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“We’re talking now,” she said, but no way was he giving in to a woman. Not even Gunnolf’s woman.
“No we ain’t. You come to the—”
“Nooooooooooo!”
The cry echoed off the stone walls, and Hasik shoved past Caris, searching for the source. He found it in Whitey, the vamp with the red eyes who’d been sucking on a flowing red tube. Apparently Whitey wasn’t enjoying his lunch. The albino bastard jerked out of his chair, ripping the tube from the wall.
“Fuck this shit! Fuck this goddamn plastic shit. They got humans back there. Bleeding for us. I want to taste them, dammit. I want to taste the life. This is bullshit. Fucking bullshit!”
He lashed out, knocking the girl next to him to the ground, then crouching over her as the two kids Hasik had noticed earlier looked on with horror. “You full up, bitch? You full up with blood? How do you stand it? How the fuck do you stand it?”
Something light and fast whipped past Hasik, and it wasn’t until she had Whitey down on the ground seconds later, a lethal-looking blade to his neck, that Hasik realized the something was Caris, moving faster than he’d ever seen a vamp move. Whitey struggled beneath her, but she held him with ease. “Back off,” she said. “Back off right now.”
“I can’t take it.” His face contorted with pain. “How do you take it?”
Caris kept her knife on his neck, then leaned in close. She turned her head slightly, so that she was speaking to Whitey, but looking at Hasik. “You do,” she said. “You just do.”
* * *
“You can go in now,” Martella told Sara, who had been hovering around the director’s door, waiting for him to end a call.
“Thanks,” she said, then drew in a breath and pushed open the door.
“Sara. How was your first day?”
“Wonderful. Strange. Eye-opening.”
“That sounds about right.” He gestured to a chair. “What did you want to see me about?”
“The Shadow Alliance, sir. You mentioned it in the interview with Dragos. But it’s not something I’m familiar with. It sounded like a vigilante organization, and if that’s the case—”
“It’s not. Well, not exactly.”
She shook her head, not understanding.
“The Shadow Alliance is a governing body populated by the leaders of the most powerful groups of Shadow creatures,” Leviathan began. “Vampires, Therians, Demons, and the like. A parallel in your world might be the various countries and their governments, each overseeing a specific population.”
“Okay,” she said. “And Dragos works for the Alliance?”
His smile was almost amused. “Lucius Dragos works only for himself.”
She thought of all those cases Leviathan had rattled off and could come to only one reasonable conclusion: Luke was a hired killer. An assassin. And from what she’d seen and read, he was damn good at his work. “No one has ever been able to make a charge stick?”
“Luke is extremely clever,” Leviathan said, with an admiration that seemed almost affectionate. “He has powerful friends, both in and out of the Alliance. And as we both know, that kind of power can all too often result in a backroom deal, especially when the evidence is weak or nonexistent.”
“Those victims,” she began, recalling Luke’s responses in the interrogation room. “The way Dragos described them and their crimes—was it accurate?”
“Every one of those men could have easily been found guilty within these walls and staked in front of a gallery of witnesses,” Leviathan said. “Does that make what Dragos did right? Or, excuse me, does that make what we suspect that Dragos did right?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. She might not have been close to her mother, but Deborah Constantine had worked in the DA’s office just as Sara had, and Sara had been weaned on the idea that the courts meted out justice, not civilians. But though she meant her words—truly meant them—she couldn’t stop the tiny trill of relief that fluttered in her chest. Relief that maybe, just maybe, the man she’d slept with wasn’t as much of a monster as she’d thought.
Still, those crimes were not on her docket, and there was no point analyzing either them or the man who may have committed them.
“The evidence isn’t weak in this case,” she said.
“No,” Leviathan agreed. “It’s not.” His brow furrowed, his gray eyes going dark with inquiry. “Is there something else on your mind, Constantine?”
She hesitated, knowing that what she was about to say could result in her losing this job altogether. She didn’t want that; she wanted to work down here, and not just so that she’d have access to her father’s file. And yet she couldn’t move forward knowing that she should recuse herself from the case.
