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After Lash had left him in that other basement, he’d dragged himself out and found the car, then gone back to Mickey’s apartment to take care of the dead woman on the chair. After releasing her from her binds, he’d wrapped her in his cousin’s comforter and cradled her in his arms like she was just really sick and needed a doctor.
Except there had been no explanation to nosy humans required. The back stairs had been empty and he’d sat the body up in the front seat of Mickey’s beater, belting her in. With grim resolve, he’d driven out to the sticks and dumped her in the old quarry.
As the splash resounded and her bloated body floated to the surface, she had stared up at him as he’d stood on the lip of the thirty-foot drop.
She’d called him stupid for not weighing her down.
“I want you to be found,” he’d shouted at her. “Your husband’s gotta know.”
It had been as he’d turned around and walked back into the forest—once again heading out to the car he’d parked on the side of a country road—that the pieces had started to fall together. And the fight last night was the key to everything coming together.
Uncle’s favorite enforcer was a vampire.
Nathaniel was the enemy.
The signs had been there all along, Evan just hadn’t noticed them, because who screened members of Uncle’s inner circle for being another fucking species? Especially when you didn’t even know there was one threaded throughout the shadows of the human world.
But the clues were so obvious now: The enforcer had never been seen during the daytime—not unusual, given his line of work, but he’d even failed to show at a couple of the family’s funerals. Stupid move, if he wanted to advance. He’d also rarely left Caldwell—and if he did, it was only to NYC or Boston—something that suggested he had other business in the zip code… or couldn’t be exposed to daylight during travel. He was capable of things no one else had ever gotten away with. A one hundred percent success rate over a decade? Never a police investigation, never in the news, not one complication with a human?
No girlfriends or wives. No associates. Never hung out with the others.
No ambition, either. He just wanted to kill.
On balance, what were the chances a human acted like that? None. There were a hundred people in the organization and nobody was like that bastard.
But now that he knew for sure vampires existed, and he’d seen them in action… what were the chances one had infiltrated Uncle’s ranks and was just looking for targets like he was practicing at a range—
Evan stopped, and looked around.
What was that buzzing sound…?
“Just a fly,” he muttered as he kept going.
When he got to the end of the tunnel, he entered the code that he still didn’t consciously know on the pad, and emerged into the shitty apartment.
He was greeted by a gun in his face.
Man, that woman was looking rough. The head wound he’d given her was still festering, but there were other holes in her now, including one at the side of her neck that seemed like it should be fatal. If she were alive in the first place.
“Where the fuck you go,” she snapped.
There was black oil all over the floor, hers—and from the bedroom behind, two other females appeared. Both were sporting injuries, too, just not as dire, and he recognized the one on the left from the night before. He’d seen her in the middle of all the fighting.
“I’m here to deliver on my promise,” he said.
Those strangely colored eyes narrowed on him and before the woman he’d stolen from could speak, he glanced at the pair in the doorway.
“I have a vampire for you.” And he didn’t care who killed it. “No one knows where he lives but me. He’s been in the human world, that’s how I ran into him, and I didn’t guess what he was back then. I’m sure now, though. I can deliver a kill to you that will get the master’s attention—and that’s what you want, right. When you go to those meetings and you stand in the crowd, you picture yourself more important than you are now. And how does that happen? You prove yourself.”
It was the Mickey syndrome. They were all just like his cousin—and he certainly wasn’t going to bring up how Mickey had ended up.
Not that he cared what happened to these three. As long as he could bring Nathaniel’s body to Uncle—and then kill that old bastard himself, that was all that mattered.
That gun slowly lowered. “Tell me more,” the woman growled.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Nalla felt lighter as she re-formed next to Nate’s log cabin, her corporeal body floating like snow falling when the flakes were big and happy and there was no wind, just spin, spin, spin. In fact, she all but skipped to the front door—and there her male was, opening things up, holding his arms out.
