Authors: Sierra Dean
“I think I’d like to save mine until the end. What do you need?”
“Kellen Rain is AWOL.”
“Ransom demand?” He slid forward in his chair, and I recognized the change in his expression. It was the same shift I’d had the previous night with Lucas when I went from
bitter ex
to
professional private investigator in order to find Kellen.
I shook my head. “I don’t think she’s been kidnapped.”
“What does Rain think?”
“I’m pretty sure he thinks she’s dead.”
Keaty threaded his fingers together and rested his chin on them, looking thoughtful. “No, death doesn’t seem right, does it? Does he have a reason for thinking that? Any specific enemies who might make a target of someone he loves?” He arched an eyebrow at me. First I thought he was implying
I
might be responsible for Kellen’s disappearance, until it dawned on me he meant something else entirely.
“You think I might be at risk?”
“If someone is targeting those close to the king, you’d be an obvious liability.”
This time I snorted. “You’re getting rusty, Spade. It made the national news when Lucas stood me up. It’s a fact
universally acknowledged,
to quote Jane Austen, that he doesn’t give a single flying fuck about me.”
“I don’t think Jane Austen ever said
flying fuck
.”
“The point. You’re missing it.”
“I never miss the point, Secret. You tend to ignore it.”
“Keaty, I think you just put the
ouch
in
touché
.”
He rolled his eyes. “Where do you think the girl is?”
“Working on her tan and ignoring her phone. My dream holiday.”
“And it’s not out of the realm of possibility for a girl with her…reputation, to vanish without word.” He was trying to politely say,
Slutty party girls aren’t known for being bastions of responsibility.
“Lucas says it’s the first time she’s run off without answering his calls.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but was she not, um, Team Secret after the wedding debacle?” He made air quotes around
Team Secret,
and I fought the urge to laugh in his face. I was trying to build bridges here, when I was naturally predisposed to burn them down.
“Yes, she was on my side.”
“Maybe she’s ignoring his calls to punish him.”
Well, damn. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Hadn’t it been precisely what I’d done?
“She isn’t answering
any
calls, though.”
“Have you tried?”
“I…” Of course I hadn’t yet tried the most obvious thing.
“Give me your phone, please.”
I obliged and handed my cell to him. He dialed Kellen’s number from my phone book and turned on the speakerphone. We stared at each other across the desk as it rang three, four, five times with no answer and then a click. “Hey, bitches, you’ve reached Kellen. Leave me a message, or better yet, why aren’t you at this party?” Her voicemail message ended with a girlish giggle.
Keaty and I continued to watch each other, both our faces impassive. His attention was heavy as I said, “Hey, Kel, it’s Secret. Call me back, please. Your pain-in-the-ass brother is looking for you.”
My partner hit the end button and slid the phone back across the desk to me. “Are you worried?”
“No,” I lied.
“Then back to my first question. Does he have any enemies?”
“He’s a werewolf king, a billionaire and an asshole. Of course he has enemies.”
Keaty turned to the laptop in front of him and deftly typed something, his fingers flying over the keyboard with an alarming speed for a man I’d thought hated all technology. “I don’t see any hostile takeovers, bad business dealings or anything that would suggest this is corporate. Could it be Callum?”
My uncle, Werewolf King of the South, hadn’t been a big fan of my marriage to Lucas, nor did he think the younger king could handle the territory he had. This had been made abundantly clear when he’d tried to steal some of our land and people. That territory dispute was what Lucas had been dealing with instead of showing up to our wedding.
Callum had also been the one to force our hands and push us into the werewolf marriage ceremony. My uncle wasn’t my favorite person by far, but I did believe he cared about me in his own weird, twisted way. He also wasn’t the type to mix humans up with werewolf business if he could avoid it.
“Kellen isn’t a werewolf. Callum wouldn’t touch her. It would be bad for his image.”
Keaty nodded, trusting my assessment of my uncle’s motivation. “So there aren’t any obvious suspects, none that would make kidnapping appear likely. And without a ransom request, I think you’re correct. She’s probably on vacation.”
“All the same, I’d like to use some of your less seemly contacts to make sure no one has seen her around or heard anything differently about her well-being. Just so I can put Lucas at ease.”
“Why do you care how he feels?”
I looked at my hands, rubbing my damp palms on my jeans before I spoke again. “I don’t care how
Lucas
feels. But I can’t change my ties to the pack. And he isn’t…right. I need him to
get
right so he can take care of his people. Otherwise it’s my job to make sure men like my uncle, and like Marcus Sullivan, don’t try to take advantage of a perceived weakness.”
I’d killed a would-be usurper to Lucas’s throne once, over a year earlier, and it had given me the illustrious and unwanted title of pack protector. Supernatural job titles were like Pokemon to me, apparently. Gotta catch them all.
I didn’t want to be queen, but I’d earned the pack-protector position in a legitimate way, and I took the role seriously. And with only a week until the next full moon, I wanted to be on good terms with the pack. When I’d been in Louisiana, I’d shifted form for the first time in my adult life. I didn’t know if the same thing would happen this month, but my ability to resist the change had been compromised. If becoming a werewolf was going to be a new monthly trend, I didn’t want to do it alone. I’d had a difficult time controlling my inner wolf, and the pack would be able to help me if things went badly.
I needed them, so I couldn’t simply dismiss them now that Lucas and I weren’t together.
That meant I needed to live up to my perceived duties.
“Okay,” Keaty said. “I’ll ask about the girl. Now do you want to know what I need you for?”
I’d almost forgotten this was a
quid pro quo
situation. “Sure.”
He tapped something into his computer and spun it around.
A glassy-eyed corpse stared back at me.
Chapter Seven
“Whoa,” I cried. “A little warning next time.”
The body was hardly the scariest I’d ever seen. My line of work meant I was constantly being shown the grim and bloody handiwork of any number of creatures, and I’d encountered everything from dismembered human corpses to rotting, dead vampires. But when you’re not expecting it, death has a habit of smacking you in the face.
On Keaty’s laptop was a color photo of a dead teenaged boy. His skin had the telltale gray pallor of death a few days’ old, and his eyes had a milky-white hue, the pupil having faded into an almost imperceptible blue. My eyes roved over the photo, ensuring there were no bite marks on his neck. It didn’t mean there wouldn’t be marks anywhere else, but the neck was the best, easiest place to drain someone.
This didn’t look like a vampire kill.
I slid the laptop closer, seeing that this was only the first in a full gallery of photos, and clicked through the rest of them. The boy wore a Papa John’s pizza uniform with a small plastic nametag telling me his name was Petey.
Petey.
Sickness flooded my belly. This kid shouldn’t be dead, no matter what had killed him. If he was so young he hadn’t outgrown a nickname like Petey, he hadn’t been old enough to die. It might not be my first time seeing a dead teenager, but seeing death take someone before they’d reached their prime tended to strike a chord with me.
My teenaged years had been spent fighting for my life and learning how to survive in a world filled with monsters and all forms of despicable evil. I hadn’t gotten to participate in the innocence of youth. Petey had been killed by those monsters, and I felt guilty for it.
There was no blood on him, and no signs of violent death, but he was dead and the case was in Keaty’s hands. I did the math, and weird potential murder plus my boss almost always added up to supernatural killer.
“What did it?”
“I don’t know. The coroner ruled it a heart attack, but his parents aren’t buying it. Someone said I was the right person to find out
what
had killed their beloved son. That’s what they said. What, not who.”
“And what do you need my help for?”
“Funny thing about his last delivery the night of his death.”
“Oh?”
“It went to a Starbucks three blocks from your apartment.”
In a roundabout way, Keaty was suggesting Marilyn Monroe had killed a pizza delivery boy.
I had, during my time associated with the vampire council, gotten to know a truly unusual creature known as the Oracle. To me she was just Calliope, but she was the only one of her kind I’d ever met, and Keaty wasn’t out of line pointing his investigation in her direction.
Calliope, a half-fairy/half-god, had a bad habit of needing to feed off a life essence other than blood—though she was also a fan of the red stuff. She preferred to eat aura energy. Specifically the aura energy of young male virgins.
I wasn’t implying that Petey hadn’t been a sex stud in his living years, but the sixteen-year-old didn’t strike me as a pussy magnet. However, he would have been Calliope’s type.
Calliope had been many things in her timeless life: muse, model, destroyer of lives and worlds, lover of vampires, and for a few brief decades, one of the most famous movie stars in the world. It wasn’t that I thought her killing people was outside the realm of possibility. In fact, I’d have been shocked to learn the Oracle hadn’t killed anyone. She didn’t have the same reverence for human life as, say, a vampire who had once had their own mortality.
Calliope was immortal. Scarily, genuinely immortal.
So what was the life of a sixteen-year-old to her?
Logic told me why Keaty believed it was her. But personal experience told me he had to be wrong. I’d seen her victims after she’d fed off them, either their blood or aura. They were often dazed and a little woozy, but they always walked out alive after the fact. And usually with one hell of a big tip. She had thousands of years to hone her control, so no, I didn’t believe she’d had a slipup and accidentally killed someone.
But if I thought she was innocent, why wasn’t I going to see her to ask her point-blank?
For starters, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure she
was
innocent. The evidence was stacked against her, and I didn’t want to run into her house demanding she explain herself if there was another way. And that brought up another problem.
Calliope wasn’t called the Oracle for no reason.
She could see the future.
So if I was planning to barge in and start accusing her of murder, she’d see it coming. And if she
was
guilty, it would mean she’d be ready for me. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to go head-to-head with an immortal being who was older than recorded time if she knew to expect me.
For the time being, I was stuck in old-school PI-research mode. I had to find Kellen, and I had to prove Calliope hadn’t killed the pizza boy. Without supernatural help.
All before the full moon next week, if I could.
No big deal.
I started with the murder investigation, trusting Keaty would stay true to his word and ask about Kellen with his sources. Nothing says
serious detective
like showing up at a Papa John’s at eleven o’clock at night on a Thursday.
“What can I get you?” A bored-looking teenage girl snapped her bubble gum and stared through me like I was invisible.
“Did you know Peter Giambi?”
Now I had her attention. “Petey?” Her expression fell, and genuine sadness replaced her ennui. She’d liked him. “What do you want?” she demanded, her tone suspicious.
“I’m a private investigator working with his parents.”
“You have a badge or something?” Man alive, when did teenagers stop being blindly trusting? I pulled out my PI license and showed it to her, not bothering to hide the holstered gun under my jacket.
“Did Peter have any regular runs? Places he delivered to all the time?”
“Sure, we have a few regulars. People who order two or three times a week. It’s New York, lady, no one cooks anymore.”
Sad, but true. A lot of people in the city viewed their ovens as a wildly unnecessary waste of good bookshelf or closet space. My own kitchen was about the size of a shoebox.
“Did anyone request him by name?”
The girl—her nametag said Becca—shook her head. “No, ma’am. We have a real serious policy about that. If a customer requests a specific delivery driver, we send the manager instead. It’s a safety thing.”