“Just nerves.” I tucked my phone back in my pants. “Pre-wedding jitters.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” She chuckled. “This certainly makes things more interesting.”
“Stop saying interesting in that tone, and eyes on the road, missy. One of us is still alive, you know.”
Cass mimed buttoning her lips and left me to stew over the fact my gut was tight and my palms were sweaty.
Clearly, I was having an anxiety attack. I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for a guy with his reputation. After I got home, I would pop a Zoloft. Problem solved. Until then… “You missed the turn for the pier.”
“Ron’s not at the pier.”
“Gustav—”
“Parroted rumors at us that I planted six hours ago.” She scoffed. “Do you really think I would tell him where our mark is hiding? He’s the boss, and he’s all about the bottom line. He gives those tips to everyone to better his chances of landing the mark, which means the pier will be swarming.”
“You’re amazing.”
“I know.”
Settling in for the short drive to the museum, I pushed all thoughts of Boaz Pritchard out of my head and prepared to bag and tag a baby vamp worth three house payments. Who knows? Maybe I would go nuts with the bonus, if we got to him first, and buy myself a bottle of the nail polish I had been eyeballing. The rich brown with golden swirls reminded me of…
Oh crap.
Boaz’s eyes.
Three
Railroad museum sounded much fancier than the reality. It was more of an abandoned train station you donated five dollars to self-tour than a brick-and-mortar museum. That meant no handy walls to pen in our vamp. He would bolt if he scented us, scented me, since necromancers smelled alive in a way that parched vampire throats. Cass was old enough to smell like the rustle of brittle pages in an aged book. Unless she had eaten recently. Since baby vamps were prone to bloodlust, she fasted while on the job.
Music throbbed in the darkness ahead. “Do you hear that?”
Cass rolled her eyes so hard she could have counted her own vertebrae. “What do you think?”
“Dumb question.”
“Yes, it was.” She patted me on the head. “But you’re adorable for asking.”
With a growl, I snapped my teeth at her.
“You’ve spent too much time with Gustav if you’re trying to bite people for petting you.”
“I’ll tell him you said so.”
“Please do.” Her smile turned wicked. “It’s no fun pulling his tail if he doesn’t feel it.”
Signaling for her to hush, even though I had been the one to blab first, a rookie mistake I blamed on the call from Boaz yanking me out of my zone, I drew an ash stake from the holster on my thigh and began stalking the origin of the pounding beat.
Effortless in the way of vampires, Cass strolled beside me on the loose gravel without making a sound.
I envied her stealth when my best was nowhere near her worst, but not the cost of it.
Cass never talked about who resuscitated her or why, and I didn’t ask. She didn’t talk about why she belonged to a different clan than the one she had been born into, and I didn’t ask about that either.
A prostitute in her day couldn’t have afforded to pay a necromancer for the service. That meant a vamp had paid for it him—or her—self, had wanted Cass by their side for centuries longer than the decades granted to a human, and yet she lived alone.
I was curious, but I didn’t want to poke her tender spots any more than I wanted her to poke mine.
Under a longnecked overhead light, the newest of the engines gleamed ahead of us. Its paint, once the color of ripe tomatoes, had turned rusty as old blood over time. The music poured from a compact Bluetooth speaker propped on the left rear wheel. The range on the device connection couldn’t be far, maybe twenty feet or so. He must be within that radius.
A familiar series of hand gestures informed me of Cass’s intentions to circle the outer perimeter in case our heartbroken runaway got feisty on us.
Careful to keep several of the behemoth antiques between me and the speaker, I began my hunt in earnest.
A dozen steps later, the front of the engine came into full view, and I found our runner.
Used to blood and death, I didn’t lose my lunch, but I tasted it perched at the back of my throat.
Ron had been staked through the heart and groin with railroad spikes the killer left in him. Spread-eagle over the tracks, he stared up at the night sky. Or he would have, if his phone hadn’t been balanced over his eyes like a sleep mask.
Out of my depth, I held my position, waiting on Cass to circle back to me.
“Well, that was easy.” She didn’t bother crouching, a sure sign we were alone, and snapped on a pair of the blue nitrile gloves she was never without. Germs were everywhere, you know. “Let’s bag and tag him.”
“He’s dead.”
“For about the last six months judging by his current state of decomp.”
Baby vamps were still…juicy…when they died. Only the old ones turned to dust like in the movies. Whoever was responsible for this bit of theater knew that. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have bothered with the symbolic staking or the placement of the phone.
“Okay, smartass. I get he was a vampire, and therefore dead.” I pointed at my chest. “Hello, necromancer? I mean he’s dead-dead.” I reached for my phone. “True dead.”
“Please stop thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
“This was murder. A ritualistic killing.”
“This is a paycheck.” She rubbed her fingers together. “A big, fat paycheck.”
“Cass.”
“Addie.”
“Cass.”
“Addie.”
“Boaz is a sentinel,” I confessed, hating how his name popped right into my head. “An Elite.”
“If you called to tell him you found a dead vampire in a closed railroad museum, he would nail you to the wall, and I don’t mean in a fun way. He would pick and pick and pick at you until you confessed all.” She flung her arm toward Ron. “Do you really think he’ll want to introduce a vampire hunter fiancée?”
The creation of vampires was the Society’s bread and butter. They wouldn’t care that there was one less vampire in the world. That just made room for more. They would worry such a young vampire’s untimely true death might provoke his clan into demanding a refund. That, they would find abhorrent.
“I didn’t say I was going to call him.” I rubbed my palms over my face. “I don’t know why I mentioned it.”
“He’s posted in Savannah, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
Used to her flexible morals where bounty met the law, I scowled at her all the same.
“Here’s your problem,” she continued. “You’re feeling guilty because he thinks he’s buying Suzy Q Homemaker with his money, but you’re more like Buffy. I’m more of a Spike myself. Oh! Or maybe if Willow and Spike had a baby. That sounds more like me.”
“Bisexual badass. Gotcha.”
“Yes.” She toyed with the laces on her corset, exposing a hidden pocket with yet more gloves. “But I would have had to have been born during one of those alternate universe episode deals. Otherwise, you’d be changing my diapers, Buff. I can’t help you kick ass if I can’t even wipe my own, you know?”