Page 60 of Cold Sacrifice

He was right. “This is why it would have been good to let the guys in,” I told him. “You all could easily hide me from view.”

“Can you really do that, Kait? Just burrow into the ground like some sort of magical mole?”

“I haven’t tried it,” I said, “but I feel like I can. There’s some sort of…knowledge inside me. It’s like knowing you can lift your hand to scratch your face. I just know it.”

He took my arm and walked me through the mouth of the alley. “Camera shows her going in here. There are no cameras inside the alley, but there are some on the other side. She doesn’t come out. So unless she scaled the walls, she did as you said. She’s in the ground.”

“She did it last night, Rick. I saw her sink down into it and simply disappear. The ground wasn’t even disturbed. She’s full of magic, and I think it’s growing stronger the longer she’s here.” I nodded at a couple of cops I was familiar with, and they returned the nod, no annoyance in their eyes.

Some of them believed I was an absolute fraud who didn’t belong inside the tape. They didn’t try to hide it, either. They glared at me until Rick lost his patience and snapped at them to stop staring at me and focus on their work.

“The news is reporting a single woman with a knife who boarded the bus and started killing people who were trapped on it with her,” Rick told me.

I looked up from the ground. I knew I wouldn’t see disturbed earth where Jolene had gone in, but I hoped I might feel something or see some magical residue. “She looks like death,” I said. “You saw her. How could they mistake her for a woman?”

He shrugged. “Video quality wasn’t great at that distance. And she had different clothes on, Kait. She’s changing clothes. Combing her hair. She looked like a human woman on the footage.”

I nodded. “She’s changing rapidly. She came out of her prison feral and mad. The only thing that drove her was killing vampires. Especially Bastien, when she learned Frederick was dead.”

“How does she learn anything?” he asked. “It’s not like she can walk up to people and ask questions.”

“She has a connection to the dead,” I told him. “A connection to the vampires. Maybe she gets some of their memories. Their knowledge.”

“It makes sense,” he said, then laughed. “Like any of this makes sense.” He took my arm and pulled me to the end of the alley, away from the others working the space. “Hi, Kait.”

My heart fluttered and I smiled. “Hi.”

He smelled so good. Not just his familiar cologne or shampoo or soap, but what was beneath that. The scent that belonged to him and no one else in the world. The scent that made me want to shove my nose against his throat so I could pull the smell of him into my soul.

His suit was still fresh, but his dark hair was a little messy. His eyes were clear, but he was pale. He was so capable, so strong, but so human. And that didn’t make me want him any less.

On the contrary.

I stepped into him, just a little, and slipped my hand under his suit jacket so I could feel his warmth through his thin shirt. And then, unable to resist and really, really hoping no one was watching, I pressed my nose to the side of his throat and inhaled. “I wish I could bottle that,” I whispered.

For the first time since I’d arrived, he smiled, and some of the tension left his body. “I don’t know how you do that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what’s going on. You touch me and nothing else matters.”

Then one of the cops working the alley hurried toward us, and with a sigh, I backed away. Our time would come.

Right now, I had to find the necromancer. I left Rick talking to the cop and began to walk the alley. I shut out the people, the honking horns and sounds of car engines and tires swishing on pavement, the scents in the alley—not any of them nearly as pleasant as Rick’s—and I reached for her scent. I looked for any flash of lingering magic, any small feeling that would tell me where she’d gone into the ground.

Eventually, Rick was once more at my back, not speaking, just watching me as I searched. And finally, at the end of the alley, behind the large, somewhat rusty dumpster, I found her trail.

I’d believed the ground wouldn’t be disturbed by her body sinking into it, but I’d been wrong. There was the slightest depression, and when I leaned over it, I not only felt the barest hint of an icy wind, but the unmistakable pull of grim magic. Death magic.

I crouched and pressed my palm against the ground, taking in not just the feel of the pavement, but the look of it. Why had she gone into the ground in that particular spot? Because it was hidden by the dumpster? The alley was paved, but over time, the asphalt had become a rough mixture of broken blacktop, gravel, and dirt, with weeds somehow growing through the cracks. There were bits of trash lying along the exterior of the building, and dirty water stood in tiny, forlorn pools in the low spots.

And somewhere in this area, Jolene had gone into the ground. “There should be blood,” I whispered. She’d killed nine humans. She would have been covered with blood. And traces of that blood should have been on the ground. And yet, I saw none.

“Rick,” I said, not looking up. “When you viewed the video footage, did you see blood on her?”

“No,” he said. “She didn’t look like she’d just butchered nine people. And there wasn’t as much blood as there should have been inside the van.”

“She absorbed it,” I realized. “Her body is a sponge. She needs that blood to live. I don’t think she killed the humans because of rage. I think she killed them because she needed that much blood at once to keep from drying out and dying.”

“And now she’s gone into the ground to sleep,” he said.

“Yes,” I told him. “She went in right here.” I looked up at him, finally. “I need to be shielded so I can try to go in after her. Can you—”