Most of the roadways in this area were short but wide, trapped between railroad homes built in the early 1900s, now renovated office buildings, with a spattering of new construction. A few blocks over, downtown Vegas teemed with slot machines, dollar-ninety-nine breakfasts, and a multimillion-dollar canopy of lights, but on this side of the metaphorical tracks, cheap thrills were the thing of dreams. As was, it seemed, indoor plumbing. There was so much urine on the walls of the alley I veered through that I could see the stains even in the moonlight.
I paused when I reached the alley’s end to peer around the corner, covering my nose as I studied the building across the street. A brick affair that’d seen its best days about three decades past, it was shrouded in darkness, its business day long concluded. The building adjacent to it had been renovated into a bank, which meant security, sensors, and cameras. In comparison, this one looked like a neglected dog. Even a break-in would be welcome attention. Happy to oblige, I skirted across the street.
There was a dim alcove with dual glass doors, and I peeked through them into the lobby, redesigned to look edgy and modern, though stripping the yellowed linoleum had apparently been beyond the budget. Black tape along the floor showed where the cattle-or customers-were to line up, and walls of half brick, half glass, probably bulletproof, held cages where clerks served their time. The place was otherwise windowless.
Only one place to go, I decided, sticking my head out from beneath the portico to survey the rest of the building, and that was up.
A good rock climber can wedge fingertips and body parts into the smallest of crannies, stem from the most unlikely of places, and defy gravity with nothing more than flexibility, confidence, and strong thighs. I wasn’t a good rock climber…but I was a heroine, and if I wanted to hang on to a measly piece of brick, I could. It helped that I had no fear of falling, but it would have helped more if I could’ve just leaped the thirty feet to the roof, which I hypothetically could. Hypothetically being the key word. Down was one thing; you just aim and let gravity do most of the work. Up was quite another.
All in all it took me a little over a minute to scale the wall, long enough to be spotted if someone had been approaching from a westerly direction. I still had the presence of mind to glance around before swinging myself onto the crackling, dilapidated rooftop, sidestepping broken tiles, bottles, and newspapers in a crouch, wondering how so much litter found its way onto the rooftop.
According to my calculations, and the death scent growing stronger with every advancing step, the opposite wall should look down on the alley where Chandra had stashed the body. I took a full minute to center myself, making sure my breath was even, then peered over the side.
It took a moment for me to spot them, eyes running over the various bumps and shadows protruding from the alley floor, but then Chandra’s bulky, loathsome silhouette lumbered into view. She bent over what I assumed was the body, examining it with careful attention until softly running footfalls caught her attention. She tensed, shoulders squared, then relaxed as Micah rounded the corner. They whispered in half sentences and medical jargon, a conversation born of familiarity and long hours spent together in the lab, and the few words I caught were difficult to follow.
Half a minute later Warren stumbled up the opposite side of the alley, still immersed in his character. His walk gradually straightened, though he still possessed the authentic limp, and his head came up, scouring their faces before moving on to the rest of the surroundings.
I jerked back from the ledge, because if anyone was going to discover me, it was Warren. He had an uncanny sixth sense, especially when it came to me. We’d been linked with a binding agent months before, and though he swore the compound had been dissolved, I sometimes felt twinges in my breastbone when he was near, like a second heartbeat. And if I felt that, I’d decided, Warren probably did too.
I waited another minute, then chanced another look over the ledge. There were six silhouettes now assembled around the body as if about to perform some sick act of satanic worship…or as if they’d just finished. Jewell arrived just then, moving quickly, and the others made room for her, falling back to allow her in, and giving me my first good look at the ravaged body.
It was a woman, painfully ordinary in every way. Height, weight, hair color…even her state at the time of death could be termed average. After all, plenty of people died naked. Some even died with a horrific and pained expression on their face, eyes sealed wide in the final throes of fighting off the Reaper. But I doubted many others died with burn marks blackening their lips, shriveling their skin so that their death mask was frozen in a grotesque parody of a grin. I also doubted too many people had the same burn marks charring their fingertips, incinerating skin and tissue all the way down to the bone.
But this woman had pulled a triple-hitter. The burns extended to the entire area nesting between her spread legs, a charred and blackened void now, still smoldering and unrecognizable. The rest of her body was marble white, pristine and untouched against the filthy ground.
“What the fuck?” I pulled back, unable-indeed, unwilling-to process what I’d just seen. It looked like nitric acid had been poured over her body. Except there were no splash marks. And who burned only in three distinct and entirely separate areas of the body? And how had her attacker gotten away without discovery, without the victim-who looked like she’d died in intense agony-even making a sound?
Worse, was this what all the victims looked like?
I leaned back over the ledge to hear the other agents wondering the same thing. Hearing the word prostitute gave some clue as to how she’d gotten naked, why she’d been vulnerable to attack, but no one could guess at what had caused such painful mutilation. “How does a person burn to death with most of their body untouched?” I wondered aloud.
“They don’t,” came a voice from behind. I whirled, blood pounding in my ears because suddenly I smelled her-smelled the lack of her-and it was too late. Regan stood a handful of feet away in a flowered summer dress, looking young and completely out of place on a dilapidated rooftop in a neighborhood that looked and smelled like it needed to be flushed. For someone with supersenses, I sure was getting snuck up on a lot lately.
“How did you-?”
“Evade your detection? Again?” Her face was guileless, but her voice teased. Seeing the way my eyes narrowed, how my shoulders squared defensively, she answered her own question. “I’m an initiate. I’m losing my human odor because I’m no longer mostly mortal. I haven’t metamorphosized yet, so the Shadow pheromones can’t be scented on me. Basically I’m in an olfactory no-man’s-land. We often send out older initiates to do reconnaissance work because of that. It’s good training, and we can’t be tracked by the agents of Light. Didn’t you know?”
I hadn’t-we hadn’t-and I was peeved to find it a good idea. Warren would never go for it, though, in part because he’d have to get through Rena to do so. Shit, I thought wryly, they didn’t even allow full-blown agents to leave the sanctuary if they thought it unsafe. Thus my position on the rooftop.
“That’s another opportunity you had to kill me,” I said in a whisper. “And you didn’t.”
Regan shrugged the words away and crouched beside me like we were longtime bosom buddies. “You’re starting to owe me big time.”
And my sense of right and wrong was just fucked up enough to believe that. Almost. “You’re not going to kiss me again, are you?”