AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Kade, please," she said gently. "Let me see you as you really are." Slowly, he lifted his face. His dark lashes flicked up, and Alex was stunned by a blast of ember-bright color that glowed like lit coals. And in the center of all that fire, his pupils had narrowed to catlike slits. It startled her, the strangeness of his gaze, the way it transformed his face, sharpening the angles of his high cheekbones and squared jaw. She stared, robbed of words. All but robbed of breath.>"Evening, Ida," Zach said pleasantly as she scowled at him.
"What do you want?" She crossed her arms over her breasts, tugging at the edges of her old housecoat. "You come to tell me he's in trouble again?"
"No, ma'am."
She grunted. "He dead?"
"No, ma'am. Nothing like that." He cocked his head. "Why would you think that?"
"Wouldn't surprise me, is all. I heard what happened to Big Dave and Lanny Ham today." At Zach's grim nod, she huffed out a breath and shrugged. "Never did care much for either one of them, tell you the truth."
"Yes, well," Zach replied idly. He cleared his throat, adopting his cop voice, the one that Jenna said made him sound like a self-righteous prick. All he knew was, it generally got results. "I actually came by to talk to Stanley."
The fact that he'd used her son's given name and not the nickname that all the rest of Harmony had called him from the time he was a skinny, snot-nosed kid made Ida Arnold's scowl burrow a bit deeper on her forehead.
"Is he here, ma'am?"
"No, he ain't. Haven't seen hide nor hair since early this morning."
"He hasn't called or anything to let you know where he might be, ma'am?" She barked out a cutting laugh. "He don't tell me nothin', just like his no-good father before him. Thinks I'm blind and dumb, that boy," she muttered. "I know what he's up to, though."
"Oh? And what's that, Ida?" Zach asked carefully, narrowing his eyes under the glare of the overhead light as he watched the old woman's expression harden.
"He's dealing again, drugs, for sure. My guess is he's also bootlegging to some of the dry Native settlements up-river."
Zach felt his brows rise, even as his gut clenched into a tight ball. "What makes you suspect Skeet-Stanley--is involved in something like that?" She tapped the center of her chest with her finger. "I raised him, for better or worse. I don't need proof to know when he's up to no good. I'm not sure what he's gotten himself into lately, but he's starting to scare me. I think he has it in him to hurt me one day. In fact, after the way he treated me when he was here last, I don't doubt it for a second. Never seen him act so nasty and arrogant. Acted like he suddenly grew a pair of balls."
Zach cleared his throat at the woman's crudeness. "This was yesterday, you said?" She nodded. "He came home looking like something the cat dragged in. When I said something about it, he grabbed me by the throat. I tell you, I thought he was going to kill me right then and there. But he just mumbled that he had work to do, then went inside his room and closed the door. That's the last he was home, far as I know. Part of me hopes he never comes back, the way he treats me. Part of me wishes he would just ... go away. To prison, if that's where he belongs."
Zach stared at her, realizing that her fear and dislike of her own son could work to his advantage here. "When he was here at the house last, did he say what kind of work he was doing?"
"He didn't say, but that boy's never done an honest day's work in his life. You wanna have a look inside his apartment? It's a damn pigsty, but if it's proof you need--"
"Can't do that," Zach said, even though right now he wanted nothing more. "From a law enforcement standpoint, I can't search his residence. That would require a lot of paperwork and procedures." The rounded bulk of her shoulders slumped a bit. "I see--"
"However," Zach added helpfully, "seeing how I've known you folks for the past decade or so since I've lived in Harmony, I suppose if you asked me as a personal favor to come in and have a look around-unofficially, as it were--then I would not be opposed." She peered at him for a long moment, then stepped back from the door and motioned him inside. "It's this way, down the hall. He'll have locked the door, but I keep a spare key tucked behind the baseboard." Ida Arnold ambled down to her son's door, retrieved the tarnished brass key from its hiding place, then unlocked and opened the door for Zach.
"I'll be just a few minutes," he said, dismissing her with both his tone and his unblinking academytrained stare. "Thank you, Ida." Once she had shuffled back up the hallway, Zach walked into Skeeter's dump of an apartment and began a swift, thorough search of the place. Empty food wrappers, bottles, and other trash littered the floor and nearly every flat surface. And there--surprise--on the counter next to an old police radio, a roll of twenty-dollar bills, secured with a rubber band.
It didn't seem like Skeeter to leave his money lying around. Didn't seem like him to leave his cell phone behind, either, but there it was, jammed into the seat of a tattered light blue recliner. Guess that explained the ignored calls and texts, although it hardly excused Skeeter for being an asshole out at Pete's the this morning.
Zach grabbed the cash and counted it out: fifteen bills. Not the five hundred bucks Skeeter owed him, but he'd gladly take what he could get.
Hell, he'd take the cell phone, too.
If it didn't give him any insight into Skeeter's recent activities or his apparent newfound business associates, then Zach would pawn the damned thing next time he went to Fairbanks to pick up new product from his connections in the city. Skeeter Arnold owed him, and one way or another, Zach intended to collect what he was due.
Chapter Twenty
Alex sat on the sofa in her living room, sharing a piece of buttered toast with Luna, both of them watching Kade walk a repeated track from the kitchen and down the hallway as he spoke on satellite phone to Boston.
In the time since they'd been back to her house, he'd brought her up to speed on a few more things about himself and the work he'd been sent to do in Alaska. Her mind was still reeling over the fact that he wasn't precisely human. Now she understood that he was also part of a group of Breed males pledged to maintain peace between their race and humankind. From the way he described it, the Order sounded almost military, which made some kind of sense to her when she looked at Kade and observed his dark combination of lethal strength and laser-sharp confidence.
And despite the danger that rolled off him in waves, especially what she'd witnessed today, Kade was gentle with her, protective. As shaken as she was by all she had seen and heard in the past few hours--the past few days--she felt secure with him.
Even when he'd gone on to explain the worst of the threats that faced him and the warriors of the Order.
He had told her about the enemy the Order was doggedly pursuing and committed to destroying, a second-generation Breed male called Dragos. Alex had listened in quiet but horrified comprehension as Kade had described the many evils Dragos had perpetrated, not the least of which being the mass abduction and abuse of an unknown number of women like her--Breedmates, tracked down and collected over a period of decades to be used as vessels for the personal army of assassins Dragos had bred. What truly gave her pause, and what made her blood run cold in her veins, was one final truth that Kade revealed to her tonight. The fact that a creature not of this world--a creature far worse than the bloodaddicted Rogues who'd killed her mom and Richie--was somehow loose in the Alaskan interior. Even Kade was grim when he spoke of the Ancient to his friends at the Order's Boston compound, describing to them the damaged freight container and the presence of vampires and Minion workers at the old mining company location. Although he kept his voice low, it was impossible for Alex to miss the fact that he and his brethren were preparing for battle against the new threat.
