A different, bright green moss had grown up the sides of the hut, turning it into a part of the bayou, and to the right she could see a hammock slung between two submerged trees with enough height to make it worthwhile. At any other time, she’d have climbed into that hammock and let out a sigh, happy to spend the afternoon watching the bayou water move slow and sinuous as a woman intent on seduction.

Right then, however, she’d been sorely tempted to shoot Janvier in the gut. “You made me traipse through the bayou for weeks,” she muttered now. “Then, right when I had you, you made nice with the angel you’d pissed off.” It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, either. “You knew how mad that made me—why did you keep doing it?”

Lifting their clasped hands, he pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “I was courting you.”

“Only someone with a twisted sense of humor would consider that a courtship.” Turned out she was one of those people, but damn if she hadn’t had fun when she didn’t want to kill him. “I was going to ask if that place is yours.”

“Yes. It is close to where I grew up.” She saw him train a single look at a street thief who’d been eyeing them, and suddenly, the curly-haired teen with spotty skin decided he had to be across the road. “It is a simple, quiet place. There is no rush there, non?”

“Yes.” She could imagine relaxing into the hammock with him, feeling all the cares of the world slide away. “Let’s go there . . . after this is over. After Felicity can rest.”

Eyes the shade of his homeland held hers, his accent evoking the lush, humid, haunting welcome of it as he said, “After Felicity can rest.”

They kept walking, going nowhere in particular, the air cold in their lungs and the sunshine bright from a winter blue sky. When Ashwini’s phone buzzed, she took it out with her free hand. “Guild confirmed her accounts have all been closed, and our contacts in banking say it appears she did it herself.”

“Her killer talked her into it,” Janvier said with absolute confidence. “Told her he’d take care of her, that if she loved him, she’d do as he asked.”

Ashwini could almost hear the bastard convincing Felicity to do just that. Except . . . “She kept her apartment as long as she could, didn’t give up her cat,” she said slowly. “I bet you she set up an account somewhere else.”

“Or,” Janvier said, “left money with someone she trusted.”

“No.” Ashwini shook her head. “He’d cut her off from her friends by that time. I’ll get the Guild cyber-geniuses to search across all possible banking institutions.”

She sent the message, but wasn’t hopeful they’d find anything that’d lead them to Felicity’s murderer—regardless of her attempts at maintaining her independence, it was clear the young woman had been almost totally dependent on her “lover” by the end. In all probability, she’d been imprisoned soon after she was last seen, giving her no chance to access any money she had managed to hide away.

“I’m going to quietly track down and talk to the servants who work in the houses of the angels and vampires who may be capable of such cruelty,” Janvier said, the strokable mahogany of his hair lifting in the breeze. “Often, they are aware of more than their masters know.”

It was a good idea. “I might be able to help with that. I generally come into contact with the younger vamps, and a lot of them are at the servant level.”

“We’ll make a list, start circulating.” He was quiet for a minute. “Cher, something Aaliyah said is gnawing at me.”

“About how the vamp ordered Felicity not to say anything about their being a couple until she had her ‘makeover’?” That had been niggling at her, a sharp barb in her gut.

“Yes, exactly. I don’t believe she was ever part of his official cattle, that he held that out as a lure—if she was good enough, pleased him enough, she’d become one of the chosen.” A punishing edge in every word. “In the interim, he must’ve arranged to meet her outside his usual haunts, where there would be little chance he’d be seen with her.”

The more Ashwini learned about the man who’d tortured and killed Felicity after suffocating her spirit, the more she hated him. “It puts all our suspects back in the pool.” And still there remained the question of how he was causing fatal injuries so eerily similar to the results of Lijuan’s feeding. “But the servant angle is still worth following—one may have noticed signs of a woman he or she never saw.”

Janvier shoved a hand through his hair. “I wish we didn’t have to tiptoe through this investigation. Someone had to have seen her with the bastard, if we could only ask!”

Even as he bit out the words, his eyes lingered on a giggling child who’d just tugged his mother to a window display, then took in a group of women clustered around a nearby café table, heads bent in laughing secrecy. “But to give Felicity justice, we would have to rip open the wounds of a city that has barely stopped bleeding.”

Ashwini had no answers, torn between the same competing forces.

•   •   •

Eight hours later, keeping the details of Felicity’s death under wraps was no longer an issue.

•   •   •

Having split from Janvier earlier to follow through with their plan of speaking to those who staffed the homes of the powerful and wealthy and cruel, Ashwini ran into the intensive care section of the hospital to find he’d beaten her there.

“Where is she?” It came out a gasp, her heart pumping; she’d received the call while at Guild HQ, giving Sara a progress report, had decided to leg it rather than try to negotiate the heavy traffic in a cab.

“In a room down the hall.” Janvier’s jacket was open over his black T-shirt, his scarf missing. “This way.”

She fell into step with him. “Have you spoken to her?”

A shake of his head. “The physicians are with her. I think she’ll react better to a woman, in any case.”

Painfully conscious of what Janvier didn’t say—the torture the woman may have suffered at male hands—Ashwini met the gaze of the angel who stood guard beside the closed door at the end of the hall, wings of silver-blue pressed against the wall. “You brought her here?”

“Yes,” Illium said, his golden eyes colder than she’d ever seen them. “She ran out of Central Park, na**d and screaming, collapsed on the street.”

“Jesus.” Ashwini thought of the bitter cold, the ice. “Hypothermia?”

“A hint of frostbite—I picked her up almost as soon as she was spotted.”

Which meant she’d been dropped off somewhere nearby, abandoned close enough to traffic to get herself help and attention. Not, Ashwini thought, for her good, but because the sadistic monster behind this wanted it to be front-page news. It was eight now, so the victim had run out during the busy time when people were leaving work or heading out to dinner.

“The tracks circled back to another street entrance,” Janvier said, answering the question she’d been about to ask.

“Of course they did,” she muttered. “Security cameras?”

“I alerted the Tower and Guild teams to go through any feeds they could find,” Janvier said. “So far, nothing.”

Ashwini girded her stomach. “How bad?”

Illium had parted his lips to answer when the door was pulled open from the inside and a tall, thin vampire with sandy brown hair, and aristocratic features in a pale-skinned face stepped out. He was wearing green scrubs, held a chart in one hand. “She’s lost over half the blood in her body,” he said, shoving a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on its ends. “However, that doesn’t explain her appearance. I’ve never seen its like and I’ve been a physician for lifetimes.”

Ashwini could feel the vampire’s age pressing against her skin, knew he had to be at least seven hundred years old. “Is there anything you can tell us?”

“Nothing useful.”

Another doctor stepped out then, a mortal woman, her hair a silver cap vivid against the deep brown of her skin. “The poor girl.” Pressing the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger, she met each of their intent looks in turn. “One of you can go in, but we had to sedate her to get her to stop screaming, so I’m not sure how much sense you’ll get out of her.”

Janvier and Illium stayed outside while Ashwini went in. Closing the door behind her with a quiet snick and steeling herself for what she might see, she faced the bed. They’d put the victim in a private room with a sprawling view of the field of fallen stars that was the night-draped city. The woman on the bed, however, wasn’t concerned with the scenery.

She lay flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling with dull brown eyes that were sharply slanted. Paired with the knife-edge cheekbones that now pushed painfully against her skin, those eyes would’ve given her a feline kind of beauty once, stunning and sensual. Her only flaw, for those who would see it that way, was the birthmark that covered the left side of her face and part of her neck, the color dark as port wine.

Once again, the killer had chosen a woman who may well have been vulnerable, a target wounded by the world until she’d been willing to overlook the danger signs in hope of love and safety.

Her face had shrunken in on itself, the majority of her skin a papery white that appeared leathery from a distance; Ashwini was certain that was an illusion, that it would prove as thin and brittle as Felicity’s. The woman’s fingernails were cracked and broken, her frame emaciated, and her black hair so thin, it felt as if a touch would turn it to dust.

A bandage covered her throat, the flesh below no doubt torn and ripped.

When Ashwini gently lifted the sheet, she saw bruises and bite marks on every inch of skin exposed by the thin hospital gown. That, however, was where the resemblance to Felicity ended. Where Felicity had been a mummified husk, this woman still had some blood in her body, some flesh on her bones. As if she’d escaped before the process was complete.

Ashwini was certain she’d been released on purpose.

Replacing the sheet, careful not to nudge the IV lines that dripped into the woman, she said, “I’m Ash. My job is to find out who did this to you. Help me.”

No response.

Not about to give up, she grabbed a chair from the corner and took a seat beside the bed. Then she started talking about Felicity, about what they’d found so far. “This,” she said at the end, “what the bastard’s done to you, what he did to Felicity, it isn’t right and it needs to be stopped.”

Nothing.

Ashwini wasn’t even sure the victim had blinked the entire time she’d been talking. Accepting that perhaps the woman simply couldn’t reply, that she’d been broken on too deep a level, Ashwini rose to her feet and put the chair back where it had been. However, when she would’ve left the room, something made her turn back.

No change, not even a whisper, and yet . . .

She returned to the bed, stared at the hand that lay so fragile and emaciated inches from her. It hadn’t been visible when she’d replaced the sheet. “Speak to me,” Ashwini whispered, but the woman continued to stare up at the ceiling.

Yet her hand, it lay in front of Ashwini like an invitation.

Throat working and skin hot, she flexed and unflexed her own hand. Her instincts screamed that she had permission, that the woman trapped in that shell of a body was crying out to her on a frequency no one else could hear. Still, she hesitated. This wouldn’t be like with old and wise Keir, or with the young and teary-eyed teenager who’d discovered Felicity’s body.

Whoever this woman had once been, she’d carry horror in her veins now.

Ashwini had never told Honor, never would, but after Honor’s abduction, there’d been so many screams in her body that the noise had been deafening, a howling terror that swamped Ashwini. She’d thrown up from the pummeling force of it more than once, but she’d sat with Honor at the hospital night after night regardless, her hand locked tight with her best friend’s.

Honor had survived that vile darkness, had needed Ashwini to be strong enough to fight its echoes, be at her side.

As this woman did now.

“I’m here,” Ashwini said . . . and touched her fingertips to the back of the victim’s hand.

33

The contact was a bruising punch to the stomach delivered by a fist of cold iron, one that knocked the breath right out of her. Then came the nausea, tied to an overwhelming and dread-laced panic that made her want to curl up into a ball in the corner and rock herself to oblivion. Breaking the contact, she braced her hands on the bed and sucked in desperate gulps of air.

“Cher.”

She’d sensed Janvier walk inside, didn’t startle at his worried tone. “I don’t know how to do this.” It came out like broken glass, rough and jagged. “I don’t know how to get past her terror.”

Moving in so close that his body heat licked over her skin, Janvier picked up one of her hands and lifted it to his mouth in the way that had so quickly become familiar. The kiss was soft, a lazy seduction, and it had nothing to do with the ugliness that had consumed their victim. The gentle pleasure of it made the nausea retreat, her heart rate calm.

Lifting their clasped hands, she rubbed her cheek against the back of his hand.

“What if I stay?” he asked. “Will the touch anchor you?”

“I don’t know.” This was uncharted territory. “All my life, I’ve tried to minimize this, what I can do. Very rarely, I sense good things, but too many times, it’s cruelty and evil. So I don’t look, don’t want to look.”