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But his work wasn’t done. He sped up, heels jabbing the hardwood, and crunched through the remainder of the vase in the hall.
Outside, the cool, rainy air was a balm to his burning cheeks. He made it to the Cadillac, dropped into the driver’s seat, and was gone before she could come out in her yard and start yelling. Not that he thought she would—Mrs. King wasn’t the type.
But if she did come out, he wasn’t sure his resolve would hold. There was a suspicious blurring in his eyes, and Rookwood wasn’t sure how much more he could hate what he was about to do—or himself.
The house crouched, one window glowing gold. Someone was up late, probably sitting in the kitchen. He didn’t get close enough to look.
Rain flirted down, kissed the leaves of trees planted when this housing development was put in. It touched the wide sidewalks, drenched the thirsty lawns, dripped from eaves, and gurgled in gutters. There was no drone of traffic as there was in the city, just the sea-sound of the city in the distance and the occasional rolling breaker of tires on wet asphalt closer.
The rain didn’t matter. He stood or crouched easily, moving only enough to keep himself flexible. The night breathed, full of damp dreaming.
The neighbors had both had dinner. Someone brought garbage out across the street behind him. But the widow’s house stood, closed and self-contained as the woman herself.
Rookwood waited. She’d come home before dusk, in a silver SUV, and didn’t open the garage but carried plastic and paper bags inside with her shoulders up, hurrying. Since then, just the light in the kitchen, mocking the gathering and fallen night.
Lights turned off in the houses around hers. A dog yapped a few yards away until someone yelled, “Max, get in here!” A series of happy yips, then a door closing and more silence.
The neighborhood prepared itself for sleep. Rookwood lifted the flask to his mouth, took another swallow of the red stuff. The problem wasn’t with it being cold or the flat copper tang to it.
The problem was how good this pale substitute tasted. And how good he could imagine it coming straight from the vein.
His nape tickled. He eased farther back into the shadows, melding with them, his pulse and breathing smoothing out into an imperceptible hum under the ambient nighttime noise. Quiet as a mole in a hole.
It had taken him two months to get his pulse under control. It was worth the work.
The widow’s house was like a sore tooth. His gaze kept drifting across it. What was she doing in there? What had she brought home? Had she made any phone calls?
> Do your job, Rookwood. He was barely breathing under the dripping fringes of some kind of evergreen. He almost stopped blinking, his pulse struggling with the iron grip of training, instinct whispering that it would be soon, very soon.
He still almost missed it. A shadow flitted over the roof, a quick, lizardlike movement. A faint tinkle of glass breaking, almost lost under the rush of rain, half swallowed by the cloak of fetid silence suddenly drawn choking close around the white walls and green shutters.
He moved. Slippery, squishing grass underfoot, getting up a good head of speed. Spatters of rain broke against his face. The UV in one hand, its light stuttering on as his thumb flicked, the gun in the other, he streaked for the French doors with only a slight squelching sound betraying his position.
And hit, hard, the glass shivering away in fragments and long swords. The noise was incredible, a crashing through the silence the Thing had pulled close around the entire house, and he saw the short white blond hair, the blue eyes, the expensive business suit, in flashes before Rookwood’s gun spoke and Chisholm’s arm flicked, throwing Amelia King across the kitchen and into the wall as though she weighed less than nothing. She slid down the wall in a queer boneless way, leaving a huge dent behind, and the hot red fury bubbled up under Rookwood’s skin.
The Thirst screamed as he hit the Thing with a bone-crunching thud. Fell, his head clipping the tiled counter, and the gun tracked the Thing as it loomed over him, snarling. Five bullets, their sound blurring into and over one another. The UV slashed across Chisholm’s face. Smoke burst free.
He looked again into the face of the Thing that had made him, and its mad blue gaze dug into the inside of his skull. It bent down, its snarl ripping across violated air, and he saw a thick, broken wooden dowel protruding from its chest.
I didn’t do that. Confusion fought with the Thirst, and instinct jerked his hand with the UV up again. Smoke boiled through the kitchen, bubbling black flesh rising. At night, when they dropped their shield of humanity, the light hurt them. During the day, they never dropped that mask. Maybe it was a survival mechanism—
“I wondered what happened to you.” Chisholm’s voice, a rich baritone. He reached up, plucked the wood from his flesh with clawed fingers. The mask of humanity was back over the face of the Thing that glutted itself on suffering, and if not for the stripes of bubbling black tissue across his chiseled features, you wouldn’t guess he was a terror as ancient as darkness itself. “Baited a little trap, did we, Rook?” Chisholm dropped the sharpened dowel. It clattered on the floor.
Rookwood raised the gun, the Thirst screaming inside his veins. Kill kill kill! it yelled, pushed, screeched. Kill it, kill it now!
“How’s Fann?” he croaked through a dry-burning throat. “Legs grown back yet?”
Amelia King moaned shapelessly. Rookwood forced himself to stare up at Chisholm. Steady. Pick your shot. Four bullets left. Didn’t hit him, worse fucking luck.
“Your ridiculous little crusade.” Chisholm sighed. He was popular in a courtroom, in a nightclub, with the ladies. Courtly, even.
But the ones who wouldn’t be missed knew what he really was. The trouble was, they didn’t know until too late—and they couldn’t tell anyone from beyond the grave.
Nobody except Rookwood.
Rookwood’s hand tightened. Chisholm smiled. It was a gentle, paternal smile, the fangs curving down to dimple his chin, the black-charred stripe across his face tingeing with red at the edges as it healed. Fann was the oldest, Briggs was the most adept at using people—but Chisholm was the most dangerous. And now Rookwood had him right in his sights.
“It’s not too late to belong to the night, Jeremy.” Again that soft, paternal tone. Patient. Loving. “All can be forgiven. I marked you because you’re one of us, deep down. You know it.”
