“You’re not in hunting condition, Ash. You know that.”
Janvier tapped her thigh and made a motion for her to cover the phone so they could speak.
“One second, Sara.”
“I couldn’t hear her clearly,” Janvier said as soon as she blocked the receiver, “but did she say a body connected to the dog?” At her nod, his face grew grim. “The city doesn’t need this right now, so soon after the battle. It’s barely begun to heal.”
“Are you offering Tower assistance?”
“No way around Tower involvement,” he pointed out. “Guild would have to report this to Dmitri sooner or later. Might as well work together from the start.”
Ashwini couldn’t argue with him—this was no normal Guild case. “I’ve got Tower assistance,” she said to Sara. Annoyed as she was about having to fight to do her job, she also knew the Guild Director was right; she wasn’t in the physical condition to handle this on her own. It’d be stupid not to have backup in case things turned to shit.
“Janvier?” Sara asked.
“Yes.” She passed on what he’d said about the city’s psychological state.
“He has a point.” A faint tapping sound came through the connection, Sara likely drumming her pen against her desk. “I assume Janvier will pass on the details to Dmitri?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’ll contact Dmitri in the morning, sort out our game plan, but for now, work under the assumption that the investigation needs to fly under the radar.”
“So the case is mine?”
“I’ll tell the cops to hold the scene for you.”
10
Ashwini and Janvier arrived back in Manhattan in half the time it should’ve taken. It was the most exhilarating ride of her life, the bike moving as smooth as a ribbon of water along a well-worn channel. Pure silk and steel and speed.
That exhilaration was replaced by bright, hard anger the instant they reached the scene.
The victim had been found in a Dumpster behind a restaurant officially located in Little Italy. In actuality, it hugged up against the far edge of the Vampire Quarter. One street over from this quiet one, and the clubs were questionable at best, deadly at worst.
Last time she’d been in the area—chasing a vamp who’d skipped out on his Contract and decided to hide in the dark underbelly of the city—she’d walked into one of those clubs and come across a blissed-out junkie passed out in the lap of a well-groomed and elegant vampire with a tinge of red in his eyes. He had the junkie’s sequined mini shoved off her shoulder, his hand molding her bare breast as he drank from her neck.
Another male vamp had his fangs buried in her inner thigh.
Ashwini had known she was wasting her time, but she’d made them stop, then waited until the woman was conscious. At which point the junkie had called Ash a bitch who needed to get fucked. Then she’d spread her legs lewdly to reveal she wore no panties, and shoved one of the vampires down between her thighs, telling him to feed. Her eyes had rolled back in her head an instant later, orgasmic cries torn out of her throat.
A week later, Ashwini had seen the same woman’s face in a Guild bulletin. She’d been found drained of blood, fanged all to hell. Saddened but unsurprised, Ashwini had told the hunter on the case about the vamps she’d seen with the victim. Turned out the two had been in San Francisco at the time, the junkie killed by another of her customers.
That was only the tip of the iceberg.
Certain parts of the Vampire Quarter were a meat market—for blood, for sex, for pain. Not all of it in the dives. Two of the most dangerous Quarter clubs were also the most sophisticated and exclusive, catering to a highly select clientele. Old, old vampires who no longer liked anything vanilla.
The Guild did its best to keep an eye on things, but the hunters weren’t anyone’s big brother, and if the meat walked in and wanted to be eaten, it wasn’t anyone’s business but that of the adults involved.
Minors were a whole other story.
Ashwini’s skin pebbled at the memory of the report that had been part of the file she’d been given when she entered the Academy at sixteen—the Guild had a policy of making sure all its students were fully aware of the world in which they’d be moving should they complete their training.
The younger students received redacted data, what their minds could handle at the time, with more to follow as they grew. Older entrants, in contrast, were given the hard facts with both barrels from the word go. In that never-forgotten case, the vampire in question had been sent to a special prison for near-immortals and sentenced to have his skin flayed off once every fourteen days, no anesthetic, the tool to be a whip or a scalpel.
Apparently, he had to choose which tool was used each and every time. If that wasn’t terrifying enough, once every month, the jailors cut off his tongue and genitals in specific punishment for the fact he’d preyed on children. The timing was calculated to be precisely long enough for everything to grow back, given his age, and for him to have two days of perfect health.
Forty-eight hours in which to dread what is to come, Janvier had said to her once while they’d been discussing punishment in the realm of immortals and almost-immortals. It’s a stupid man indeed who seeks to break a law when the penalty is in Dmitri’s hands.
Parole wasn’t even a possibility until the vampire had served a hundred years.
As far as Ashwini was concerned, it was the perfect goddamn punishment. The vamp had been fucking and sucking from a thirteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl, both of whom had been raised in his household, the children of servants. Instead of protecting the innocents who’d looked up to him, he’d used their trust and that of their parents to systemically abuse.
He’d even groomed his victims to the point that they believed the abuse to be a normal part of life.
The two children had been damaged on such a deep level, Ashwini knew the prognosis for their future psychological health had been bleak at best. She’d heard rumors that it was one of the rare times Raphael had personally involved himself in the lives of mortals—this was long before Elena became his consort.
According to the rumor mill, he’d done something to the children’s minds that allowed them to heal. Ashwini had always hoped the rumor was true, that the kids had made it, were living safe and happy lives as the adults they’d now be . . . and that no other monster had invaded their existence.
Like the one who had preyed on this victim.
The female—who wasn’t any longer in the Dumpster, but had been put on a tarp on the fresh-fallen snow beside it, a white tablecloth protecting her from exposure—wasn’t a child. That much was clear when Ashwini and Janvier lifted one edge of the tablecloth to look underneath with the help of the high-powered flashlight she’d borrowed from one of the two cops who’d responded to the report of a body.
“I knew it was a Guild case soon as I saw it,” the senior member of the duo had said, her gray hair worn in a neat bun at the back of her head and her breath frosting the air. “Things I’ve seen on this job, you’d think I’d be immune to surprise. Never come across anything like this before, though.”
The victim, her hair like straw stripped of color, wasn’t a total mummy, had some shape to her. Enough that Ashwini could tell her face had the bone structure of an adult and her breasts had developed beyond adolescence. Her height appeared to be near the five-four mark and, with the skin around her mouth having receded, her dentition was clear and testified to her humanity. No fangs, not even baby ones. The marks on her body were myriad. The light reflected off the shiny white of long-term scarring, sank into the fresh purple-green of new bruising, was torn up by the mess that had been her throat.
Someone had hurt this woman over a long period of time.