“No, it’s okay,” he interrupted. “I’ll join you. Trail’s so dead it’s in rigor—don’t think Darrell made it this far. Background report should come in soon, so we’ll have a better idea of other places he might frequent; may as well try to figure out what happened here in the meantime.”
Freshly gloved and masked, she and Ransom went through the entire place one more time, looking for anything that might provide a clue. “Why did you say this track was a slam-dunk?” she asked, placing the hypodermic needles she’d noticed earlier into the biohazard container.
“Vamp wasn’t a runner. He just got homesick every so often—his angel would give him three or four days, then send a hunter to pick him up.” The quiet pity in his tone resonated with the same emotion inside Elena. “Records say he never resisted, was always polite and apologetic and full of stories about his plans to renovate the house.”
It was a poignant image, of a harmless man who hadn’t deserved death. As the five angels Nimra’s squadron carried home in flower-strewn biers hadn’t deserved it. Embers of anger burning slow and dark inside her, she didn’t reply and the two of them finished the rest of the sweep in silence.
“I have to agree with the pretty boy—house needs to be toast,” Ransom said, once they were back out in front of the dilapidated villa.
“You’re calling Illium a pretty boy?” Elena snorted, glad to focus on something other than the heavy cloud of death that hung over the city. “Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
“I have scars, like any respectable male.”
“Tough guy.” Staring at the house where a vampire had died in what she hoped was a quick death, she put her hands on her hips. “Think Sara would be pissed if we just set it on fire and said ‘oops’ when the fire department arrived?”
“I don’t think she’s forgiven you for the whole being-chased-by-a-vampire-through-Manhattan incident.” He rubbed his jaw. “Arson would make a good cover story, though. It’s just the kind of place some firebug would light up.”
An hour later and thanks to Sara’s connection to every agency in the city, the house underwent a controlled burn initiated by the fire department. If only, Elena thought, they could as quickly erase the threat posed by a disease that had decimated the cells of a near-immortal.
• • •
Having flown to the Tower to drop off the biohazard con tainer, Elena took the chance to duck into her and Raphael’s private suite to shower and change. Ransom had roared off to do the same—not only were they stabbing blindly in the dark with the background report still MIA, neither one of them would be much good at sneaking up on a fellow hunter with the stink that clung to their clothes and skin.
“Might as well wear a bell,” had been Ransom’s succinct assessment.
She’d just finished scrubbing her hair and body clean several times over when her cell phone rang, Jeffrey’s name on the screen. Grabbing fresh gear from the clothing she kept at the Tower, she let the call go to voice mail, having no intention of hashing this out over the phone.
Once dressed, her hair braided and her weapons in place, she got in touch with Ransom. “Do you need me right this sec?”
“No, I want to check out a tip on my own.”
Figuring he needed to connect with one of his street contacts, wary people who trusted Ransom alone, she agreed to meet up with him at an Upper East Side address in an hour and, walking out to the balcony, flew off into the cold wind coming off the water. She’d spoken to Raphael while she’d been in the shower, so she knew he was heading back to the Tower over that water, Aodhan by his side and two integrated squadrons at his back, having just completed a critical drill.
Preparation, Elena thought, for an unprovoked and already ugly war.
Words that might as well apply to her relationship with Jeffrey.
The woman who opened the door to the brownstone office had skin of gleaming mahogany, her hair cut in a glossy bob and her body encased in a neat skirt-suit of jewel green. Nothing at all like the vamp-addicted brunette who’d been Jeffrey’s last assistant, her skin pale from too many donations in too short a time.
“Do you have an appointment?” the current PA asked, her throat moving as she swallowed.
“No. Tell Mr. Deveraux I’ll wait for him in the back garden.” As she made her way to that tiny green enclosure through a narrow access path, her mind filled with images of another brownstone, another door. Sara and Deacon had changed the layout and size of their house so that Elena would feel welcome, and yet her own father had done exactly nothing to ensure the same. Not that Elena was surprised, only furious at herself for continuing to permit him to wound her.
Jeffrey appeared in the back doorway as she arrived. “Elieanora. I have a meeting in five minutes.” Curt impatience in eyes of pale gray set in an aristocratic face and hidden behind spectacles framed in fine gold, his pure white hair combed with neat perfection, his stone gray suit sitting easily on his shoulders.
No doubt, her father was a handsome man, the kind of confident male irresistible to women young and naïve enough to think they could penetrate his icy exterior. He’d have no trouble finding another mistress to take the place of the one who’d been brutally murdered during the hunt that had forever altered Elena’s life. Perhaps he’d already done so, already replaced the woman who’d looked nothing like the elegant beauty who was Jeffrey’s current wife. No, the poor woman had been a pale imitation of Marguerite . . . and a living symbol of the pain her father had never once acknowledged aloud after those first brutal days.
Instead he’d wiped Marguerite from their home in what Elena now understood had been a cold rage. His wife had betrayed him the day she wrapped that noose around her throat, and Jeffrey was still so angry at her for it. Elena could’ve forgiven him that rage, but what she couldn’t forgive was that he’d thrown one of Marguerite’s children out with the trash, too.
“You know why I’m here,” she said, fighting to remain calm, to not be reduced to the level of a screaming teenager.
“You had no authority to take Eve out of school.”
“Stop. I am not doing this dance with you today.” She kept speaking despite the chill of his eyes. “The reason I went to Eve was that she was hiding in a corner crying.”
Skin white over bone, a tic in his jaw.
“You know why,” she said, merciless in her love for a sister who was yet an innocent. “She’s your baby, and you told her to get out of your sight?” Elena made no attempt to hide her disgust. “You don’t get to do that, Jeffrey, not to her. She thinks you hung the f**king moon!”