He broke the hinges on the box and lifted the lid off.
The little girl curled up inside looked like she was made of cobwebs and ash. Pale hair tangled around her face, and she was curled up in a tight ball with her withered arms wrapped around her legs. The heat from the metal during the fire had singed her elbows and the heels of her feet dark as charcoal. Her bed was a handful of curled papers and booklets.
“Oh damn,” Kendall sighed with the weary compassion of someone who’d seen too many small bodies carried from too many burned buildings. “Poor little thing. How did she—”
Madoc lowered the lid back into place.
“She’s in VINE custody,” he said. “This whole building is quarantined until VINE has completed a sweep and decontamination. I’m sorry, Chief Kendall, but you need to get off the property.”
“What?” Kendall spluttered. “This ismyscene, Agent. You can’t just—”
“People keep making that mistake,” Madoc said flatly. “Trust me. I can and I am. I don’t want any city employees on this property until I’ve given the all clear. Or are you completely confident you’ve cleansed the corruption from your house after yesterday?”
He waited. She set her jaw, angry color high on dark cheeks, and glared at him.
“We’ll see what SSA Crane has to say about this,” she said brusquely. “Until then, the scene belongs to you, Agent.”
She stalked away out of the garden. Madoc looked back at the little metal coffin and rested his hand on the lid. He flipped his saint’s medal out of his collar and kissed Michael’s image as he mouthed a prayer over the girl.
That done, he got up and called Pally.
“I need you in Charleston,” he said the instant the line connected. “And I need a deep dive on the Aron family. I want to know everything about them. Crack juvenile records, break into the Proverbial’s files on them, scrape out their secrets. I want it all.”
The pause conveyed Pally’s doubt. He was the only Biter who’d also been a cardinal, the only one who was older than Madoc. He didn’t need to ask if Madoc was sure. He knew Madoc wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t.
“It will take a while to convince the Senate to crack open Mission records,” he said in his quiet, ruined voice. “The Proverbials have a lot of support among Senate breathers, and the boyars respect religion still.”
He didn’t. The contempt in his voice betrayed that.
“Off the books, then,” he said. “Do what you need to do.”
Pally exhaled softly and, for once, wasted the words to state the obvious. “If this backfires, even you might not weather it intact.”
Down the street, a flash went off in a window. Some homeowner had let a photojournalist install a telephoto lens in one of their upstairs rooms. Madoc scowled and let the smoke out of his heart. Even if no one ever took another photo of him, his face was well-known and his nature too indisputable to ever pass unnoticed. The child was a different matter.
He looked down at the sad little coffin and sighed.
“I want to find out why the Arons had a dead dhampir buried under their kitchen,” he said. Pally forgot himself enough to swear with a guttural rasp of Old Country coarseness that would usually make him wince. “If anyone, breathing or boyar, has a problem with that, they can address me directly. Get it down, then get down here.”
“Before you wake next,” Pally promised. It was an old promise and less impressive than it had been in the days before planes, but still worth something. “Keep the child safe.”
“She’s past that,” Madoc said bluntly. He hung up on Pally’s resigned sigh, so the older vampire didn’t hear him. “But I will.”
Chapter Eleven
TOOK SCRATCHEDhis shoulder as he poked through the depleted stash of suits in his wardrobe. They were all nice—no more and no less. The neatly folded shirts stacked on the shelf were better quality because he liked the expensive cotton against his skin, but you could get away with that. It was hard to price a shirt without actually touching it, but an expensive suit spoke for itself. That wasn’t the impression Took wanted to give.
He picked out a dark gray, fitted suit and the band-collared shirt that was a shade darker. Usually he didn’t wear them together. They were too matched and slick for a trustworthy agent. Today he wanted to look more like a successful professional, someone people with money would listen to—lawyer, accountant, security consultant—someone who’d cost enough that you valued them.
Took shrugged the shirt on and then peeled the suit off the hanger. He dressed quickly, the truth of him, and his scars, buttoned down under the well-tailored silk mix.
People tended to see style as self-expression. It was intrinsic and immutable. You either had it or you didn’t. Most never consciously realized that appearance was the first metric when you profiled someone on the street, how what they wore indicated class and interests, that the woman with the Cath Kidston baby bag was someone to hold a door for and the boy with the shiny tracksuit bottoms and white sneakers was someone to avoid.
Took had learned that long before the Academy. Pull on a collared shirt and shine your Sunday shoes and people never pulled you up to ask what you were doing. A lot different than if you scuffed up in boots and a work-stained T-shirt and they recognized you as “that boy” from “that family.”
His dad had always said, “There’s the clothes you weartowork, and the clothes you wearforwork.”
So when Took went to the Academy, he presented himself, day one, as who he wanted them to think he was. The only one who ever saw through it was Madoc, and even then, not all the way down to the bone.
