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“Forget it,” he said shortly. “You said you wanted to tell me something?”
I had been pacing back and forth with increasing agitation throughout our previous exchange. Now I took a seat, hoping this would set a more professional mood, if at all possible following my outburst.
I cleared my throat. I knew that Storm was not going to like what I had to say. “I went to visit Steffane Ronin in prison yesterday.”
“You what?” He looked a bit stunned as if he thought I was making an unpleasant joke.
Before he had a chance to recover I told the rest of the story quickly, filling him in on all the details except the part about Ronin telling me that he sensed we were dark creatures alike. I didn’t need Storm to know about that.
When I was finishedSstorm’s face was thunderous. “Aside from the fact that you went to visit Steffane Ronin when I specifically told you to leave this case alone, putting yourself in danger—”
“I was careful,” I interjected, flushing slightly at my lie. The hell had I been careful. I had forgotten immediately to never look a vampire in the eye. Not that it had mattered in the end. Put it could have gone seriously wrong. My throat under his fangs wrong. Willing letting him drain me dry wrong. I doubt he’d had fresh blood in six years. He might have done it, unable to help himself. It was not like they could punish him worse than they already were.
“Let me tell you in clear terms. This. Case. Is. Closed.” His words were clipped and harsh. “I did not hire you to re-open shut cases. We tolerate vampires in London only so long as they never kill. They can take as many blood-slaves as they like so long as they are willing and kept healthy. There is nothing we can do about willing victims who are of age, even if they are under the mesmeric influence. But the second they kill a human we lock them up and throw away the key. That is how it works.”
“What if he never killed her? Her body went missing before an autopsy could be done. Wasn’t that weird?”
“She was in a sealed room with Ronin. And the girl’s aunt testified that the girl had been terrified that Ronin wanted to claim her as one of his sheep. That was pretty much all that the jury needed to hear.”
“Leonie,” I said. “Her name was Leonie.”
“I know,” he said through gritted teeth. “I saw her. It wasn’t easy to forget.”
“You said you worked this case. Did you have any doubts?”
The briefest expression of something flashed across Storm’s face. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I it was not quite doubt. He said, “Steffane Ronin was in his sealed crypt bedroom with the murder victim. The door was made of stone and a foot thick. Nobody could have got into there once he had locked it from the inside. The walls were several feet thick and there were no windows. There was nobody in the room but him and the deceased. There is no way anyone else did it.”
“Then why do I feel like he is telling the truth?”
“So this is just a feeling of yours? Not an actual vision?” Storm looked even more frustrated.
“Does it matter? What harm is there in me looking into it? If it is true then we can free him and he will tell us who DCK is. If he was lying at least it looks like we tried to help him and maybe he will still give us some useful information. It is a win-win!”
Storm rubbed his forehead with one hand. “He is playing you. I don't know why. Maybe it is just boredom. Six years is a long time to be locked away, even for a vampire.”
“Then how did he know about DCK killing my mother? Only you, Remi, Leo and Monroe know that Madga was my mother.”
Even saying those words out loud twisted me up a little inside. It was hard to acknowledge out loud that Magda had been my mother. I never got the chance to know her. DCK took her from me in the most brutal way possible and left her corpse for me to find. The bastard. Every time I thought of this I wanted to kill him. I wanted to strangle him with my bare hands. I wanted to do to him what he did to her. Wanted him to feel the pain and the god-awful fear of being at the mercy of a monster.
“And the chief,” I added. “He knows too. Are you saying that any of them would have told someone?”
“No,” he said immediately. “They would never do that.”
“I agree,” I said. “They would never do that, so how did Ronin know?”
Everyone who knew that Magda was my mother had feared for my safety. They thought that DCK would come for me too because it would amuse him to kill mother and daughter. Because he was a monster who liked to play sordid games. I knew better.
Before she had died, Magda had warned me that my navelstone — Godstone, she had called it — was too powerful to fall into the wrong hands. She had been convinced that DCK had been hunting me so that he could get his hands on the stone. I couldn’t imagine why. All I knew about the stone was that it had the power to heal me overnight when I was injured. And recently it seemed to vibrate whenever the urge to kill got too strong inside me. But that was not enough reason for DCK to search the Earth for me like Magda had thought, was it?
Magda had thought the stone could be used as a force for good. I have no idea why she thought that. Sometimes I wondered if the urge to kill that overcame me, making me feel like an addict in need of a fix, was emanating from the stone. As time went by the need for a fix was increasingly becoming an obsession. I needed it bad. And that was why I needed to find DCK before I went out of control and killed someone I shouldn’t. I needed to deal with him. And maybe after that the stone would calm the heck down and give me some peace.
If Storm could hear my thoughts he really would think I was crazy. Thinking that my weird navelstone had desires and feelings of its own. Thinking that it was the reason I wanted to kill something or someone.
“We don’t know how Ronin knew, but we can try to find out,” Storm said reassuringly.
“C’mon!” I chided him. “Ronin must have found out that Magda was my mother directly from DCK himself. It would make sense that a serial killing maniac like DCK might be friends with a dhampir like Ronin. Ronin was rich, powerful and had a fabulous life. Probably just the sort of guy that DCK would befriend. Even a monster must have friends.”
