Teag didn’t move a muscle until we were well out of sight. Then he left out a gust of breath and slumped in his seat so quickly I feared he’d been shot.
“What?” I asked, alarmed.
He withdrew the map from its hiding place and fanned himself with it. “Oh. My. God. You and Sorren handled that so well. I was terrified he was going to search the car for drugs or something and find the map.”
I gave a shaky laugh. “I was pretty scared of the same thing. Where did you hide it?”
Teag shot me a sly grin. “That cop looked pretty straight to me, so I put it somewhere I didn’t figure he’d look. I slipped it in the waistband of my jeans under my shirt.”
I chuckled. “Good thinking.” I knew Teag had had a run in with some homophobic cops at one time in his life, and I didn’t like how pale he looked. I had been afraid of getting a ticket. It hadn’t occurred to me that Teag was afraid of getting roughed up, or worse.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, turning the car toward home. I thought about cracking a joke about Sorren glamoring the cop, but then I saw the look on his face and reconsidered.
The car sputtered to a stop in front of my house and we got out. I caught my breath. The back window was smashed, and the rear bumper was gone. Three deep slashes had ripped through the passenger door like a can opener. The front windshield was cracked from side to side, and the hood was dented so deeply it looked like a boulder had bounced off it. The driver’s front tire was nearly flat.
Sorren had stopped and was talking quietly on his cell phone before joining us.
Teag followed me up the steps to the front door. I could tell that, despite his injuries, Sorren was on high alert, turning around to watch behind us as we entered. Baxter greeted Teag and me joyfully, overdue for his dinner. He took one look at Sorren, stopped barking and sat down with the same glazed look I had seen on my stoner cousin. I wondered if Sorren’s glamoring would give Baxter the munchies.
“Of all the irresponsible –” Sorren began as soon as the door shut.
I held up a hand, palm out. My vampire boss could talk to the hand. “Not before dinner,” I snapped. I had seen a body that was flayed and ripped to shreds, been chased by the black cloud of doom, saved a vampire from a pack of demon-spawn, and had my car totaled by refugees from Jurassic Park. I was hungry and I was so not in the mood to be lectured.
Sorren was angry. Well, so was I. And right now, I was angry at Moran for killing homeless guys. I was pissed at the demon for whatever its role was in turning Trifles and Folly’s antiques into supernatural C 4. And I was royally ticked off at the hassle I was going to face explaining my damaged car to the insurance agent.
Sorren muttered something in Dutch. His accent, usually unnoticeable, becomes more pronounced when he’s angry or hurt. And belatedly, I realized he was both.
“You’re bleeding,” I said. I stopped to look him up and down. He looked like he’d been to war, and he had been, to save our necks.
“It’s only a flesh wound,” he deadpanned.
I gave him a ‘shut up’ look and started to look for gauze.
“Really, Cassidy. I’ll be fine,” Sorren said. “I’m nearly healed.” He pulled back the shredded cloth of his black shirt to reveal a newly healed set of slashes, thin pink scars where, not half an hour earlier, there had been a bone-deep gash.
I uncorked a bottle of wine and sloshed some into glasses for Teag and me. It was that kind of night.
By now, I had grabbed one of the frozen pizzas I keep for emergencies and thrown it in the oven. I poured kibble into Baxter’s bowl, grabbed my wine glass, and sank into a chair.
“Ok,” I said to Sorren, taking a swig of Chardonnay to steel my nerves. “You were about to tell me that going to the Navy yard was irresponsible, reckless, and stupid. Go ahead. Let me have it.”
Sorren watched me for a moment, and then he began to chuckle.
“What?” I asked, thoroughly annoyed.
“You are so like your Uncle,” he said, shaking his head.
“Uncle Evanston?”
“Actually, you take after all of your relatives,” he said, in a tone that left me wondering whether or not that was a good thing. “Headstrong, completely heedless of danger – and rather remarkable,” he said.
I chanced a look at him. “You’re not going to yell at me?”
Sorren sighed, and since he didn’t need to breathe, I knew it was an intentional gesture. “What would be the use?” A hint of a smile quirked at the corner of his mouth.
“Yes, what you did was dangerous, reckless and all the rest. But it needed to be done, and daylight was the time to do it,” he said. “As for what happened, you could have hardly expected it.”
“There’s been another murder,” Teag said. Sorren listened as we recounted what happened before the darkness fell.
He finished his recap and turned to me. “You never said what vibes you picked up from the murder scene, Cassidy,” Teag said.
I took a deep breath and sipped my wine. “It feeds on fear,” I said, and I could hear my voice shaking.
“It enjoys killing those men, even as it feeds on their blood.” I paused, trying to make sense of what I had seen.
“It’s not human, the thing that’s killing them. It’s never been human,” I said. “And it killed him somewhere else. There wasn’t enough blood.”
Sorren nodded. “Anything else?”
I was shaking, but I pressed on. “It’s gathering strength for a purpose,” I said slowly. “I don’t know what that is, but whatever’s killing those men isn’t at full strength yet.”
“God help us,” Teag muttered. He refilled the glass of wine in my hand, and I took a gulp, not a sip, trying not to think about that mangled body.
“We didn’t get to all of the locations on the map,” I added. “But we found several worth going back to.”
“And we found this,” Teag said, digging in the pocket of his jeans. He held out the button on the flat of his palm.
“You can do this another time, Cassidy,” Sorren said, giving me a worried look.
I shook my head. “No. People are dying. There isn’t time.” I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and took the button.
“It’s Jimmy Redshoes,” I said. ‘Jimmy Redshoes’ was the name downtown regulars gave to a gregarious panhandler who always wore a beat-up pair of red sneakers. He’d come home from a couple tours of duty overseas in the Army, but part of him broke over there and never got fixed. After that, he slept where he could and raised money the only way he knew how. Sometimes he played his guitar for coins, and he was good enough to draw a crowd before the cops shooed him away for performing without a permit.
Around the holidays and during city celebrations, Jimmy came up with costumes and posed for pictures with tourists, many of whom were happy to drop some money in his hat. At other times, he could be found selling an ever-changing assortment of kitschy junk just out of the watchful gaze of the police. He was harmless and charming, and the knowledge that he had met such a pointless, painful death made me angry.
I frowned, trying to make sense of the jumbled images. Jimmy’s thinking was full of angles and sharp corners, and it was difficult to piece the bits together. “He’d glimpsed the danger before,” I said.
“Something kept bringing him into the area, and he knew it was dangerous. He’d been chased, but he came back anyhow.”
“Why?” Teag asked.
I searched the impressions I received from the button, but the answer wasn’t there. “I don’t know,” I replied. “But it was something he thought was important enough to take the risk. And it killed him. He was truly terrified and running. Whatever it was clawed him… lots of pain and there it ended. The button must have popped when he was struck.” I loosened my grip, and the button slipped out of my hand onto the table.