Grinning, Chloe punched the button to answer. “Dr. Jones, I presume. What are you doing up at the ass crack of dawn this morning?”
“Stil haven’t slept from last night.” A huge yawn fuzzed the phone line. “We’re short-staffed so I pul ed a double. Budget cuts.”
“Ouch.”
“Tel me about it.” Tess worked as a pathologist for the FBI. The Normal side of the FBI. She was one of the most Normal humans Chloe had ever met. “I haven’t put in hours this awful since my residency.”
Along with werewolf Jaya Nemov, they’d become friends in med school, which was the only reason Chloe and Jaya had gotten close to anyone outside the Magickal community. Most Magickals didn’t bother because it was just too hard to keep people in their lives who they had to constantly lie to about what they were.
Chloe knew she should probably ease out of her relationship with Tess, but when Jaya had died during a ful moon Change, it emphasized to Chloe that a good friend was hard to come by, magic or no magic. Tess might never know the truth behind Jaya’s death, but she’d stil shared the loss of someone they both loved.
So, Chloe kept her friend and did what she had to do to keep her secrets.
Then again, a part of her had always wondered if the reason she held on to Tess was because her long-dead mother had been a Normal. She grinned, and it wasn’t nice. Her family was almost as horrified that she had befriended a Normal as they had been when her father had married one and bred a halfling.
Another yawn sounded through the phone, recapturing Chloe’s attention. Her grin softened, and she cradled the phone closer to her ear. “So, you’re cal ing because . . . you want to get together for dinner tonight and tel me more about the suckfest of budget cuts?”
Tess chuckled. “You’re a mind reader.”
“Sure. That’s total y a plausible explanation, Doctor.” Chloe inserted as much drawling derision into her voice as possible, and Tess laughed. Telepathy wasn’t one of Chloe’s magical skil s, so it wasn’t an outright lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth. This time. A familiar twist of guilt knotted her insides, but she pushed it aside. Tess was Normal, Chloe was Magickal; there was nothing she could do about the need to prevaricate. “How about you meet me here around seven?”
“Perfect. See ya. I’m hitting the hay now.” The cal was punctuated with one final yawn from Tess before both women disconnected.
Chloe went to drop the phone in her purse and saw she’d missed a cal about an hour before. There was a voice mail message waiting for her. She hadn’t heard the phone ring, but then, why would her subconscious want her to wake up from a steamy episode of her regularly scheduled Merek dream?
She shoved a hand through her disheveled hair and pushed the reminder of her one-night warlock out of her mind. Flipping her cel over to speakerphone, she accessed her voice mail while she wandered into her bedroom to dress for work.
A deep, silken male voice emerged from her phone. “Chloe, it’s Damien.”
Chil s crept down Chloe’s spine and a hol ow feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. The last person she expected to get a cal from was Damien. Hel , the last person she wanted a phone cal from was Damien.
Shaking off that inane thought, Chloe zipped up her skirt and shoved her feet into a pair of bal et flats. While she walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and hair, she hit the buttons to replay the message she hadn’t real y listened to.
“Chloe, it’s Damien.” A muffled thump sounded in the background of the cal , but Damien hurried on. “I’m sorry to bother you at home. Don’t erase this.... I need to talk to you about work. It’s . . . It’s important to the project. Cal me back. Please.” The cal ended abruptly, as if someone had stabbed the End button with more force than necessary.
The please gave her pause. Damien never said please. Then again, he also never said I’m sorry. He was a vampire. They were, by definition, cold-blooded. They also tended to have superiority complexes and thought everyone, from other Magickal species to Normals, was so far beneath them they didn’t even register on their radar. Sure, most of them would stoop to having a fling with a non-vampire, maybe one or two non-vampire friends, just for variety, but anything else was out of the question. They didn’t mix.
Luckily, Chloe hadn’t wanted more than that from Damien, but she had expected fidelity while they were together. Apparently, that had been beneath him, too. She sighed, disconnected the cal , and slid her cel into her pocket.
The worst part about dating someone you worked with was when it ended badly. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. They were both team leads in pharmaceutical R & D for Desmodus Industries, but since those teams were working on the same project, they did see each other, though not that often. Thank the gods.
Shoving her arms into a jacket, she picked up her handbag and headed for the side door that lead to her detached garage. If the bloodsucker wanted to talk to her about work, he could do it when she got there.
She wasn’t cal ing him back.
2
What a fucking mess.
Merek Kingston shoved his sunglasses up his nose and stepped away from the shattered window. His shoes crunched in the glass that littered the living room of the penthouse apartment. He swept the room in a glance. The woman’s body lay crumpled near the entrance, her eyes blank and empty, her fangs stil extended in a twisted snarl.
“Al esia Dawes. Thirty-five-year-old attorney. Vampire.” Selina Grayson, his partner of three years, flipped her notebook closed before turning cool, dark eyes on the scene. At over four hundred years old, the slim elven woman had seen more than her share of death.
“Who’s our guy down on the street?”
“Coroner’s stil scraping the charcoal off the pavement, but my best guess is the owner—” she consulted her notes again “—Damien Raines.”
“Also a vampire.” It wasn’t a question. Even if the man hadn’t charbroiled in the sun, the Vampire Conclave owned this high-rise, and everyone in it. It didn’t take a genius to do the math on the kind of Magickals who might live here. He tipped his head toward the window and the street below. “Anyone down there see anything useful?”
“No. We have a few Normal gawkers, but the telepaths first on the scene say no one even saw anything worthy of a memory tweak, let alone anything that might help us.”
Only certain Normals were permitted to know magic even existed. If a Normal married into a Magickal family. When officials were appointed or elected who had to interact with the Magickal branches in every governmental organization.
If those people no longer needed to know about magic, their memories could be adjusted. The Al -
Magickal Council made those decisions, and they were ruthless in upholding the nondisclosure laws. Merek was definitely in favor of those laws. They’d brought witch trials and vampire hunting to a virtual standstil a century or two ago, and that made everyone in Magickal law enforcement’s job a whole lot easier.
Selina tucked her notebook into her jacket. “You get a read on the place yet?”
He grunted in response. Letting his eyes unfocus, he took in the room again, this time with his precognitive abilities. Power tugged in his chest, lifting the hair down his arms as it crackled in the air around him. He shuddered under the lash of magic that was almost painful.
The other officers in the room shifted away. Only Selina stayed near him while he “read” the room. Unlike the clairvoyant abilities of most Magickals, he was cursed with an overabundance of power. He could see the past, future, and present. A roaring sounded in his ears, ripping through his mind. Every historical event in Seattle tried to slam into him. Cold sweat broke out across his forehead, and his muscles shook from the onslaught. He pushed through the chaos and focused on just this building. Dark shadows of twisted memories layered over themselves in his mind as people raced in and out of the room in fast-forward. Then the wal s crumbled into dust, and he stood midair over a city he didn’t recognize. What he saw was the stuff of nightmares, the ragged end of humanity thousands of years in the future. Everything destroyed. Pul ing back from the vision, he homed in on the room. The recent past.