He was still a legend, and just as striking and ageless.
But I wasn’t that girl anymore.
Claude paused for a moment, then nodded—more to himself than to me. “All right. There have been a series of murders back in Chicago. We think it’s a serial killer.”
“No OWEA involvement yet?” The Otherworlder Enforcement Agency was similar to the FBI in that we mostly waited until locals called us in.
“Not until you.”
I grunted, keeping my opinion on the matter to myself. The Chicago Paranormal Unit—or PNU—was a good unit, but the OWEA had more resources.
“People have been disappearing. We’ve found several bodies thus far that seem related to the same guy.”
“How many still out there that might be related?”
“No way of really knowing.” He took a sip of the coffee and grimaced.
I sipped my coffee, relishing the hazelnut flavoring while I considered what he had said. “How do you know the deaths are related?”
“They were all branded using an honest-to-God branding iron.”
I choked on my coffee. Claude handed me a napkin and I nodded for him to continue.
“The brand is in the bag—that’s the evidence I need you to touch.”
“Wait a sec.” I took a deep breath and coughed again to clear my throat. “You managed to get the brand? How the fuck did you do that?”
The trucker passed our table, heading toward the men’s room. He nodded in greeting, and I nodded in return.
Claude shrugged and lowered his voice. “Got lucky. The end must have broken off in the fire. We found it settled in some old ash.”
I frowned. Something didn’t jive with his story. Brands didn’t just break off. Not that luck didn’t help solve the occasional investigation—hell, routine traffic stops caught a shitload of criminals who’d done far worse. Of course, the vampire wasn’t giving anything away. I was willing to bet the man had been able to lie easily since before I’d been born.
Not that he looked it. I was twenty-eight, but looked like I was in my early twenties—despite the stress inherent in my job. Claude looked a few years older than I did. But he had the poise of a much older person. And while I couldn’t feel much of the signature vampire fear aura radiating from him, that didn’t mean much. The intimidating aura that exuded from vampires seemed to have little to do with their power or age.
“Tell me the rest.”
“I’m kind of on a timetable here. Tell you what, read the brand for me and I’ll send you the file.”
I let out a breath in a big whoosh of air. Truth was, I didn’t want to handle the icky brand that had probably been used in some sort of sick, ritualistic murders. I didn’t want to watch people die in my head. And I most definitely didn’t want to carry that memory with me until the day I died.
But that was the job.
Granted, not a job I was supposed to be doing without authorization, but my skills were far too useful to the OWEA for them to fire me for skirting the line.
I nodded and he slid over the bag. I unrolled the heavy bag. It was a normal evidence bag, but it didn’t have the normal tags. No case number. Nothing. That bothered me, so I made a mental note to check up on it later.
Air whooshed in and out of my lungs as I purposefully hyperventilated. I had passed out twice from lack of oxygen during a vision before I realized that such a simple thing could help.
I stuck my hand in the bag and gripped the branding iron.
A loud rush of sound filled my ears, as if I’d just plunged my head into a bucket of water. Inky darkness overtook my vision for half a second, and I fought sudden claustrophobia.
Every time, I experienced the same overwhelming feeling of being trapped in a dark, airless, white-noise-filled room. And I always tried to move—even knowing that movement was impossible.
Then the fear and sensory deprivation was gone. And what replaced it was worse—always worse.
Glowing with orange fire, what could only be the brand filled my vision. The symbol was unfamiliar. Five lines converged into a triangle, with a swirl cutting across the lines. Smaller symbols that looked like eyes peeked out from the spaces in between the lines.
A man’s face replaced the brand. He frowned at me, and I had a difficult time focusing on him. My vision blurred. He was saying something, but I couldn’t hear him. His frown deepened and he turned away, still talking. He wasn’t talking to me. The realization seemed unimportant. Foreign emotions ran through me, too fast to identify them. But fear soaked it all. Fear and almost debilitating panic.
The metal edges of the diner table came into focus first, and I sucked in a breath of air. Then Claude asked if I was all right. I waved him off, trying to get my bearings.
“I’m fine,” I managed. I wasn’t really. I never was after a particularly violent vision. Not right after. Not even a week after. It took time for them to fade.
Luckily, this vision hadn’t been terrible—of course, the initial one usually wasn’t. Sometimes I witnessed the torture, the death. But something about this vision felt off. The man’s face had almost seemed…familiar. And a sickness filled my stomach, as if the coffee disagreed with me.
I shook my head. Maybe the OWEA shrinks were right. Maybe these visions were getting to me.
I raked my eyes over the room, over the painfully handsome vampire sitting across from me in the booth, over the old and worn decor of the diner around us, over his tailored suit. I barely allowed myself to blink. It took my body a few minutes to stop shaking, and just as long for the sight of the solid room around me to convince my brain that I was no longer trapped in that cold place with the flaming brand.
Claude waited silently. Too silently. His eyes were on me, and his body betrayed no movement. Vampires did that sometimes. Creepy.
I broke the silence the way I always did, with my first impressions. “I saw the brand, then it went away and a man replaced it—a vampire. He said something—was talking. But not to me—the vic, I mean.”
“What did he say?”
I raised my eyebrows at his question, but before I could come up with an appropriately smart-ass reply, he answered his own question.
“Of course. Psychometrist visions are sight-only. No auditory or olfactory.” He leaned forward and a bit of his hair fell onto his forehead. “Anything else?”
Just sight-only impressions? If only. Not that watching murders happen from the point of view of the victim or murderer wasn’t bad in its own right, but the emotions are what stuck with me.
What would I tell Claude? The victim was afraid as he was being branded? That the victim was beyond thinking, because he’d been tortured so long his pain became psychically linked to the brand used in his torture?
“Did you see anything interesting in the background?” Claude pressed.
“No. I rarely get anything from the background with a first pass. And sometimes the images just flash—a floating face, an object set against a black background. Some emotions.” I shrugged and, finding my muscles tense, I rolled my shoulders. “It takes time and repeated sessions for me to get more of the picture.”
He frowned at that. “Okay. Can you describe the man in the vision to me?”
I closed my eyes and recalled him as well as I could. “I can do you one better.” Again my stomach turned when I brought the man’s face to mind.
I pulled my sketchpad out of my oversized purse and drew the face I’d seen. A few quick swipes and I had a basic drawing done. I added some key features, lines around his eyes, and the way his hair swept across his forehead. The slight hint of fang amidst his perfect set of teeth. Then I stopped to look at it. My hand shook. I shoved my pencil back into my bag to cover my shaking fingers, then turned the picture to Claude. Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. Something about the picture bothered me—probably just seeing the face in a vision that had turned so horrible, so fast.
A crunching noise made my eyes flutter open.
“You’re sure?” Claude said, and I couldn’t look away from his expression. By all accounts, Claude was an old vampire. And old vampires were masters of controlling their emotions, of keeping their thoughts off their faces. But the wide eyes and tense set of the vampire’s jaw was hardly controlled. Something about the picture surprised him. Something he didn’t like.
I scanned the area for the source of the odd crunching noise. Had Claude heard it, too? “Yes. I’m sure. But if you let me keep the brand for a week or so, I can probably get you more.”
“That won’t be necessary.” The vampire stood and gave me a short bow. “Thank you for your help. It was nice to see you again.” He turned to go, then halted next to me. His hand closed around my shoulder and squeezed, and I couldn’t help the small shiver that ran through me. “Really. I appreciate this, mon chou. And I am…happy to see that you are well. I wish—” He shook his head. “Thank you, again.” Then, without another word or a backward glance, he was gone, with the bagged brand slipped under his jacket.
What the hell? I reached for my coffee and something on Claude’s side of the table caught my eye. I slid out of the booth and walked to his side to get a better look.
My breath caught. Two palm-length imprints were etched into the smooth table. I took a long drink and then leaned down to look under the table. Sure enough, it looked like fingers had been dug into the particleboard underneath.
Claude had gripped the table hard enough to leave dents. That was the crunching sound I’d heard while showing him the man—the vampire—I’d seen in the vision. There was only one explanation that I could come up with.
Claude knew him.
Chapter Two
Squealing tires cut through the early morning stillness. Someone cried out, and a car door slammed.
I tried to see through the darkness, but I could only hear the laughter. I could only see the face, grim and sinister.
And then he was gone.
Bright light pierced my curtains when I awoke for the second time that day. My breath came fast, and I struggled with confusion.