“Good.” A pause. “Hell of a welcome back, Ellie.”
Elena touched her hand to Luca’s shoulder as she passed, intending to check out the primary scene one more time.
“Hey, Ellie.” When she glanced back, he said, “It’s good to have you back, notwithstanding the circumstances.”
The words, the quiet acceptance, meant everything. “I haven’t forgotten I owe you a drink.”
“It’s two now—interest’s a bitch.”
Five minutes later, the light exchange felt as if it had taken place in another lifetime. A lifetime in which she wasn’t standing in the middle of a room saturated with violence while the crime-scene techs worked with calm industriousness around her. It didn’t matter that the killer had been caught and punished, the scene still needed to be documented for both the Guild’s archives and the M.E.’s.
If, one day in the future, Celia’s parents demanded to know what had been done to gain justice for their little girl, there would be some answers for them. Nothing that would lessen the hurt, nothing that would bring their daughter’s laughter back into their lives, but answers all the same.
Just like Elena had had a file to read after she grew old enough to request it.
Shoving aside the jagged edge of memory, she looked around the room, her eyes skimming over the blue-overalled forms of the two techs. She knew one of them, but the other was a stranger. Both had nearly swallowed their tongues when she walked in, but Wesley had lightened the mood by saying, “Can I take a photo of you?” A flash of white teeth against night-dark skin. “Then I can sell it to the reporters as an exclusive and make enough money to pay my as yet nonexistent kids’ college tuitions.”
“Hate to dash your hopes, but I’m probably already on the air by now. The students,” she’d said in explanation when confusion colored those pale brown eyes.
“Aw, shit.”
That had been the extent of their conversation. Wesley and his colleague, Dee, went about their business with an efficiency that told her they’d been working as a team long enough to have developed a rhythm, while Elena stood in the center of the room, drowning in the echoes of violence. One of the bunk beds had sheets drenched with red turning to a dull brown that failed to mute the evil that had been done here, while more blood—arterial from the pattern of the spray—splattered the wall to its right, closest to the door.
Wesley was standing there staring at that wall. “Ellie, do you see?”
“Yes.” She turned in a circle, found the blood drips on the floor and wall near the window, felt her hand clench. “Dee, could you do me a favor for a second?”
The petite blonde rose to her feet, fingerprint brush in hand. “Sure, what do you need?”
“If you’d stand by the door.” Elena waited until she’d done so. “Bend down a little. That’s it.” Heading over, she looked at the spray. “That’s how tall Celia would’ve been while standing.”
Straightening, the tech looked behind her, her bones sharp against skin that hadn’t yet thrown off the pallor of winter. “Bastard took her out here, sprayed the wall.”
“Then who bled out on the bed?” Having moved to the bunk, Wesley lifted up the mattress with careful hands. “It’s soaked through. No way the girl had enough in her after splattering the wall that bad.”
Damn it. “Call your people, tell them the pond needs to be searched.” A vampire of Ignatius’s age—he’d appeared sixty at least—could’ve carried the slight weight of two young girls without a problem. Or ... he’d discarded one in the woods where the angels hadn’t spotted it from above, and Elena had bypassed because she’d been focused on the murderer.
Wesley was already taking out his cell phone. “You going to check the trail?”
“Yes, but someone needs to talk to the principal, find out—” A new scent curved into the room, erotic and luscious and flavored with sensual decadence. It was a lure, that scent, a trap that caught only the hunter-born in its jaws, and Dmitri knew how to use it to its greatest advantage.
5
Instinct had her stepping out to meet the leader of Raphael’s Seven in the corridor. The vampire with his chocolate-dark eyes and black hair was dressed in what looked like a ten-thousand-dollar suit from some fancy store like Zegna’s, the ensemble black on black with an amber-colored tie that threw the tanned color of his skin into sharp relief. Except as she knew all too well, that color wasn’t a tan.
“I heard,” he said when she reached him, and for once, his voice carried no hint of the double-edged blade of sex. He sounded as she’d once imagined him—a battle-hardened warrior with scimitar in hand, ancient runes carved onto the weapon’s very surface. His scent, too, she realized, was being held in fierce check.
He spoke again before she could say a word. “You need to return to the Tower.”
Elena scowled—the day she let Dmitri give her orders was the day ice-skating became a regular activity in hell. Part of it was simple contrariness because he’d made it crystal clear he considered her a weakness in Raphael’s armor, but part of it was self-preservation. Because the instant Dmitri decided she wasn’t only a weakness, but actually weak, he’d stop fencing with her and come at her full tilt.
Raphael would kill him for it, but as Dmitri had once said to her, she’d still be dead. So she folded her arms, braced her legs. “The second body could—”