“Will I get fired?”
“Don’t act stupid,” Madoc told her, not unkindly. “You’re the director’s daughter. No one will ever fire you. They’ll just promote you to a dark room in a far-off state and avoid your calls. Except I won’t let that happen. You’re a Biter, and you’ll stay as long as I say I want you to stay. Got it?”
The medicine tasted sour, but Lawrence swallowed it anyhow. She never traded on her mother’s influence, not that Madoc had seen, but it would take a more naive soul than Lawrence not to know it was there. She rubbed her neck and pressed her fingers down on the neat scar just above her collarbone.
“And this? Will the schedule for my Kiss go ahead as planned?”
Probably not. Maybe never. The Anakim could pass the Kiss like a contagion if they wished, spread it through a city until the only prey left was each other and their fragile society collapsed into cannibalism and legend. They weren’t meant to offer the Kiss too often, and what rose from the human shell wasn’t alwaysright, but they could.
Their own children, though? Dhampirs were rare even in Europe and—except in unfortunate cases like Madoc’s—treasured and cosseted throughout their fragile childhoods by any vampire they came across. If people discovered there had been a chance to save these lost children, one that VINE had squandered, there would be an uproar. After that, there was no way VINE could be seen to reward the human who’d caused it all, no matter how high her connections ran.
“Not until the case is closed,” he hedged around the harsh truth. “If nothing else, they won’t want you out of commission until this case is over.”
She pressed her hand protectively over the scar and nodded tightly. “So what now?”
Madoc pushed himself up off the wall and brushed a fastidious hand down the borrowed uniform he had on. He could smell the sex on it, still on his skin under the cotton.
“I am going to get changed,” he said. “You’re going to brief our host about last night’s events. Then we get ahead of this story. By the time this filters down to the press, we’ll have answers to most of their questions.”
“Will Took work with us?” Lawrence asked.
Madoc hesitated as he pulled open the heavy door. Where did last night leave them? Rough sex and tender afterthoughts meant nothing on their own. Madoc had lived long enough to know that. It had been more lust than love, whatever Madoc’s feelings, and the morning after was where regret lived.
“If we need him,” he said as he gestured for Lawrence to go through the door ahead of him. “I don’t know if anyone told you, but we used to solve crime at VINE before Agent Luke Bennett flew out from LA.”
Lawrence looked thoughtful as she stepped through the door. “I just wonder what he’d do next? If he were here.”
“The same thing you’re going to do,” Madoc told her as he gave her a nudge down the corridor. “Brief SSA Crane. Then meet me down at the car.”
YELLOW-AND-BLACK TAPEcordoned off the street at both ends. A few reporters lingered at the curbs as they filled the air with morning-after updates on the fire. The houses either side of the burned-out husk stood empty, doors left open in the neighbors’ haste to get out.
Madoc couldn’t blame them. The fire had left the house a skeleton of charred timbers, full of smoky ghosts and a replenished stock of bad memories, some of them his. Madoc absently scratched his jaw. The skin had healed already—the trickle of ichor he’d tapped from Took’s throat was more potent than a draft from a human—but he could remember the hot, bubbled scorch of pain. It hadn’t changed.
When humans came to kill him, they always brought fire to do the job. It hadn’t worked yet, but sometimes Madoc wondered if the fire had scorched something that he couldn’t heal, that one day what walked out wouldn’t be him anymore.
Not this time, but one day. That would end well for no one.
Back at the tape, fingers pointed as Madoc crossed the road and the cameramen swung around to grab some quick, static-blurred images of him. He ignored them as he headed to the tent the fire department had set up as a makeshift on-site office.
Chief Kendall pinned her glove under her armpit to pull her hand free and offered it to Madoc as he joined her outside the house. Her palm was hot and sweat-damp as he gripped it.
“I just wanted to thank you for last night,” Kendall said gruffly. “If you hadn’t realized someone had adulterated our tanker, the whole damn street would have burned down. There were other fires set around the city. We wouldn’t have been able to get back up here until it was… far too late.”
Madoc smiled at her. He’d always appreciated courtesy, the more so when it was grudging. Gratitude was easy if it didn’t bother you. It had more impact from someone who’d rather withhold.
“I was here too,” he pointed out. “There was some self-interest involved in that warning.”
Kendall chuckled roughly and ran her fingers over the buzz-cut fuzz of curls that clung to her skull. “Fair enough,” she said. “You want to walk through the scene?”
“Want isn’t quite the word,” Madoc said. “But yes. Hopefully, if there was something other than me in there that the Hunters wanted to destroy, we managed to stop them in time to find it.”
Kendall turned and gave the ruin of the house a dubious look. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “It’s pretty gutted. You’d probably have more luck with the man they grabbed from the backyard. The survivor.”
“Another agent is already talking to him,” Madoc said. “I like to have the answersbeforeI ask the questions.”
Kendall shrugged and gestured for him to follow her. She pulled the glove back on as they walked around the house. Burned grass crunched underfoot, and the sour smell of old shit rose from the puddles that pocked the charred ground. Madoc filled his lungs in case he needed to say something and then stopped breathing.
“The fire investigators have been and gone,” Kendall said as she led the way around to the back of the house. Metal scaffolding had been laced across the building, struts burrowed into the walls to keep the slouched architecture on its foundations.
