They stared at each other for a second. There wasn’t any aggression in Took’s face. It was a blunt statement of the facts as he saw them.
“You know I don’t work like that,” he said.
“I know. The boyars do, and once it gets out that VINE thinks there’s a chance the dhampir kids are still alive? They’ll do whatever it takes to get them backandcome out of this scented with roses. Whatever Dom Waringdid,he can pay for, but not for anyone else’s sins.”
That helped. It had caught Madoc a little on the raw that Took thought it needed to be said. His tender heart preferred the explanation that it was the boyars Took didn’t trust.
“You know I can’t make promises for the boyars’ behavior,” he said, “but I won’t bend the neck if they play the villain.”
Finally Took nodded, and his shoulders relaxed as some tension that Madoc hadn’t even noticed let go of its hold on him. He flicked another button on his shirt. Madoc glanced away from the bruised temptation of his lean throat.
“I take it I can borrow a uniform?”
“Ask Lawrence.”
Took gave him an annoyed look, but nodded. “So why?” he asked. “If I’m officially back on duty, what’s the big secret?”
“I found the youngest of the Aron children,” he said. It wasn’t often he surprised Took—a kiss, a rescue, this—so Madoc savored the moment. “She never left the house. So, don’t kill Dr. Forrester. We might need him.”
“THERE ANDback by candlelight,” Madoc said as he greeted Pally at the Sword Gate entrance to the police station. “Good as your word.”
Pally slung his go bag onto his shoulder with an ease that belied the arsenal of weaponry that Madoc knew was in there—guns mostly. He’d have a few knives, but Pally didn’t trust himself with edged weapons. They got you too close to the blood, and his control was… not what he might wish. He glanced up at the slice of moon that hung on the black velvet of the sky.
“Not quite,” he said in his low, ruined voice. “I tried, though.”
“It’s appreciated,” Madoc said. “The Aron files?”
“I tried,” Pally repeated with a faint grimace at the admission. “Quick is at the local chapter of the Proverbial Church to get into the records on their missionaries. He said I needed to let him off the leash if we wanted access to their records without the stamp of a boyar. I don’t exactly know what he meant, but I gave him permission anyhow.”
“It was the right call,” Madoc said, “and my responsibility.”
Pally shrugged. “Let the boyars rage if they want,” he said. His pale, amber-yellow eyes always had a disconcerting effect. They were a beast’s eyes in a human face, but the flash of anger that lit them from behind drained the humanity out of them. “If the Proverbials had anything to do with the loss of this little one, there won’t be enough of them left to raise a hue and cry on our methods.”
The hot edge to his voice made Madoc scowl. On most days he trusted Pally. They’d been enemies once. The reasons for that were all sealed under The Salt, but Madoc remembered times he’d ridden into a settlement and found it gone, wiped away root and branch by Pally.
Or Paladin, as he was called back then. No one had wanted to be intimate enough with him for nicknames.
Of course all the cardinals had done terrible things. Pally had just done them with confidence in the justness of the cause. The same steel-shod self-righteousness that made him strap on his country’s cause, back in the day, had seen him visit atrocities on those who endangered his new faith in his boyar.
In Madoc’s experience, a man with a cause was the worst enemy—or ally. A wicked man might, at least, hesitate to add something new to their tally of sins, but someone who believed they acted for the Greater Good could commit any sin and still sleep at night.
“We don’t know who’s involved yet,” he said as he gestured for Pally to follow him up the blanched white steps to the heavy doors. “Waring could still be the sole actor. The fact that Nora Aron was a dhampir puts the family within his victim group, or this could be some new brutality from the Hunters. Even if the Proverbials are involved, we don’t want to sow disputes within the Accord if we do not have to.”
The old motto of the Empire of Blood was still carved over the door, scarred and chipped in places where public opinion had run against it. There was something dourly appropriate about the grim old words—If you would be our enemy, we do not bend, and you will break.
Pally paused in the doorway under them. He had the sort of looks Tepes favored in his court—dark, pretty, and dead-eyed. “If they murdered our children,” Pally said coldly, “the Accord is worthless, and it’s war that we’ll court.”
It was the sort of sentiment that Madoc should stamp down on and then send a report up through the hierarchy to whatever politician oversaw VINE. But for all the things Madoc had lost in his long life, and he would unsentimentally note that his losses had been many, he’d never lost a child.
To rebuke Pally now would be as pointless as when they’d told Madoc to stop looking for Took.
“It won’t come to that,” he said.
Pally tilted his chin in acknowledgment. “We can hope for a better outcome,” he said, “but be prepared, Madoc. If we find more dead children, then I will fuck over every last, toothless bastard between here and California. And I will not be alone.”
“MAY I?”Pally asked as he extended his hand, his fingers poised just above Nora’s bone-white brow. Death had made him pallid a long time ago, but his fingers still looked darker than the child’s skin.
On the other side of the table, Forrester looked uncomfortable as he fidgeted with his glasses, but he nodded.
