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He leaned back and closed his eyes. Time passed. The wind howled through the night, an eerie, almost forlorn cry. Evil enjoyed nights like this, he thought. Yet the night remained free of evil’s taint, and he drifted off to sleep.
The phone vibrating against his side woke him some hours later.
He looked around quickly. Everything was as it should be, and Kirby was still curled up asleep in the bed. Lucky, he thought, and scrubbed a hand across his eyes. Maybe jet lag was finally catching up with him. He dug out his phone and answered it.
“Hey, shapeshifter, didn’t wake you, did I?” Delight ran through Camille’s sharp voice.
“No, just sitting here watching the sunrise.” He bit back his yawn and glanced at the clock. It was barely five.
Camille chuckled. “You never were a very good liar. How’s Kirby?”
He glanced across at her. She hadn’t shifted any, but she was no longer asleep. Odd how attuned he was to her. “Awake and listening.”
She flipped the covers away from her face at his words and regarded him warily. Still not trusting him, despite everything.
“I paid a visit to her friend’s remains last night,” Camille said.
“Russ told me you were going to do that. What did you find?”
Camille sniffed. “What I found surprised the hell out of me.”
Doyle raised his eyebrows. It had to be bad if Camille was surprised. She’d been around long enough to see the worst this world could offer. “What?”
“Helen Smith died before the manarei got to her. She killed herself.”
“She what?” Suicide was an unusual step for a witch to take. Most witches believed that if you took your own life, you prevented your soul from moving on, dooming it to roam the confines of Earth for time eternal. “Why would she do something like that?”
“I’m not really sure. I didn’t have enough time to do a full reading on her remains, but I suspect she performed a spell of some sort. Her magic was gone, Doyle, but it wasn’t ripped from her.”
“But if she was able to get rid of her powers, why kill herself?”
“Better a self-inflicted death than being torn apart by the manarei.”
True. The bastards liked their prey alive and wriggling, so they tended to work from the bottom up—ripping off toes and fingers before getting to the limbs. Shock and death would be a welcome relief in that sort of situation. “You heard back from Russ yet?”
“Not yet.”
Doyle frowned. It wasn’t like Russ not to report in. “You tried calling him?”
“Yeah, but there was no answer.”
“If you don’t hear from him by six, give me a call.” Russ was still young in vampire years—forty, to be exact—and his immunity to sunlight was almost nonexistent. If it got much later than seven, he’d be in trouble.
“Will do. In the meantime, I want you to be careful. I can see some pretty bad shit headed your way in the next few hours, especially now that our killer has had time to regain some strength.”
“Thanks. I needed to know that.”
She snorted. “Better to be prepared, my boy.”
“Yeah, right.” He glanced across at Kirby as she sat up. Though she had the sheet pulled up around her, he could see the outline of her body quite clearly. He’d thought last night that she was little more than skin and bone. He was wrong. He cleared his throat slightly and looked away.
“Are you listening to me, Doyle?”
“You were talking?”
“To myself, apparently. Are you planning to hole up in that motel?”
“No. We’ll be harder targets to hit if we keep moving. Besides, I told Russ I’d check out the whereabouts of the next woman on your list.”
