Wild Things: A Chicagolands Vampire Novel (Chicagoland Vampires) (15 page)

“Could they have something in common?” Mallory wondered. “Aline and Niera?” Apparently bored of the whisk, she stuck it back in the canister again to mingle with its colleagues.

“How could they, if Aline didn’t know the elves existed?” But then I looked at Gabriel. Aline did seem like the conspiracy type, and God knew she hated the Keene family. “Did she?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

There had to be some connection. This many attacks—large-scale attacks—in two days couldn’t be a coincidence. I looked at Ethan. “Have you talked to Luc?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Seeing you safe was first on my list.”

I nodded. “When you call him, you might see if Paige and the librarian are back from their rendezvous. The librarian has stores of microfiche and, you know, Internet access. If there’s a connection between Aline and Niera, they’d be the ones to find it.”

“A good idea.” Ethan pulled out his phone.

“I’m full of them,” I said, glancing at a clock on one of the Brecks’ sleek appliances. “We only have a few hours until dawn. I’ll check the box when it gets here, talk to Jeff or Damien about whatever I find. Maybe they can provide some context.” I glanced at Catcher and Mallory. “Can you follow up again with Baumgart- ner, see if this new glamoury magic rings any bells? And check again on Simon if you still haven’t reached him?”

“We’ll do both,” Catcher said, “but neither is likely to lead to much.”

“Better to check and come up empty than miss a lead,” I said.

Ethan looked at me with obvious amusement. “You’re becoming quite the investigator.”

I searched my memory for a good quip about cops, maybe something from a film noir about private detectives that would have made him laugh, but came up empty.

“Book ’em, Danno?” Catcher offered.

“Close enough.”

Jeff, Damien, and Nick walked into the kitchen together. Jeff and Damien looked significantly better than they had when I’d seen them before. They’d changed clothes and their superficial wounds were gone, probably because they’d shifted and let their magic do its work.

Nick walked to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of water.

Jeff carried Aline’s box, which he set on the counter, then smiled at me. “You all right?”

“Fine. You?”

“Feel like I lost another life or two, but I’m okay.” He nudged Damien collegially, but Damien just offered back a mild blink.

“Nothing?” Jeff said and, when Damien continued to stare, turned to me with a crooked smile. “Alrighty.”

“Boo’s okay?” I asked.

“Boo?” Ethan asked.

“Damien’s babysitting a kitten we found at Aline’s,” I explained.

Damien nodded. “Was sleeping in the car. Now sleeping in a box in the living room. Any developments here?”

“Ethan’s calling Paige and the librarian to check for any connections between Aline and Niera.”

“That seems unlikely,” Damien said.

“Agreed. But it’s also unlikely that harpies attack shifters, and hours later someone pulls mojo on the elves.”

“You’re thinking they come from the same source?”

“We don’t have any evidence either way, yet. But I’m thinking two major magical attacks in a five-mile radius in the span of twenty-four hours cannot be a coincidence.”

“Put that way,” Damien said, “I can hardly argue with the conclusion.”

I rose, picked up the box. “We had a to-do list,” I said, reminding Damien and Jeff. “This part was my assignment.”

Jeff nodded. “I’ll see what I can do with her hard drive.”

We looked expectantly at Damien. “I suppose I’m going to make some phone calls.”

I glanced back at Nick, who stood quietly beside the refrigerator, bottle in hand. “Can I borrow a room to look through this?”

Ethan looked worried. “Don’t you want to rest?”

I shook my head. “Too much adrenaline. And irritation. I need to work. I’ll be fine,” I added, when the line between his eyes didn’t disappear.

“Use the drawing room,” Nick said, as if it would be obvious to everyone which room that would be. It was to me, as it turned out, because I’d been there a thousand times.

•   •   •

If Papa Breck’s office was one of my favorite rooms in the Breck house, the drawing room was one of my least favorite. The office was a place of adventures and hidden secrets. The drawing room was a place of manners and sitting quietly. It was where Julia, Papa Breck’s wife and the Breck family matriarch, would spend a quiet afternoon with a book and a cup of tea, or where she’d make me and the boys endure a time-out if we’d been too noisy in the hallways. “Your father did not make his money by letting out the bought air,” she’d tell us, and demand we spend an interminable half hour sitting on hard, uncomfortable furniture until she was satisfied that we’d calmed down.

I was hardly “just a girl he knew in high school.”

I carried the box into the drawing room. It was prettily arranged—lighter and more delicate than Papa Breck’s study—with butter yellow walls and tailored furniture. A round pedestal table sat on one side of the room, with several hard wooden chairs (learned from experience) and a leather case that held two decks of cards. Both decks were missing their one-eyed kings, because we’d decided the cards held secret codes and deserved saving.

I put the box on the table, walked to the shelves that lined the other end of the room, tracing my fingers over the linen-covered hardbacks that were placed in groups amid bud vases and family pictures.

I found the copy of Ian Fleming’s
Casino Royale
—because a book about James Bond with a casino in the title obviously had to relate to our one-eyed kings, and slid it from its home.

Tucked inside, back to back, were two aging kings of spades.

So many memories in this house. Each time I came back, I built new ones, even if they weren’t always pleasant. I tucked the cards back into the book, slid the book back onto the shelf, and moved back to the table. I shoved the leather box of cards aside and made space on the table while I opened the box.

Just as the house had demonstrated, Aline wasn’t one to throw things away. Anything. Receipts. Greeting cards. Lists. The paper wrappers that held silverware inside restaurant napkins. I assumed every scrap of paper and receipt in the box had meaning for her, some emotional weight that kept her from throwing them away, that bound them to her as the years went on.

I looked through the piles, separated them into groups, and when that didn’t reveal any universal truths, put them into chronological order.

By the time Jeff knocked on the door, I had several tidy piles of paper and absolutely no clues whatsoever. Maybe he’d had more luck.

“Hey,” I said. “What did you find?”

“Nada.” He pulled out a chair and took a seat. “She plays a lot of solitaire, which just seems extra-sad.”

“Travel plans?”

“The ticket looked completely legitimate. But there was nothing in her Web history that indicated she booked it on that computer.” He shrugged. “Could be someone else booked it; could be she used a faster computer.”

“So that doesn’t really help us narrow anything down.”

“It does not,” Jeff agreed.

I frowned down at the box. “Honestly, I don’t know anything at all so far. I’ve looked through everything in this box, stacked and reordered it, looking for a pattern.” I gestured at the receipts I’d organized. “These piles are geographical. I was hoping something would hit. But I’m not seeing anything.” I glanced at him. “Do you want to take a look? Maybe there’s shifter significance I don’t see.”

“I doubt that,” he said, but settled in to peruse.

PAPER MOON

W
e worked quietly, deliberately, searching through the only potential bit of evidence we had. And it wasn’t much.

“I think keeping all this stuff would weigh me down,” I said, pulling out a grocery receipt for utterly innocuous items: milk, eggs, cookies, paper towels.

“Yeah,” he said, flipping through a stack of greeting cards. “But you have Ethan, a family, friends. You have connections.” He flipped open a card, grimaced at whatever he found there, and closed it again. He put the card in the pile and looked at me. “I don’t think she does. I mean”—he spread his hands over the stack—“all this stuff would be relatively meaningless to us. Cards from people who don’t sound like they know her at all, bills, receipts. Photographs of other people’s kids. It’s almost like she was trying to build a life from paper, from the stacks of stuff that she kept in the house.”

That was both poetic and sad, and it made more sense than I preferred to admit. If Jeff was right, Aline led a sad and lonely life that had been capped by a potentially sad and lonely end. We just weren’t sure yet.

“So where does that get us?”

He pushed his hair behind his ears. “I’m not sure.”

I stood up, getting a fresh perspective on the piles we’d made on the dark wood table. “Okay. So she’s missing. The question right now is whether she’s missing on purpose, or because she’s a victim of the mattacker.”

“The ‘mattacker’?” Jeff asked, blinking.

“The magical attacker. I shortened it a little.”

Jeff chuckled. “Shorten it all you want. But nobody else in the house is going to refer to the perp as a ‘mattacker.’”

“You’re probably right. But they aren’t in the room right now. So—we know a flight was purchased for Aline—whether or not by her.” I looked back at Jeff. “I don’t suppose you know anyone with an airline connection?”

“No,” he said, frowning. “Why?” But before I could answer, his brows lifted in understanding. “Because if she got on the plane, she probably wasn’t kidnapped. I don’t know anybody offhand, and I’d prefer not to hack into transpo databases. That kind of stuff gets you flagged.”

“I think that’s a legit reason,” I assured him. “So she gets a storage locker, buys a flight, comes to Lupercalia. Leaves right before or right after the attack.”

“There’s just nothing here that touches on any of that,” Jeff said. “At least, not that I can see. But that’s part of the problem—it could all be relevant, and we wouldn’t even know it because we don’t really know what’s going on here.” He picked up a faded and water-stained receipt. “She got gas.” He picked up a strip of three yellow tickets. “She went to the carnival.” He picked up a small wax paper bag with a logo on one side. “She bought cookies at Fran’s Delights of Loring Park. That has got to be the most pretentious name for a cookie joint I’ve ever heard, but I’m getting off track.”

I was proud he realized that. He didn’t always.

“None of this stuff means anything without context, and shifter context isn’t helping much. None of it, as far as I can see, is shifter related. She lived like a human. Bought things like a human.”

“Could that be the reason she’s gone? She pretended to be a little too human?”

Jeff shrugged. “I don’t think we can rule it out. It might be time to call your team.”

I smiled at him. “I think we can arrange that.” I pulled out my phone and started up the program Luc had created for the House’s guards. It had timers, alarms, alerts, and, according to him, a “slick” little videoconferencing setup.

I set up the phone on the table and turned on the app, selecting the option to connect with the Ops Room.

An animated clip of Luc filled the screen. His animated cowboy hat bobbed back and forth as he screeched “Show me the Ops Room!” over and over again.

“Is that supposed to be a play on ‘Show me the money’?” Jeff wondered.

“God only knows,” I said, smiling with relief when the real Luc replaced the faux one.

He smiled brightly at Jeff and me. “Sentinel, I’m glad to see you’re taking advantage of the technological resources we’ve provided for you. And that you’re alive. Ethan said things got hairy. And for you, too, Jeff.”

“Being a hostage is always a bummer,” Jeff said. “But we came out all right.”

“Have you heard anything about Scott?”

“Scott?” Jeff asked with alarm.

“Kowalcyzk’s interviewing him today,” Luc explained. “Jonah said the lawyers are negotiating with the mayor’s office, the police commissioner, the feds. No other news yet.”

“At least he’s got advocates,” Jeff said.

“And loud ones. The lawyers are all over TV, the Web, talking about how poorly their client is being treated, how it’s baldly unconstitutional. They’ll get him out, or set him up for a civil suit later.”

“Sometimes you play by the rules they give you,” I said. “I assume Ethan gave you the rundown about everything here?”

“He did. He’s talking to the librarian. And good timing there; he just got back to the House an hour or two ago. What can I do you for, Sentinel?”

“We need to borrow your brain.”

•   •   •

Ethan had given Luc the overview, heavy on the elves and their apparent existence. We stuck to the facts of the attack, walked him through what we knew, and brainstormed about the potential cause.

Luc wasn’t convinced they were related at all. “Two different methods,” he said. “One much more violent than the other. One kills, the other—what would you say—violates? One attack during the day. The other at night.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “it’s two attacks on supernatural groups in Illinois within twenty-four hours. The methods may not have much in common, but they have to be connected.”

“We need to know if she got on that plane.”

“That’s exactly what Jeff and I were saying. I don’t suppose you know someone?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I might, you know, know someone.” His cheekbones glowed faintly pink, and there was a bashful look in his eyes.

“Former girlfriend?” I asked with a grin.

Luc hunched over a little, as if shielding the camera and his answer from the other people in the room. From the topic, I assumed Lindsey was one of those people.

“Briefly,” he said. “And I can’t stress that enough. We haven’t talked in a while, but I could maybe make a phone call. I wouldn’t, of course, want it to become a thing.”

“I’m
empathic
,” we heard Lindsey call out offscreen. “And you’re hardly whispering. I can hear you, Merit and Jeff.”

We waved weakly back at Luc, whose face had turned a mottled shade of crimson.

A flounce of blond hair popped into view. “’S’up?” Lindsey asked with a grin. “Jeffrey. Merit.”

“Will you please give your boyfriend permission to call his ex-girlfriend and ask if our victim-slash-perpetrator boarded her flight?”

“She hardly qualified as an ex-girlfriend,” Lindsey said. “They may have bounced around together a smidge, but that’s it. It barely counts.”

I’d have much preferred to dive into Lindsey’s scale of what did and did not “count” for purposes of “bouncing,” but this wasn’t the time.

“Excellent,” I said. “I’m going to assume that means you have no objection to Luc calling Bouncy so we can continue our supernatural investigation and get the shifters and elves off our backs.”

“Roger that,” she said, before Luc nudged his way on-screen again. He no longer looked especially amused.

“So you’ll let us know?” I asked cheerily.

He grumbled something, and the screen went blank. I scratched absently at an itch on my shoulder, glanced at Jeff.

“That was pretty awkward.”

“Vampires,” Jeff said with a shrug, as if that explained everything.

I yawned hugely, stretching back in the chair. I was still residually sore from being dragged around and bound. It was nothing that a little sleep wouldn’t fix, but I was getting achy from sitting.

“It looks like bedtime for you, Sentinel.”

I looked back, found Ethan in the doorway, hands in his pockets, lips curled in amusement. “Having any luck here?”

“Not a damn bit,” I said. “We can’t find anything that gives us a motive for Aline, or indicates she was a target of the attack. What about you? Any luck with Paige and the librarian?”

“They’re looking through the archives,” he said. “I was advised my request was substantial and it would take them some time.”

Ethan’s voice was flat, and I could easily imagine the librarian giving him a very pointed speech about the time he’d need to complete an assignment. Like most of the vampires of Cadogan House, the librarian was particular.

Another yawn racked me, and I raised the back of my hand to my mouth. I was too tired to hold it in.

“You’ve had a bit of an evening,” Ethan said. “I think it’s time to head back to the carriage house.”

I nodded and stood up, regretting that the end of the evening hadn’t been more productive.

“I’ll get this cleaned up,” Jeff said. “And check in with Damien.” He glanced at Ethan, smiled. “Merit held her own. Had those elves shaking in their boots.”

“I’m sure she did. And it probably didn’t hurt to have a tiger in her corner.”

Jeff smiled shyly. “I’m just glad we got everyone out of there okay. Hopefully, we’ll find Aline tucked away on holiday, and Niera on a jaunt, and everything can go back to normal.”

I didn’t disagree with the hope, but I was beginning to think crisis was the new normal.

•   •   •

We had an hour until sunrise, but my body was already shutting down. Ethan all but carried me back to the carriage house, where Mallory and Catcher had showered and were lying on the couch, a predictable Lifetime movie on the television. Some men golfed; some wrenched. Catcher Lifetime’d.

I headed straight for the bedroom, stripped down to bare skin, and blistered myself in the shower. My body ached like I was awaiting the onset of the flu. I could only assume the elves had thrown me around like a sack of potatoes in the process of getting me into the village.

When I’d risked using all the hot water, I flipped off the faucet and wrapped myself in a fluffy towel. They had their prejudices, but you couldn’t fault their taste in linens.

I pulled on a Cadogan T-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms, and then took care of the other necessary bit of business—sword care. I’d managed to snatch my sword back from the elves, but it hadn’t come away unscathed. The steel was filthy, dotted with mud and probably worse, little clumps of dirt clinging to the scabbard. I placed both carefully on the floor, then grabbed the small kit Catcher had given me from my duffel bag. Rice paper. Oil. A whetstone to hone the surface.

I hadn’t yet used the whetstone. The katana had been made by hands significantly more experienced and learned than mine; I’d long ago decided to leave sharpening to the experts. But I was good with oil and rice paper, which would clean the steel to a sheen and protect it from nicks during the next battle.

After removing the gunk with a soft cloth, I dotted oil onto a square of rice paper and folded the small sheet around the blade. With a smooth, swift motion, I wiped the oil from one end of the katana to the other, then repeated the process until the blade gleamed. The blade had been tempered with blood and magic, and with each pass of the paper I felt the answering shiver of satisfaction, as if the sword appreciated the care.

When I was done, I slid it back into the sheath with a
zing
of sound, and placed it on the top of the bureau beside Ethan’s sword, already scabbarded. They made a beautiful pair, artisanal weapons of death, handcrafted protectors of honor.

As I patted myself on the back for my mental poetry, a knock sounded at the front door.

I opened the bedroom door and peeked into the living room.

For the first time tonight, it wasn’t bad news. A teenager with pink cheeks stood in the doorway wearing a Loring Park Pizza cap, and the siren’s call of roasted meat spilled into the air from the four steaming pizza boxes he carried. The scent was nearly tangible; I could practically see the wavy lines of meat smoke rising off the box.

A victim to my hunger, I marched into the living room.

“What’s this?” Catcher asked.

“Dinner, I guess.” The kid shrugged. “Guy at the house paid for it, sent me out here with it.” He grinned. “Said you should tip me really well.”

“I’ll just bet he did,” Catcher mumbled, pulling his wallet out of his back jeans pocket. He snatched out bills, then exchanged the cash for pizza and watched the kid head back down the driveway—as if there was a threat the pizza delivery boy might change his mind and attack.

After a moment, Catcher closed the door and put the pizza on the table. “I guess the Pack felt bad about last night’s grub.”

“Or tonight’s hostage situation,” Ethan said, throwing open a box and grabbing a steaming slice. Without napkin, fork, or plate, he dove into the slice, earning openmouthed stares from Mallory, Catcher, and me.

“I’m not that pretentious,” he said over a mouthful of a pizza that looked like a butcher-shop special. I recognized pepperoni; the rest of it was a hearty, delicious mystery.

“You are,” the three of us said together, but we were smiling when we said it. We all grabbed slices and took seats on the sofas.