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“N-no, I told you.” I shifted my eyes to the side, and barely restrained my impulse to touch my jaw. Logan’s close scrutiny was making me feel guilty, and I hadn’t done anything. Dylanhadslapped me, but I had to downplay this thing.I had to.This man was acting so suspicious.Were they here to arrest me after all?“It was nothing.”
“Did your mother witness the fight?”
“It wasn’t exactly a fight, but yes. She heard most of it, anyway, and then she came to the door.”
“What did he need the money for?”
“I don’t really know. Dylan always needed money. He may have borrowed from loan sharks again. He did that in New York a couple of times that I know of, and I had to borrow from my retirement fund each time to pay them off.”
“Do you have any idea where Malone could be? Any friends or relatives we don’t know about?”
“Just the people at the playhouse. He likes to go there a lot.”
Logan regarded me thoughtfully for a moment then closed the notebook and stood up. Conway followed suit.
“We’ll be in touch,” Mr. O’Neal,” Logan said. He pulled a card from his breast pocket and handed it to me. “Let me know immediately if you hear from Mr. Malone.”
I nodded, a little confused. That was it? I looked down at the card. It gave his name, William Logan, and a number on a plain white background. I was still looking down at it when I heard him clear his throat, and I looked up. Tyler was standing there staring in at us.
“Is this young man your brother?”
I went over to stand beside Tyler and put an arm around him.
“Yes, this is Tyler.”
Tyler mutely held up a hand that was dripping blood, and I gasped and took a quick, horrified step backward. It was total reflex—I never could stand the sight of blood. In the next second, I had pulled myself together and grabbed his wrist. It was just a cut on his finger, but obviously, it was deep and had been bleeding a while, so it was dripping down to his wrist. I felt guilty because I hadn’t even heard him get up. I shuddered but tried to make my voice sound normal. “Tyler, what have you done, buddy?”
“Is he all right?” Logan asked. He and Conway both were watching us closely.
“I don’t know—I think so. He doesn’t always react to pain the way other people do. Were you cutting some banana for your cereal? Come on and let’s get that taken care of.” I glanced at the detectives.
“We’ll be on our way then and let you take care of that,” Conway said. Logan hesitated a moment and then nodded, turning to leave.
“He looks hungry. Get him a Band-Aid then fix the boy some breakfast,” he called over his shoulder. “You have yourself a nice day, Jace. We’ll be in touch again soon.”
****
Logan
We were silent till we got back in the car and pulled out on the narrow road in front of Jace’s house. We were in an older section of town and most of the houses seemed to be mill houses or one and two-story shotgun homes along narrow streets just barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other. Most had been renovated, but some, like the O’Neal house, were still little more than tiny, old-fashioned places, with a good deal of trees and tall shrubs in their yards.
Conway was driving and as he maneuvered back over to Decatur Street, he glanced over at me. “Are you all right?”
I nodded, reminding myself to relax my grip on the arm rest. Seeing blood unexpectedly still got to me a little, even after ten years. I took a deep breath to get rid of the tension in my muscles. Vampires were creatures that had left their filthy stain on my soul and in my blood. It had taken me a long time to fully wrap my head around the fact that these monsters existed, but actually seeing vampires in action, watching them rip apart my friends as we camped by a river in France, had an amazingly clarifying effect on my thinking. I still had problems being around blood, but I was so much better than I had been. Another reason I thought Jace could be saved, though Conway was being stubborn about it. In Conway’s mind, Jace was too far gone, but I didn’t believe that, and it went against all of the Hunters’ founding principles.
The Hunters had begun, in western culture at least, when the bishop of Paris, now known as St. Denis, had discovered the slums of the city of Paris were overrun with vampires back in the third century. The city was in danger of being destroyed, but Denis and a band of priests brought the problem under control by bravely hunting the vampires down. First, they overpowered them with sheer numbers, and then they staked them and decapitated them, the first known use of the method. Many of the priests were killed or mauled in the process, despite their best efforts.
So it was that Denis, with the intercession of the Archangel Azrael, himself, according to Denis’s writings, discovered the method of using potions, containing holy water blessed by St. Denis himself and the blood and bones of the holy martyrs on the wounds of the victims. They were among the first of his miraculous healings. He learned that he could save a few and even turn the victims back toward God if they weren’t too badly injured. St. Denis managed to save only a few of his fellow priests, but they had been his first success stories, and the first of theHunters. Denis himself had been bitten and treated his own wounds with his potions and the intercession once again of Azrael. He and the priests had claimed Azrael had told them what to do, and who was anyone alive today to say any differently? When Denis was finally overcome by the vampires in an epic fight, the creatures took off his head. He was later sainted by the church and all his statues still depict him holding his severed head in his hands. I had a small statue of him the monks gave me that I kept in my room wherever I happened to be, and it always gave me comfort, though I wasn’t particularly religious.
“I’m fine,” I said, finally responding to Conway’s question. Then to distract him, I asked, “What do you think about Jace?”
He made a little scoffing sound. “He’s a thrall. What’s to think? He’s too badly compromised to believe a word he says. He would lie for his master, without a second thought. We’re probably going to have to put him down as soon as we try to get a little more out of him. I think he knows a lot more than he’s letting on about Malone’s whereabouts, and I don’t like being lied to.”
“You think he’s lying then?”
“Not about all of it. I have no doubt his home life is bad. I get that. But that demon has his hooks in him deep, and I think Jace knows where the asshole is. We need to keep the pressure on. Malone tried to fake his death to get us off track. That’s all this is. But did you notice the sigil on the side of his house?”
“Sigil? No, where was it?”
