Page 11 of Immortal Unveiled

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Manus pivoted and took a step toward the two hybrids who were having a laugh at his expense. He glared at Ryder and Grayson.

“Piece of cake, huh?” Grayson said.

“So that’s how it’s done, yeah?” Ryder added.

Grayson turned his head to Ryder and lifted his finger like a schoolmaster. “Lesson number one: how to get a woman to believe your lies. First, roll out the charm—”

“Shut up, Grayson!” Manus snapped.

When Ryder opened his mouth, Manus cut him off with a glare. “Same goes for you.”

For a moment, the two sat there stone-faced, then Ryder lifted his hand as if he were sitting in a classroom and asking the teacher for permission to speak. Manus felt like catapulting him through the window, but there were too many witnesses.

“What?”

Ryder lowered his hand. “You’re not gonna give up, are you? I mean, we still have to convince her that what she’s seen has a logical explanation.”

“Duh!” Manus huffed. “Apparently she hates men. Had I known that, I wouldn’t have gone in with a charm offensive. Guess we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way and deliver evidence that will make her believe my explanation.”

Now Grayson raised his hand.

“Would you stop that, you two?” Manus motioned to Grayson’s hand. “Or you’re gonna really piss me off.”

With a grin, Grayson lowered his hand. “How’re you gonna deliver evidence that your bogus air conditioning vortex is actually possible? We know that’s not how it works.”

“We don’t have to prove the vortex explanation. We just have to give her something else that she can believe.”

Both hybrids tossed him quizzical looks, then shrugged.

“Whatever you say, bro,” Grayson said.

“Lead the way,” Ryder added.

After determining that Kim wasn’t going back to her mother’s house, Manus hopped in the car, let the hybrids jump in, and drove to within a block of the house.

“I’ll go in invisibly. You’ll meet me in the backyard, and I’ll let you in through the back.”

Manus had been to the house just after Nancy Britton had been killed and looked around to see if anything left in the house could expose her as an emissarius for the Stealth Guardians. He’d found nothing that indicated that she’d ever worked for them. Nor had he found anything else that could have helped them solve her murder. Not that it needed solving because they all knew that she’d been killed by a demon. He’d literally sucked the life out of her. To a medical examiner, it would look like strangulation with a side of heart attack. But any Stealth Guardian would recognize the truth.

It didn’t matter which demon had actually done the deed. But what mattered was why she’d been killed. How had she gotten onto the demons’ radar? How had they known that she was associated with the Stealth Guardians, that she was one of their trusted spies who would feed them information about demon activity she came across in her daily life? Unfortunately, neither Manus nor his brethren had found anything. In their books, too, the case had gone cold—until Kim had started making waves.

Maybe this was a good opportunity to go back over the facts and look at everything with a fresh eye. Perhaps they’d missed something. The demons had targeted Nancy Britton. Was it to get information about the Stealth Guardians out of her? Since there hadn’t been any security breaches after Nancy’s death, it didn’t look like she’d talked before the demon had killed her. Had he wanted something else other than information? That theory wore thin too, since nothing—apart from a bracelet—had been stolen.

Invisibly, Manus walked through the locked door into the house. Nothing much had changed inside though it appeared that Kim had started packing up personal items. She was probably getting the house ready to be sold. However, she hadn’t gotten far with her endeavors to clean out the house. He understood that too. It was hard to move on after a parent’s death, and packing everything into boxes seemed so final.

Before he could go further down memory lane, Manus walked to the kitchen in the back of the house and opened the door to the small, fenced-in yard. The two vampire hybrids were already waiting for him.

He waved them inside and closed the door behind them.

Both looked at him expectantly. Apparently, they’d learned their lesson not to piss him off any more today.

“I need you to go through Nancy’s stuff and find a photo of that bracelet Kim was talking about.”

“But we don’t know what it looks like,” Grayson said reluctantly.

“According to Kim, she wore it all the time. So, find her photos. If she really wore it all the time, it should be on practically every photo that shows Nancy.”