cardinals there, and while they paid lip service to international law, any dissent the missionaries fomented among the breathing there with their preaching was put down swiftly. Bloodily. The Proverbial faithful knew that and accepted it, embraced it even. A mission that came back without at least a quarter of their party lost was considered a failure.
“Annabelle was with them?”
“Her brother,” Took said. There was a dry edge to his voice, that old bitter note that crawled up sometimes when he talked about religion. Madoc had always assumed a break with his faith was what had convinced Took to leave California, where he got to hunt vampires, and come to Philly where he had to work with them. “They were very proud. He was their first-born, to be sacrificed to their faith. Annabelle was the one they expected to excel in his memory.”
Or maybe he was wrong, Madoc thought with a slice of dark amusement, and there were no personal feelings there at all.
“So the fact that the Arons oversaw their oldest child’s death wouldn’t have been a reason for the Franklins to keep their daughter away from them?”
“Quite the opposite,” Took said. He held his hand out for the file and, when Madoc handed it over, flipped through until he found a police-tagged copy of a sun-faded photo on a bloody fridge. It showed Benedict Aron, gray hair pulled back from his face in a ponytail, surrounded by preteen kids in front of—based on their T-shirts—Lake Santa Ana. Took tapped a finger against one small, wan face in the sea of tanned grins. “It’s an incentive to send her to their bible camp, so she can find out what a hero her brother was and prepare her to make the next generation of martyrs.”
“What were you?” Madoc asked.
Took paused for a second and then shrugged. “Too gay to make more martyrs,” he said, but the edge was gone from his voice, so it was a lie… or a truth that didn’t matter. “What I don’t know is why Waring decided to take out the Arons. If VINE’s profile was right and he had ties to the Hunters, there’s no reason for him to decide to kill a good Proverbial family.”
“Unless they weren’t so good,” Madoc said thoughtfully. “Unless whatever they were doing was something the Hunters wanted wiped from the face of the earth. Abuse?”
The corner of Took’s mouth tilted in a rueful grimace. “No. That would just be… leverage, even if they touched up a Hunter kid. They would have drained them dry of anything useful and gotten rid of them quietly.”
The door creaked open and the cat slunk in, all carefully placed paws and belly low to the ground. It gave Madoc a distrustful side-eye on the way past and then scaled one of the bookshelves so it could tuck itself into a loaf and watch them from a height.
It should have been bled out and gotten rid of in a sack. One way that Vine tracked rogue nests was through reports on missing pets. A handful of kittens were even easier prey than the frail or the weak and good enough for a just-Kissed vampire not yet ready the Hunt. Instead, here it was, alive and well.
“Sometimes things don’t go to plan,” Madoc pointed out slowly as he worked his way through his sudden inspiration. “Maybe you’re right—maybe—and Waring didn’t work for the Hunters, not when he started, anyhow. So whatever they had planned for the Arons was interrupted by their murder. And Annabelle’s body was never found.”
The flash of delight on Took’s face was one of the few things that had made his smart mouth tolerable, even before Madoc wanted to drown himself in it. As much of a showboat as Took could be about his wits, it delighted him when someone beat him to the end of a puzzle.
“Maybe she’s not dead,” Took filled in for Madoc. He got up from his desk and paced around the room as he hunted through the filing cabinet and between books for something. “Damn it, where’d I put the—”
The cat jumped down from the bookshelf in a smooth, long ripple of motion, like poured milk with eyes, and landed on soft paws. It padded across the room and shoulder checked the trash can. It fell over and Madoc saw the buff folder impatiently shoved in there.
“You threw it out,” he said. The itch of irritation at the back of his throat surprised him a little. He did his job because he was good at it and because, a long time ago, he’d been told to do it. It had never occurred to him that he might take pride in it, perhaps because no one he cared about had ever insulted it before. “Are you sure you still work for VINE?”
Took looked as though he would flush if he had the blood for it. He padded across the room and retrieved the file from the bin.
“I was just frustrated,” he muttered as he brushed it off. “And Lawrence pissed me off.”
“Why?”
