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But Rafe felt an obligation with the ability he’d been given.
It wasn’t as if he never got laid. He was male and he also had a warrior’s blood in his Breed veins. He had all the female company he wanted; he just preferred to be selective—with his bed partners and his blood Hosts, both of which he drew exclusively from the human population.
He slanted a flat look at Aric. “You want to keep lecturing me for a while, or are you ready to get to work?”
He turned onto a quiet road leading away from the Finglas city center. Rows of small, nearly identical red-brick duplexes and townhomes lined one side of the lumpy asphalt. On the other side of the darkened residential road, an overgrown spread of grass that might have passed for a park at one time spanned several blocks.
“This is the street Gideon gave us?”
Rafe nodded. “This is it.”
Aric’s brows rose. “Not exactly the kind of posh address I’d expect for one of Crowe’s women. If she was sleeping with him, she should’ve demanded a raise.”
“Maybe it’s modest for a reason. If not for Gideon tracking her down, we probably never would’ve thought to look in a nondescript neighborhood like this for Crowe or anyone he associated with.”
“Hide in plain sight,” Aric said. “Crowe wouldn’t be the first Atlantean to pull that stunt.”
Rafe nodded, checking house numbers as the SUV rolled past one tiny cracker box after another on the narrow residential street. “Guess she’s not hiding in plain sight anymore. Here we are.”
Aric stared out the passenger side window at the tidy little apartment building that sat quiet and dark at the end of a short slab of cracked concrete. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s home.”
Rafe peered closer and shook his head. “She’s home. There’s a light on in the back, first floor. Come on. Let’s go say hello to Miss Lynch.”
Killing the headlights and engine, Rafe stepped out of the vehicle. As soon as his boots hit the pavement, his senses went tight with alarm.
“Jesus Christ.”
Aric swung a tense look at him. “You smell it too?”
Rafe nodded, his fangs prickling in his gums.
Blood.
Human blood. A fucking river of it, based on the way the stench was hitting his nose.
They rushed the house on silent feet, Rafe motioning Aric to round the place to the back while he took the front. Aric was gone in an instant, vanishing into the shadows.
Rafe touched the latch on the front door and found it unlocked. No signs of forced entry, but there was no mistaking that something bad had occurred inside. He stepped in, nearly overpowered by the olfactory punch that slammed into him as he entered Iona Lynch’s home.
The place was silent. As soundless as a tomb.
“Hello?” he called into the darkness, unsurprised to receive no reply.
He crept through the small foyer and past a neatly furnished little living room. Despite the stench of bloodshed filling his nose and making his irises burn with amber heat, he didn’t see evidence of a struggle until he stepped toward the galley kitchen in the back of the house.
Then, the impact of what had taken place here—very recently, from the look of it—shook him to the bone. He drew up short, his boots halted in a pool of fresh blood.
Aric had just entered the kitchen from the back door now too, and his low curse echoed Rafe’s thoughts. “Holy hell.”
A young blonde woman lay crumpled and deadly still in the center of the blood-soaked kitchen tiles, a lethal gash at her throat. There was no question she was dead. She’d been cut so savagely, the wound had nearly decapitated her.
“Jesus Christ,” Aric murmured woodenly. “Guess we weren’t the only ones looking for Iona Lynch.”
Rafe clamped his teeth and fangs together on a ripe curse as he strode through the slick lake of spilled blood to reach the woman. He was fucking up a crime scene, but if there was any chance he could revive her, he had to try. Not only because it was the right thing to do, but because Iona Lynch was the Order’s best lead on Crowe and his Opus associates. They couldn’t afford to lose her.
Kneeling down in the mess, he gingerly rolled her onto her back and touched the hideous wound at her throat. She had no pulse, no breath. Her skin was cool and waxy beneath his fingertips. There was nothing for him to work with, nothing for his ability to latch on to and draw toward healing.
“Shit.” He glanced up at Aric and grimly shook his head. “I can’t help her. She’s too far gone by several minutes, at least. Goddamn it, we’re too fucking late.”
