Instead of a revenant I could kill, Sylvia spotted me sitting in the dark and walked over, her hand on her gun butt, that angry-cop look lurking in her eyes. She said. “Cops are dead in there, and you were taking pictures. So you could get paid.”
She was right. What could I say? It was a stupid waste of time, but I tried logic. “You take crime-scene pictures. So do I. And, like you, I study them later to see what I missed, what I could have done differently. And, like you, I get paid because of those pictures.”
“Don’t compare us,” she snarled.
And I realized what she really wanted. I smiled, showing teeth, and reared back in the bucket seat, half in and half out of the vehicle, crossing my boots at the ankles. I laced my fingers across my midsection, going for irritating snark in both expression and body language. From the way her mouth tightened, I’d say I’d succeeded.
“Why not? You’d stay on the job if the county said you had to serve for free?” I asked.
“It isn’t the same thing.”
“No? If our country was attacked and our marines were cut off from supplies and pay, they would keep fighting, no matter what. They take an oath. You were elected,” I goaded. “Pay stops, I bet you’d stop doing the job too.”
“You don’t know me well enough to insult me.”
“Back atcha, Syl.”
It took a moment for her eyes to register her understanding, and when they did, her mouth turned down as if she’d sucked on a lemon. Then she sighed and sat down on the curb, almost as if she were showing submission, but I figured it was really just exhaustion. “Guess I deserved that.”
“You wanted a fight. I thought about giving it to you. I came close.”
“Eli says you’d win.” She didn’t sound happy about it.
“I’d wipe the floor with you,” I said happily.
Sylvia Turpin snorted. “I can’t decide if I like you or not.”
“Two alphas in the same city. Makes it hard.”
“Long as you stay away from Eli,” she said, “I guess I can live with it.” I started laughing, and Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Okay. That sounded like a high school girl laying claim to the cute boy in class. I’m an idiot. But—” She came to an abrupt stop, clearly floundering with whatever she wanted to communicate.
“But you never met anyone like him, and it worries you that we share a house?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Friends and family. That’s all, Sheriff.”
“Yeah?” She thought about that a bit, her eyes on the parking lot at her feet. “Okay. I can live with that.” She stood and held out her hand, which trembled slightly. We shook. She didn’t release my hand, but held me in place and searched my face. After what felt like way too many seconds, she nodded and stepped back. “Okay. Later, Jane Yellowrock.”
“Later, Sylvia Turpin.”
It was after two a.m. when Eli and I drove into the historic Top of the Hill district of downtown to check out several addresses the Kid thought looked promising for containing vamp lairs. Some had basements, one had newly installed vamp shutters, and three had belonged to vamps on the kill list.
Like many old Deep South towns, the rich and hoity-toity lived close to the poor and down-and-out, sometimes only one block away or even one yard down. The socioeconomic distribution had been designed in a time when transportation was a major problem and the poor had to walk to work as servants at the rich people’s big houses and in town businesses and cotton mills and industry.
High Street was no exception to the rich-house/poor-house rule, and the address we turned in to was way off the street, little more than a shack, maybe six hundred square feet, with a tiny, off-kilter front porch, some kind of brick-printed sheeting hanging loose over rotting boards, and boarded-up windows. Eli put the SUV into neutral and we studied the small place in the headlights. “Looks abandoned,” I said.
“Yeah. We can hope.” Eli executed a fast three-point turn so were facing the street for a quick getaway. “Let’s check it out.” He cut the SUV engine, pulled on a baseball hat and a low-light vision scope over it, adjusted the aim of the device, and grunted. “Nothing.” Next he tried a handheld passive infrared system and grunted again. “Still nothing.”
It started to rain, drops hitting the windshield with heavy splats of sound and tiny little ice crystals in the middle of the dollops of rain. Eli handed me a superbright, 2,200-lumen flashlight and cut the motor. The night descended on us, silent and chill. The cold hit my face as I opened the door, a long-delayed weather front bringing the early stages of sleet with it. A slow, icy wind coursed along the ground, wisps of fog scudding around my legs. Something about the half-melted sleet, slow breeze, and the odd fog made me feel as if I were being watched, so I turned, setting my feet deliberately in a full circle, taking in the dark with Beast senses, breathing with my mouth open, scenting, before turning on the flash. Though I held it carefully before me, it still stole my night vision, so I closed my left eye to preserve what I could.
Leaving his door pushed closed but unlatched, Eli moved out from the SUV and toward the house. Bike riders don’t have to think about stuff like getting a car door open for a fast getaway. I copied him and fell in, walking so I could keep an eye behind us, the light illuminating the old street, moss hanging from trees, winter-burned gardens, tilled earth and mulch and lots of brown dead stems, and the shimmer of falling rain. No green plants meant no earth witches, not like Under the Hill, with its lush greenery and tingle of magics.
The dead plants seemed significant somehow, and the feel of emptiness settled on me, featherlight and ominous. The sound of rain intensified and icy drops ran down my face and neck and into my collar. I shivered once, bracing my shoulders against the cold.
Eli stepped onto the front porch, the boards creaking under his weight, and secured his flash to his weapon, so it moved where the gun pointed. With his free hand, he tried the door. It was open. The little hairs lifted on my neck. He glanced at me and I nodded once. He opened the door and moved inside to the left, graceful as a wraith. I followed, moving to the right and setting my back against the interior wall.
The front room was empty except for a bare mattress and drug paraphernalia—needles, syringes, metal spoons, burned matches, stubby candles, a broken glass bong and several that were made out of cola cans, the old scent of marijuana, and the fainter smell of chemical-laced drugs, probably crack and cocaine. The drugs could be cut with so many different products with diverse chemical makeups that they never smelled the same to me. I’d need to be a dog or even in Beast form to detect them well. The dank house smelled of black mold and dead mice and human urine, but it hadn’t been used as a drug house recently. And there was no fresh scent of anything, no old-school vamps, no new spidey vamps, no nothing.
We checked the back rooms anyway. Still nothing but broken furniture and food wrappers and used condoms, the stuff of romance for street people.
Eli was silent throughout the search, his face impassive the few times that reflected light bounced onto him. I was just glad to be out of the rain. I wasn’t sure that Eli had noticed any discomfort.
When we had determined there was nothing of interest here, I followed him to the SUV, wondering how he got to be point man but not really caring. Macho man protecting the little lady, no matter that I was as tall as he and could kick butt just as well. Better, even.
With rain alternating between sputters and downpours, we inspected six other places, addresses that the Kid had sent us. We found more of the same: empty lots, houses with families sleeping inside, empty houses with FOR SALE signs out front. There were no people on the street, human or otherwise; the city had been deserted, less because of the hour than because of fear of being kidnapped and eaten.
All in all, it was disappointing, and we headed home before dawn with only the kills from the morgue to show for our trouble. But hunting vamps was like that. A lot of records work followed by useless footwork, and then by either blood and gore or disappointment. Tonight we had both, and as we rode home, I e-mailed the kills to the MOC with instructions for electronic deposit into my account. Despite what Sylvia had said, money was money.
When we got home to Esmee’s, I sat in the SUV after Eli went inside, feeling at loose ends and not knowing what direction to take this investigation. I hadn’t discovered who was in charge of the spidey vamps, and I hadn’t found a single insight into where Misha was. I was a failure, and understood that I was creeping up on invisible deadlines that meant I might never find and save Mish, and more humans were dying at the fangs of vamps.
Sleepy, cranky, and angry at myself, I headed inside, not wanting any human interaction. So when Bobby greeted me at the foot of the stairs, sitting on the bottom step with his arms around his knees, I had to smother my irritation. “Bobby? What are you doing up?” I asked, managing to sound unruffled.
He yawned, and that made me more crabby. I wanted my bed. “Jane, I had a dream. It was about a lion.”
I had no idea what to do next. How was I supposed to react to that? Bobby stood and took my hand, pulling me into the breakfast room, where the lights blazed and Eli sat, his weapons on the table before him, one disassembled. He was fieldstripping and cleaning the guns, a nine-millimeter semi in parts and pieces laid out on a bamboo tray and a layer of old linen napkins probably provided by Jameson. Bobby pushed me into a seat, and I sat. I mean, really. What was I supposed to do?
“It was a mountain lion. I think it was you.”
Eli snorted softly without looking up.
“Misha says my dreams are symbic. She says that what I see isn’t always what the dreams mean.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling better now that I had an out. “Most people’s dreams are symbolic.”
“That’s the word,” he said, pleased.
“What happened in yours?” I asked.
Eli glanced up from his weapons and raised his brows. I grimaced at him and turned my attention back to Bobby.
