She nodded slowly and once again lowered her eyes to her book.
The tension in the room, though, was as thick as the sense of threat.
Forcing himself to sit as still as stone, he focused his attention on the preeminent problem of ridding the threat to Caro.
This thing was not an entity—it was an energy. Energies needed direction. That meant whatever it was had been summoned. The question was whether it was still being directed.
He looked over at Caro and saw that she had finally fallen to sleep. He let time tick by until about a half hour before dawn. The back of his neck had begun to burn with awareness of the coming day. He couldn’t wait much longer.
Pulling out the phone Jude had given him, he called his friend. “We’ve got to find a way to protect Caro during the day. And I’ve got to find out everything possible about the victims.”
“Bring her over here,” Jude said. “Chloe can keep an eye on her today, if keeping an eye on her will be enough.”
“It may be. I’m getting the sense that this energy doesn’t want to be witnessed in action. At least not yet.”
“Then bring her here. For our edification, I have a background search running on the victim and his family. Anything else you want?”
“A bookstore. The kind of place that caters to would-be mystics and mages.”
“I know of several. I’ll pull the list together.”
He closed the phone and found Caro watching him from sleepy eyes. “What now?” she asked.
“We go back to the office. Quickly. You must not be alone.”
Chapter 4
The embrace of night once again wrapped the city in its heart. The vampires awoke and reclaimed their world.
Damien entered the office not ten minutes after Jude emerged from his inner sanctum. Terri appeared a few minutes later, dressed in casual clothes and heading for the coffeepot.
Caro watched the movement around her and spent a few minutes getting to know Terri, Jude’s wife. She could tell by Terri’s aura that the woman was still human, and the idea made her a wee bit uncomfortable, although she couldn’t exactly say why. Some atavistic response to vampires not being normal?
But according to her grandmother, they were part of the natural world, no different from anything else under the sun—or moon in this case. Evil, her grandmother had always maintained, was a choice not a fate.
She’d been struggling all day to deal with the wild changes in her belief system, and she was slowly coming to realize that while she had rejected her grandmother’s beliefs, she hadn’t entirely escaped them.
She wasn’t as shocked by the existence of vampires as she was by her own stubborn refusal to accept it for all these years. And here she had thought she was open-minded.
“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?” Terri asked as they stood leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchenette, drinking coffee from mugs.
“That they’re vampires? Yes.”
Terri nodded. She was a small, pretty woman with raven-black hair and bright blue eyes. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Not a thing.” Caro gave a sharp, mirthless laugh. “I’m already up to my neck in hot water because I saw a man levitate and get thrown through the air by something invisible. How much will it help my case to say I know two vampires?”
Terri’s smile was wry. “I heard about it.”
Caro’s heart sank. “I was afraid everyone was gossiping about it. Damn, it’s going to be hard to go back to work.”
Terri shook her head. “I didn’t hear gossip, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m working the case as M.E. and that was part of the information reported to me.”
Caro’s heart lifted a bit. “They at least told you what I saw?”
“It was passed on to me verbally. Trust me, it’s not in the written reports.”
“So who told you?”
“A man you’re probably pretty angry with right now. Captain Malloy. I know he put you on leave, and why he had to do it, but he included the information anyway. As he said, ‘You never know.’”
Caro almost heaved a huge sigh of relief. “I thought he believed I was losing my mind.”
“I don’t know about that. But he kept it out of the written reports, which protects you, and he passed it on to me privately, which says something.”
Caro nodded as a burden seemed to lift from her shoulders. “So what’s your impression?”
“That it would have been physically impossible for that man to get impaled that way by normal means, unless he’d been dropped from the ceiling on those horns, not thrown across the room. However, it’s indisputable that my office had to take the guy down from the wall.”
Caro nodded, savoring the vindication, however small it was. “So what are you going to put in your report?”
“Death from impalement by means unknown. What else could I put? Nobody but you saw what happened and the guy was found hanging on a wall on the horns of an elk. Someone else can wrestle with how it happened. I only need to report the facts.”
Caro smiled crookedly. “I tried to report the facts.”
“Eyewitnesses mess things up from shock. I’m not suggesting that you did, but it’s a great cover for you. Just let it go at that, Caro. Some people are happier labeling things unknown than they are dealing with the truth. And speaking of shock...how are you handling the vampire thing?”
“Maybe I’m still in shock, but right now it doesn’t seem like a terribly big deal. My grandmother used to talk about them. What about you?”
Terri laughed and turned to dump her coffee in the sink. “I threatened Jude with his own sword. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but right now I have to run or I’ll be late.”
Caro lingered a few minutes longer in the kitchen, trying to imagine Terri, who was tiny, threatening Jude with a sword. That actually seemed like a rational response to her, and she wondered at her own lack of upset. Maybe Terri was right. Maybe she’d suffered too many shocks in a short space of time.
Maybe she was just numb.
Well, except for that ever-present desire to jump in the sack with Damien, which was even more nuts than seeing that guy impaled, when she came right down to it. What the heck did she really know about Damien? Not enough to trust him with her body and her most vulnerable emotions.
Certainly not.
She refreshed her mug and returned to the office to find Damien and Jude in deep discussion.
“The victim,” Jude said, looking up as she joined them, “appears to be clean in all his dealings. No hint of anything unsavory. Same for his family.”
Caro couldn’t keep quiet. One thing she had learned on her way to making detective was how dangerous it could be to assume the obvious. “We’re presuming the guy was the intentional victim here. Maybe he was collateral damage. Anyone in that family could have done something wrong.”
Jude looked at Damien and they appeared to agree.
“You’re right,” Damien said. “For all we know, the mother may have been dabbling with dark powers. Or one of the teens. There may be no purpose behind these killings at all.”
“Which only makes them harder to solve,” Caro admitted grimly. “But it remains that we narrow our focus too much if we assume the father was the intended victim.”
“He just seemed the likeliest,” Damien said. “He was a real-estate developer. The mother didn’t have a career. The kids were in school. Although these days, just going to school seems to be enough to set off the worst in some people.”
Caro couldn’t deny that. “It’s sad but I see it too often. Some kids gang up on some other kid. Just to gang up. We need to look more closely at that. Who knows what one of the victim’s children might have done if they were being picked on badly? Or if they were picking on someone else?”