When Temptation Burns: A Shadow Keepers Novel (Shadow Keepers 6) (3 page)

Slowly, he pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Thank you.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “For what?”

For believing I’m human. For proving I can keep up the charade
. “For last night.”

Her expression relaxed and she smiled softly as she reached for his hand, her fingers twining with his. “Like I said. Come back to bed.”

He’d be lying if he didn’t admit it was tempting, but long ago he’d promised himself not to go there. He’d had a few relationships with his own kind—with the shadowers. If a week or two of dinners and sex could be considered a relationship. But with humans? With them he wouldn’t even stay through the night.

“You’re going to say no,” she said. “I see it on your face.” She eased up onto her knees, the sheet falling away. “Let me try to persuade you otherwise.”

“Brenda—” he said, recalling the name that had been pinned to her uniform.

“No, no,” she said. “You don’t want—”

But he didn’t hear what he didn’t want, because the sharp chirp of his phone interrupted. He tugged it from his pants pocket, saw Tucker’s name on the display, and answered. “Yo.”

“It’s Rhys,” his partner said. “I just got a call from the office in Victorville. I think we’ve got him.”

Doyle felt his pulse increase as he got the details, told
Tucker he’d meet him in five, then snapped the phone shut.

“You really do have to go,” Brenda pouted.

“I do,” he said, and this time he meant it. “Because you’re right. I’m a cop. And I’ve got a job to do.”

“Dead,” Officer Gomez said, his voice carrying across the parking lot as Doyle crossed toward him, his long strides kicking up the dust that seemed to blanket all of Victorville. “All of them.”

“Shit.” Beside him, Doyle’s partner Severin Tucker shoved his hands into his pockets. Then, as if something inside him had popped, Tucker kicked a rock and sent it rocketing across the lot. “Goddammit all to fucking hell.”

Doyle seconded the emotion, but he didn’t give in to it. He was too on edge; the anger that all their scrambling to find the missing girls had been for nothing hovered too close to the surface. Let it go, and he couldn’t guarantee that he could pull it back.

He met Gomez in front of the entrance to the shabby, abandoned motel. The place sat about five miles outside of town on an old highway that had been made redundant by a new freeway. It had been empty for decades; and the only building within sight was an equally desolate gas station.

The intense summer sun beat down upon them, filling the air with the strangely sharp odor of melting tar and baking dust. A tumbleweed rolled by.
A ghost town
, Doyle thought, and cursed the monster who’d brought more death to this place.

“Time of death?” Doyle demanded. “Come on, Officer, I need information.”

Gomez swallowed, the only betrayal of his youth. “Not sure, sir. Four hours, at least. But maybe longer. Could be eight. We—we expected the medical examiner to arrive with you.”

“We?” Tucker asked.

“My partner and I. He’s inside. With the bodies.”

“Just the two of you?”

Gomez nodded. “Victorville’s a small post, sirs, and since you both arrived so quickly …”

“Not quick enough if they’ve been dead for four hours,” Doyle said.

“Maybe eight,” Tucker reminded Doyle.

“Fuck.” One hour and Doyle had a chance. Maybe even four. But eight? If it had been eight hours, the bodies would be useless to him. “You told Los Angeles dispatch you had a bead on Rhys,” Doyle said, referring to the vampire he had been hunting nonstop for the last three days, ever since the body of Cecilia Winfrey had been discovered in the attic of a recently listed Venice Beach cottage.

The description of the injuries in the real estate agent’s frantic call to 911 had been tagged by Division 6 dispatch, and Doyle had arrived even before the human police. He’d taken one glance at the girl—bloodless skin, ripped-up neck—and knew immediately that his trip to Venice hadn’t been a waste of time. A vampire had killed the girl, and the case was well within the jurisdiction of the Preternatural Enforcement Coalition, an ancient organization that investigated, prosecuted, and meted out punishment for crimes performed by
vampires, werewolves, jinns, and all the other shadowers.

Tucker had wasted no time. A human with the rather rare but extremely useful gift of mind control, he’d worked his mojo on the gathering crowd, and soon the local cops were on their way back to the station and the real estate agent was headed to her next listing, completely clueless that anything untoward had happened at the beach property.

After that, the case had belonged to the PEC. More specifically, to Doyle, and he’d immediately gone to work. Cecilia was dead, but she still had a story to tell, and Doyle had crouched beside her, his hand pressed to her forehead. As a percipient paradaemon, he’d seen Cecilia’s fear. Had experienced the horrors of her last hours when Joaquin Rhys had bled and tortured her—and not just by causing her pain. No, he had added insult to injury by describing in intricate detail exactly what he was going to do to ten of her college friends. And he’d recited each girl’s name and address just so that she could have no doubt of his sincerity.

Most vamps fought against that kind of depravation. They used willpower and rituals to help bind and suppress the daemon that was released in the transition from human to vampire. Lose the battle, and they became rogue, giving in to their bloodlust and losing their humanity in the process.

As a paradaemon, Doyle had always had that dark force living within him, throbbing and needy beneath the surface. Unlike a vampire, he couldn’t call upon any rituals to help him battle it down. Despite his human mother and his human appearance, he wasn’t human and never had been. He had to fight the seething, bubbling
rage inside of him solely through the force of his own will.

The effort cost him, and dearly, but the constant battle made him stronger. It also ensured that he had no patience for vamps who didn’t at least try to control their daemons. They were vile. Lazy. And the ones like Rhys, who were evil even without the daemon? Those he hated beyond all reason.

Those, he’d made it his mission to fight.

“So what about him?” Doyle pressed. “Where the fuck is Rhys?” Doyle’s voice cracked with irritation. He was tired and hungry, but it wasn’t the kind of hunger that a quick stop at the Golden Arches could solve. He’d planned to feed after leaving Brenda, but there’d been no time. Not with the girls missing. Not when there’d been a chance to save them.

That chance was gone now. All that work, all that worry, and still Rhys had won.

“I don’t know, sir,” Gomez said, stumbling over his words. “We thought—when we found the girls—we assumed. But he’s not here. We’ve searched, and there’s not a sign. Nothing at all.”

From the moment he’d caught sight of Gomez’s face, Doyle had expected that answer. But that didn’t stop the sudden surge of rage inside of him. It threatened to burst free, and when it did, he hoped the lowlife vampire who’d murdered these humans would be there to suffer the onslaught of his wrath.

“And all the vics are in there? All ten?”

“Ten? No, sir. There’re only six girls.”

Doyle glanced at Tucker, who frowned. “You’re sure?” Rhys’s promise to Cecilia had been crystal clear—ten
girls. And all ten of the girls he’d named had in fact been abducted.

An eleventh girl had been killed and left behind. Her boyfriend had found her on the floor of the apartment she shared with one of the missing girls, her head bashed in from a hard landing against the brick hearth.

The poor girl hadn’t died immediately, though, and her suffering had gone on for hours. The weight of her pain had sat heavily with Doyle when he went into her head. Had she died immediately, he would have been running blind. Because she’d suffered, he’d gained a lead. A reference to the desert. A place to hole up. A lot of rambling, mixed-up words that Rhys had crooned to his terrified abductee, which the dying girl had overheard. Jumbled because of the injured girl’s pain and fear, but still enough for Doyle to work with.

He’d recited the words to a tech team back at Division 6 headquarters in Los Angeles, who’d gone to work running combinations of the words through a computer, trying to generate possible locations from them.

While the program ran, Doyle had gone out to clear his head and feed, an excursion that had landed him in Brenda’s bed. Before he’d had a chance to take his leave of her and move on to Orlando’s—where he could slake his unique appetite—the techs had hit upon the Desert Rose Motel in Victorville. Gomez had been dispatched, and Tucker and Doyle had arrived only minutes later, traveling from Los Angeles to Victorville by wormhole. It beat fighting the traffic on LA’s highways, but it was a damned unpleasant way to travel, and it drained the shit out of Doyle.

“Four still missing,” Tucker said. “Shit.”

Doyle sucked in a noisy breath, then exhaled on a curse. “Let me see the girls.”

Gomez nodded, then turned and led the way inside. Doyle and Tucker followed him past the reception counter and into the dank little office. It looked like a set for a 1950s television show, right down to the plastic covering on the teal blue sofa. In the corner, Gomez’s partner spoke into a radio. He nodded at Doyle and Tucker but otherwise didn’t acknowledge them.

“There,” Gomez said, pointing to a filing cabinet that had been pulled back from the wall. “It was like that when we got here. Like he wanted us to find his nest.”

This time, Doyle went first, with Tucker and Gomez bringing up the rear. The filing cabinet, it turned out, was attached to a hinge, turning it into a makeshift door. When opened, it revealed a hole in the plaster that led to a short tunnel, which ended abruptly in a gaping pit.

Tucker edged up beside Doyle and peered down into the dark, then grunted in frustration. After a second, he dropped a coin into the void. They didn’t hear it land.

Tucker looked at Doyle. “How far down?”

“Only about ten feet,” Doyle said. Unlike his human partner, he had preternaturally keen vision.

“Shoulda heard it land, then,” Tucker said.

“The body was soft,” Doyle said. The dime had landed on the breast of a young girl who was positioned directly beneath the hole. Doyle had the feeling Rhys had done that intentionally, positioning the girl so that it was almost impossible for her would-be rescuers to avoid landing on her already abused body.

“They’re all down there,” Gomez said.

Doyle didn’t bother answering. Carefully, he lowered himself through the hole in the floor. He swung his legs
out a bit so that he wouldn’t fall straight down. As it was, he still stumbled when he landed, and he had to steady himself on the body of another girl. That sick fuck Rhys had stacked them all around.

A moment later, Tucker and Gomez joined him.

“He sucked ’em all dry,” Gomez said. “Every single one of them.”

Tucker fished a flashlight out of his pocket. He turned it on, cast it around, then whistled. “Doyle, partner, we’ve got a problem.”

Doyle followed Tucker’s gaze, then immediately rounded on Gomez. “Are you fucking crazy?” He pointed to the four tunnels that led away from the hub where they were standing. “We’re goddamned sitting ducks.”

Gomez stumbled backward. “It’s okay. We—we went down all the tunnels. They all circle back here. All but one. It opens up into one of the rooms in the back of the motel. But he’s not there, either.”

That fury rose up again—and again Doyle battled it back down. Gomez was young. Inexperienced. But he’d just made a potentially fatal mistake.

He looked up at Tucker. “Let’s get these girls up. It’s too dangerous down here.” If Gomez and his quiet partner had already checked the halls, they were probably safe. But Doyle wasn’t in the mood to take chances.

“Already ahead of you.” Tucker stood and nodded at the officer. “What special tricks you got, Gomez?”

“Huh?”

“Forget it. Leap like a superhero and drop us down a ladder or something so that we can lift the girls out.”

Gomez—who Doyle guessed was some species of shapeshifter—literally leaped to the task, and soon they
had one of the girls laid out in the main office. Doyle knelt beside her, then turned to look at Tucker.

“Not worth it,” Tucker said. “Too much time. You’re just going to drain yourself more.”

“He might have said something in front of her. Some hint of where his other hidey-hole is.”

Tucker’s face was tight, but after a moment he nodded. “If it’s only been four hours you might still see something.” Tucker was Hollywood handsome, but right now his face was creased with frustration. “We’re running out of leads, and Rhys has a taste for this now.”

That was damn sure. Ten girls they knew of, but Doyle was certain the body count would rise.

Doyle pressed his fingers to her forehead.
Nothing
.

Damn it, they needed some luck.

As a percipient, he knew that he was an asset to the PEC. If he arrived at a crime scene in time, he could reach into a victim’s mind and withdraw their last moments—what they saw, what they felt. His gift was rare—there were only a handful of percipient daemons across the globe—but incredibly useful. The gift had defined his life ever since he had discovered it, realizing that he could use this power that was tied to his daemon half as a tool to help the weak. The victims. The humans.