“You,” he said, his voice severe as he stepped back but didn’t quite release me, “need to eat.”
“Like I’ve got the fucking time right now.”
“I did not mean right now.”
“Good.” I scanned the home in front of us. It was nothing remarkable—just an ordinary brick house in a street filled with similar buildings. I pushed open a picket gate that had seen better days and ran for the front steps. There was a doorbell to the left of the door, so I leaned on it heavily, then rapped impatiently on the door itself. Inside, the chime and knocks echoed, but there was no response. If there was anyone inside, he or she was either deaf or dead.
“There is neither life, death, nor undead inside. The house is empty.”
I glanced at my watch. Eight minutes left. Fuck, fuck, fuck! I closed my eyes and tried to remain calm. Tried to think. “Even if she’s not there, there may be some clue—”
I didn’t get to finish the sentence. He just caught me in his arms again and whisked us inside. I drew in a deep breath the second we re-formed, ignoring another rush of dizziness as I sorted throug="-orted th the various scents in the air. Lavender and furniture polish vied for prominence with the aroma of coffee. Underneath that lay the scent of femininity, though it was far more vague than it should have been if she spent the majority of her time here. Certainly in the apartment I shared with Ilianna and Tao, the dominating scents were horse and wolf, with the tang of females coming in a close third. The masculine, incandescent scent that was Tao was a distant fourth.
But there was no male scent here. Nothing to indicate she ever had any visitors, human or otherwise.
I growled in frustration and waved a hand at the first couple of rooms. “I’ll search these; you search the ones at the back of the house.”
He nodded and disappeared. I moved into the nearest room—a living room that was comfortably furnished and neat as a pin. I did a quick walk around, shifting various bits and pieces, but I couldn’t find anything that jumped up and screamed clue.
Conscious that we were running out of time, I dashed into the room opposite. It was a bedroom—the main one, if the shoes lined up neatly along the end of the bed were any indication. I scanned the nearest bedside table, seeing nothing but change, then opened the drawers. Knickers and socks. I cursed, ran around the other side, and repeated the process. Nothing. Fuck!
“Risa,” Azriel called. “Here!”
I spun and ran down the hall. Azriel stood near the phone at the end of the kitchen counter, and as I entered, he pushed a notepad toward me. On it was a series of K-shaped doodles, some with snakelike tails, some without. And in one corner, an address—Amcor, main entrance, Alphington—and a time: midnight last night.
I glanced at him. “We have four minutes left.”
He didn’t answer, just caught me in his arms again and swept us across the fields. This time, when we re-formed, I staggered and would have fallen if not for the fierceness of his grip on me.
He didn’t say anything—he knew me well enough by now to know the futility of it—but his disapproval swept around me as sharply as any rebuke.
We’d reappeared in the middle of an old parking lot. I swung around, searching the old buildings, seeing the grime and the many shadows that haunted the place, even in the midmorning sunlight. The air was ripe with disuse, rubbish, and rats, and the wind whistled through the many broken windows. It was very similar to what I’d seen on the fields.
“There is magic in this place,” Azriel said softly.
I gave him a sharp glance. “Good magic or bad magic?”
“Neither.” He paused. “It sits in between.”
How the hell could magic sit in between? “What about life? Can you sense the woman?”
He hesitated. “There is someone in the end of that L-shaped—”
I didn’t wait for him to finish. I just ran, as fast as I could. I leapt the remnants of the gates and bolted for the shadowed building, nostrils flaring as I dragged in the scents. Death ran underneath all those I’d noted earlier.
"2em">No, no, no!
I crashed shoulder first into the door, sending it and myself falling into the building. I brushed my fingertips against the concrete to steady myself, then ran on, splashing through puddles and leaping over rubbish as I followed the nebulous scent of death through the various rooms—all the while hoping it wasn’t the woman’s death I could smell, but something else.
It was a small hope and, as it turned out, a vain one.
Chapter 2
Dorothy Hendricks lay on a table in the middle of the little room. She was naked, her body so pale and thin that I could count every rib. Though she wore no jewelry, something stuck out from her chest, slightly to the left of her breastbone. It took me a moment to realize it was a knitting-needle-sized piece of wood. She’d been staked.
And yet she looked at peace—her expression was serene, with a smile forever frozen on her lips.
Either she’d welcomed this death or she hadn’t realized exactly what was happening to her. Given what she’d claimed on the astral plane, I had to guess the latter to be true, especially since there was little in the air to suggest anything sexual had been going on.
My gaze went to the four-inch cuts on her wrists. She’d obviously been bled out, but there was no evidence of it on the floor underneath her. Which meant someone had collected her blood—or consumed it. Shivers raced up and down my spine. I really didn’t want to know what someone would do with that much blood, and I really, really didn’t want to meet someone who could consume that much.
“We had time left,” I said, my voice flat despite the anger that surged through me. “But he never intended for us to save her. He was just playing games.”
“Perhaps, but this death was meant to be.”
As Azriel spoke, the gossamer shape of Dorothy’s soul rose from her flesh. She looked happy and content, offering her hand without qualm to the white-haired, white-winged reaper who suddenly appeared beside her body. It really didn’t surprise me that she’d chosen the more traditional version of the reaper. Despite her words on the astral plane, there’d been nothing out of the ordinary to be seen in her house. Certainly nothing that suggested she liked her life to be anything other than vanilla.
So why had she become a vampire?
I watched them walk onto the gray fields and disappear, then glanced at Azriel. “Why would a woman like Dorothy be the target of someone so dangerous? She may have been a vampire, but if the information Stane uncovered is to be believed, she was harmless in every other way possible.”
“Perhaps it was nothing more than a weak astral spirit unwittingly attracting a darker soul.”
“Perhaps.” The image of the faceless man ran through my mind, and I shivered again. He’d called me a huntress, but he’d been the one hunting, not me. “But I have lata suspicion that his choice of victim was deliberate, not one governed by chance.”
“Yet he offered you the opportunity to save her. Even if that was never to be, it seems an odd decision for one who takes no chances.”
“I know.” My gaze swept Dorothy’s body and came to rest on her calves. Cuts ringed them both, the wounds gaping. I frowned. “Why would he cut her tendons like that?”
“There is a belief in some cultures that cutting the tendons in the legs prevents the soul from rising.”
And he’d staked her because she was a vampire. “Then why bleed her out? It seems a little overboard.”
“Perhaps he merely wished to be triple sure of his kill.”