Stone Chameleon (Ironhill Jinn #1) (11 page)

“Where is Marina?” The tips of Isaac’s fangs descended beneath his upper lip. I wondered how he perfected the deranged predator look, whether he practiced raising his lip in the mirror, or if he could extend his fangs at will to the appropriate length. Either way, the effect worked marvelously to jump-start my heart and send it into fits.

“You mean…you haven’t…she didn’t return to the hive last night?” I put my armchair between me and the patio door. Not that it would matter one whit—he couldn’t enter my home anyway—but it gave me a greater sense of security no matter how false I knew it to be.

His presence saturated the air, carrying hot ripples of his power that stung my face. “Do you suppose I’d be here demanding answers from you if she had?”

“But I…” I waded through the misty memories to get back to my last moments with the young vampiress. “She left before I got much out of her. I assumed you’d contacted her somehow and forced her home. Didn’t you?”

Isaac had always been tight-lipped about how he managed his underlings, whether by fear alone or by some metaphysical means. I thought about asking him about it in a more pointed way, but prodding an angry vampire wouldn’t have been my brightest idea ever.

His face remained neutral though his fangs stayed like a promise of death. “Did she tell you why she was there? Was she injured?”

He ignored me as usual. Splendid.

“The video feed from A & I Electronics can tell you more than I can.” Especially that I hadn’t murdered her. “She was bleeding black, so says Connor Lewiston. It was dark in the warehouse, so I didn’t get a good look to see for certain if she was injured. She did say she was frightened.” I winced at the last, remembering too late that what petrified the poor girl loomed beyond my doorway.

Isaac regarded me with eyes filled with golden fireworks, forcing me back another step. “What was she afraid of?” His voice lowered an octave. “Or of whom?”

I took a moment to assemble a coherent sentence. “I think she regrets her decision. She told me she’d been dying, and you gave her eternal life, but I don’t think she realized what that meant for her. I think she’s afraid of spending the ages like a wizened apple under the rule of the hive.” There, that included truth enough without poking my finger directly at the scary dead man before me.

A shift in stance sent a cascade of his thick, root-beer hair over his shoulder. “Tell me why you soaked in your bathtub long enough to get waterlogged. Was it to wash away her blood?”

I made a sound of disgust. “No, it most certainly was not to remove blood.” My hands would have been on my hips to emphasize my irritation if they hadn’t been holding my robe closed.

A heavy drumming sound sent a jolt of fright down my central corridor as he clashed with the invisible barrier keeping him outside my home. His palm pounded it again before he stepped back and grew still. I’d rather have him acting like a raging rhino than that terrible, unpredictable stillness.

“Tell me the password so I can smell you.”

The command in his tone urged my gaze away from his herculean body—though I wasn’t sure when my attention had fallen there—and raise it to look at his face.

“Some scents can be washed away, but not blood. If you’ve damaged one of mine, I’ll know it.”

“If that would clear me, why didn’t you demand that of me yesterday?”

He glared until I thought I’d go up in flames in the heat of his anger. “What. Is. The password.”

“No.” Scenarios of him ripping my throat out filled my imagination. How many of his children had I touched? They’d all been face down when I found them, forcing me to put hands on them to test for life. Or undeath, as it were. Had their positioning at the scenes been by design, too?

I didn’t fancy being in his presence at all, but if I didn’t allow him to have his smell test, he’d suspect me of hiding something from him, and then he’d never go away. Besides, there were enough people who worked at the bakery to hear me if I screamed, and Isaac wouldn’t kill me with so many possible witnesses around.

I pointed toward my bedroom. “Let me get dressed, and I’ll come out there to you.”

He extended his index finger in my direction and made a come-hither motion. “Come here now before I get angry with you.”

I flinched again. If that wasn’t anger, I didn’t want to see the real thing. No point in delaying the inevitable; he’d catch up with me sometime, and I didn’t want him hunting me while I worked.

Ignoring an incessant desire to run, I shuffled toward him and opened the door farther. The moment my wrist cleared Deirdre’s ward, he grabbed my arm and jerked me the rest of the way outside. I kept my gaze on his collar bones, which seemed to have their own muscles, to avoid looking at his mouth full of daggers. His chest didn’t rise and fall, which unnerved me even more.

“I’ve been in contact with all of them, Isaac.” I tried to swipe moisture onto my dry lips with my tongue, but found none in my cotton mouth. “I didn’t know if they were dead when I found them, so I turned them over.”

While his gaze drilled into my skull, he lifted my fingers to his mouth and took two of them in deep, cradling his tongue around them as he sucked. My blood became fizzy and warm, and pleasure seeped into my abdomen in the presence of the half-naked Celtic god suckling my digits.

Until I remembered he was a dead man who, I was quite certain, would have no regrets about turning me into a pile of shredded jinn for his dining pleasure. That he wasn’t cold suggested he’d fed well on some human’s blood before arriving. Who needed a cold shower?

“I thought you said smell?” I pulled back from him, but his grip on my wrist might as well have been an iron shackle imbedded in the side of a mountain. After an agonizing pause that stretched into a small eternity, he let me slide from his lips and stepped away.

In a voice low in register and tinged with sadness, he said, “Old blood. Dead blood.”

My lungs expelled their contents in one large gush. I wiped his slobber from my fingers on my robe. “So you know I didn’t harm then, then?”

“Aye. Unless you wore gloves.”

I leaned against the brick and let my head fall back against it with a clunk. “Then help me prove to you I’m telling the truth. Arrange with Detective Peterson for me to see the original crime scene photos. Allow the Ironhill PD forensics team to examine Daniel to determine what type of weapon killed him.”

Isaac turned and gazed toward the sky. Although curiosity begged me to circle him to discover what his expression held, my self-preservation instincts held me close to my safe hold.

“I’ll consider your request.” He moved toward the edge of my deck.

Wait. He had business dealings with Amun, didn’t he? “What can you tell me about Amun Bassili?” I knew I’d regret opening my big mouth later. After everything I’d been through, saving my own hide should have dominated my thoughts, not my confusion over the smug Persian.

Isaac shifted enough to allow a glimpse of his perfect profile bathed in silver moonlight. I’d always found him beautiful in a deadly sort of way. A strange thought to be having, given the circumstances.

“Strange you should ask.” He needn’t have turned any farther—I saw his smirk plain enough—but he did, anyway. “Bassili asked me the same question several years ago, right after he met a striking, stubborn woman at…a policeman’s ball, was it?”

Arms crossed, I whirled to stare at the brick to hide my flaming cheeks. “He asked about me? What did you tell him?” Although I meant it to sound casual, my desire to know came through loud and clear, anyway. I was glad I hadn’t added the question burning brightest in my head, about who Amun’s girlfriend was. Not that I wanted to know.

Through barely contained laughter, Isaac said, “Well, let me see if I can remember.”

“You know bloody well you remember.” I rolled my eyes at myself.
Subtle, Lou. Nicely subtle.

He laughed harder. “I suppose I did tell him a few things, but not how you like to sleep in until nine o’clock Sunday mornings, and then watch cartoons in your pink bunny pajamas. Or that you take baths hot enough to boil a lobster. Or that there’s a collection of exotic stones on the third shelf of your bookshelf, one of which you keep in your pocket and which finds its way into your delicate hands when you’re upset.”

My eyes grew wider as he continued.

“I might have mentioned you keep a small, curmudgeonly rodent you call Benny, whom you talk to as if he were a human for reasons I canna understand. You adore the scent of vanilla, the color turquoise, and white tulips make you smile sadly.”

I pressed my hands against the wall to steady myself.

“Oh, and how could I forget you’d eat toast for every meal if it provided all the nutrition you needed, and you’d wear silk every day if it wasn’t so expensive and impractical? Have I left anything out?”

Only that I was jinn. Other than that, it seemed he’d been right, he did know everything about me.

I spun around. “How did you…?” but he’d gone, only faint laughter carrying back from wherever he’d zapped off to. I stomped my bare foot. “Isaac. You come back here this instant. Isaac!”

I’d have shouted more if someone from the house behind the store hadn’t shouted at me to shut up.

I went back inside and slammed the glass door. A short stomp into the kitchen and back didn’t expel my frustration, so I opened it and slammed it again. Benny shuffled out from beneath the sofa, cooing with soft chirps.

“Can you believe that infernal dead man?” I dashed around the room, arms flailing. “Not only did he tell me nothing of Amun, he filled my head with even more questions that will drive me mad. How does he know so much about me?”

I marched to my bookshelf and stared at my collection of stones arranged there, scooping up a rare shade of pink pegmatite to twiddle in my fingers. Its song, though sweet and powerful, didn’t comfort me as it should have. “Fine, he could have seen my collection from the doorway, I suppose, if he leaned the right way. He caught me having a bath tonight, but wouldn’t have known the temperature. The vanilla he’d have smelled in my hair from the shampoo, but the flowers? And the cartoons and pajamas?”

Hands pressed on my hips, I tilted down to my hairy friend. “How could he possibly know I fancy tulips?” Mum used to give them to me for my birthday in the spring. They reminded me of better times and of what I’d lost—the one person I could share my true self with. But she hadn’t sent any since she went into Mayvern two years ago.

I twisted a bundle of wet hair in my fingers until it hurt. “And the toast. How would he know about that? I’ve never once eaten around him, nor talked about food with him. Has he been eavesdropping on me?”

The idea replaced my blood with ice water. Could he hear through my walls? What was I thinking? Of course he could. Considering what he might have heard me saying or doing over the years caused my stomach to boil with embarrassment. Women, especially ones who didn’t have a man in their life, had needs too. An echo of Mum’s voice reiterated her opinion of my loose morals.

“That doesn’t explain everything, though,” I said with a little relief, “like sleeping in Sunday mornings. He couldn’t have been outside in the daylight. And the bigger question, is why would he want to know so much about me, anyway?”

I supposed it might have been one of those “know thine enemy” deals. Yes, that had to be the why. Now all I had to do was figure out the how. There was no point looking at the pictures with my mind in such a state. They’d have to wait until morning. Served Isaac right if he lost another of his children in the meantime.

I
dragged my sorry behind out of bed at nine Sunday morning and plodded to the bathroom. My reflection in the mirror induced a groan. I appeared to have been on the business end of a few right-hooks to the face, with two purple shiners to show for my trouble. Splendid.

After sorting myself out, I went into the kitchen and opened my bread box—the second step of my daily ritual. Dammit. I slammed two slices of bread into the toaster. Why did Isaac have to ruin everything I loved? Everything in my daily routine would remind me of answers I wanted and didn’t have.

“I really hate that man,” I told Benny as I munched my honey-glazed toast in front of the TV, which I’d left off. Cartoons were off limits, and I couldn’t bear to listen to Amun gushing about the love of his life again, or watch the harlot reporters batting their lashes at him. “Both of them, in fact. They’re equally infuriating and mysterious, and quite frankly, they deserve one another.”

Benny chirped his agreement as I took another sweet, crunchy bite. Belly full, I sat down at my kitchen table to look at the photos. Instead of my pink bunny jammies, I’d put on a pair of yoga pants and a T-shirt instead to show Isaac I wasn’t so predictable. Not that he’d see it, but it made me feel better, anyway.

As I stared at the first crime scene by the river, my inner eye went back to Mr. Bassili’s kiss.

I just had to know
.

“Enough!” I pounded my palm on the table, went to my desk, and opened my laptop. Despite my anger, I searched for ways to reach him. After flipping through several websites of the companies he owned, I came up with a twenty-four-hour call center sure to have a live person on a Sunday morning.

I snatched the cordless phone from the desk and paced around the room as I dialed.

“Bassili Industries,” a woman with a pleasant voice said.

“Yes, good morning, I need to reach Mr. Bassili.” At her silence, I added, “It’s urgent that I speak with him.” So I could make his ears bleed.

A scuffling came over the line along with mumbled voices, making me imagine she’d placed her hand over the phone and spoken to someone else, perhaps a supervisor. More shifting sounds preceded a clearing of her throat. “May I ask who’s calling, please?”

“This is Lou Hudson from Ironhill Pest Control. Can you give me his cell number, please?” I held my casual tone instead of the pique that wanted to seep out.

“Oh yes, Miss Hudson. I’m not authorized to give you his number, but he left a message for you. Would you like me to read it to you now?”

“Beg pardon?” My knees folded me down to the sofa. “Message? For me?” Brilliant. “Oh, yes, please do.” How had he known I’d call this number? My grip tightened on the phone. I was not that predictable.

Although the woman coughed a few times, it didn’t cover the humor she found in what she was about to say. “Mr. Bassili is in the process of digging a tunnel to the center of the earth with a teaspoon and may be unreachable for some time. He thanks you for your call and will try to get back to you by month’s end.”

Oh, how very funny. If I’d been a betting woman, I’d have wagered that it wasn’t her supervisor the receptionist had spoken to, but Amun himself. “Thank you for that,” I said loud enough he might overhear if he’d been standing close to her. “You can tell Mr. Bassili he needn’t bother getting back to me. I’m sure if he keeps digging, he’ll find himself back in the hell he came from.”

I hung up the phone with a little satisfaction. Resigned to my ignorance, I made ginseng tea and laid out the photos, determined to keep my mind on task. For an hour, I studied every detail, from the tiny pebbles on the river bank to the cigarette butt on the edge of the café photo.

And found exactly nothing.

A shrill ring blasted through the silence. The two pictures I held side by side for comparison whizzed across the table and onto the floor. Thinking it would be Mr. Bassili calling to gloat, I picked it up and said a casual, “You’re not funny, you know.”

“Lou?” Detective Peterson’s rumbling voice shattered my hope. “What’s up?”

“Oh, Gerry.” Mercy mother of hellfire.
“Sorry, I was expecting someone else.” I squeezed the handset tighter to my ear. “Wait, if you’re calling me Sunday morning, I’m guessing the magnanimous vampire lord of Ironhill granted permission for me to see the crime photos?”

“Yep, though he’s none too happy. Not that he ever is, but this was worse. I’m calling so late because he kept me up until 4:00 a.m., gnawing my ear off about a certain monster whisperer who likes to crawl under his skin and give him an itch. You know how much he
loves
having to cooperate with us lowly mortals.”

It hadn’t always been that way, only in the past ten years the government demanded cooperation from all the supernatural races when it came to upholding certain laws. Murder being the key one. I’d pushed for the new rules when humans began disappearing without a trial once accused, and later evidence cleared the accused of the supposed hive crime. Until the investigating had been done, putting the crime clearly in one jurisdiction or the other with undisputable evidence indicating guilt, Isaac had to play nice or face a jury comprised of the heads of all the sentient races.

“How about the autopsy?”

“Don’t push your luck, Lou. You’re lucky he bent at all on this. Frankly, I’m shocked all to hell. He won’t do shit for me when I ask.”

It shocked me, too, if I was being honest. “Can I come right now? I took pictures yesterday, and there’s something nagging me about them, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.”

He gave a gruff bark of laughter. “Yes, well, we all know how good you are at waiting patiently.”

“I’m patient,” I said with indignation. “I don’t have to help, you know. This isn’t my job, it’s yours and Isaac’s.” I didn’t see it that way, but I wasn’t feeling particularly helpful after that quip.

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, now, I was just fooling.” His chuckling suggested otherwise. “Come on over now and lunch afterward is on me. Somewhere we can get all-day breakfast, right?”

Did everyone know of my love affair with toast? Maybe my anger at Isaac had been unfounded. I needed to do a better job of diversifying my routine and diet so as not to make myself such an open book for all to read.

“Fine. Make it a place that serves Texas-style toast, and I’ll meet you at the precinct in a half hour.”

“Deal.”

I hung up and dialed Harper. She picked up on the second ring. “Yeah?”

“Good, you’re home.” I grimaced at her usual phone greeting. “How are you feeling?”

“Good as new, Lou. What’s going on? You sound kind of, I don’t know, excited.”

That was one word for it. “I’m heading to the precinct to look at the crime scene photos, and I could use an extra set of eyes. Are you interested?”

Gerry wouldn’t mind, and after his poking at me, I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty for adding another lunch onto his tab.

“Looking at gory pictures in a building full of hot men in uniform? Sounds like my kind of Sunday. Can you pick me up?”

“Be ready in ten minutes. And Harper?”

“Yeah?” Her sheepish tone told me she already knew what I would tell her.

“You can’t go into the precinct packing. And certainly nothing concealed. You know that, right?”

“Ah, hell, Lou. Where’d the fun be in that? Carrying a piece makes it more likely I’ll have one of the yummy officers pat me down.” Her sultry purr vibrated through the phone.

I sighed and shook my head, my cheeks bunching with a smile. “You haven’t changed a bit since high school.”

“And that’s a problem how?”

I laughed with her. “Be ready. No guns. I mean it, Harper.”

“Yeah, yeah. No guns. Party pooper.”

* * *

“Isaac said nothing about Harper.” Gerry’s brick-house body blocked the doorway into the briefing room where I assumed he’d laid out the evidence for us to peruse. His ill-fitting black suit held a week’s worth of wrinkles. “She can’t come in.”

I pressed forward and tapped him on the chest with the folder full of images I’d brought with me. “What Isaac doesn’t know won’t kill him.”

“Again.” Harper tossed a handful of chocolate covered espresso beans into her mouth. When we both stared at her with raised brows, she shrugged. “You know. Won’t kill him
again
. Because he’s already dead?”

I rolled my eyes and returned my attention to Gerry. “We’re doing this for him, after all. He can’t complain if he gets two sets of trained eyes for the price of one.”

Gerry dropped his pronounced forehead against the doorframe with a resounding
clunk
. “Why are you doing this to me? Since this whole sorry thing started, he’s been chewing my face off on a nightly basis. When he finds out I let Harper in…” He grimaced.

“You’ll remind him that Harper was already at every scene with me except the field.” I patted the large man on the shoulder, pushed by him, and entered the room. “It isn’t like she’s an ignorant civilian who’ll spill his secrets to the press. She’s bound by a confidentiality agreement to keep other races’ secrets, as I am.” I pulled up my sleeve where the small burn mark on my upper arm proved I spoke the truth. Another agreement I’d made with Deirdre.

“You’re going to get me killed one of these days,” Gerry said, then followed Harper in and shut the door. “And to think I gave up being a beat cop for this political bullshit.”

“Mouth, Detective.” I surveyed the bags of evidence spread on the table.

“Sorry. Forgot there were
ladies
about.” He waggled his fingers. The way he said it suggested there were no ladies about at all, only females who hunted monsters for a living. Why couldn’t we be both? “Don’t touch anything. And no stuffing your face in here.” Staring at Harper, he flicked his fingers toward the table. “All we need is for Lou’s fingerprints or your sugar dust to show up on any of this stuff and give Isaac another reason to think she killed his vamps.”

Harper glared at me from beneath her crimson fringe, her winter-green eyes blazing. “Jesus, Lou, is he still on about that?” The pockets of her blue camouflage fatigue bulged with sugary snacks as she gripped her hips.

I ignored her and went to the table. “Oh, stop fussing. We all know it isn’t true, I just need to convince Isaac of it, which is why we’re here.” I nodded at Gerry. “We’ll be careful not to touch anything.”

“I’ve grouped them by scene,” he said, passing his hand over the left-most collage of pictures, sporting various angles of black blood and gore. “This one is the first, down by the Kimble.” His hand moved right as he spoke. “This one is outside Rikki’s, this one from the soy field, this one from the decrepit house, and the last, as you can see by the corpse in the brown water, is from the sewer.”

He met my gaze with a questioning one. “What are you hoping to find, anyway? Isaac and I, along with half of the forensics team, have been all over these and the scenes themselves, and we found squat. No hairs, fibers, DNA, nothing. This perp is a real pro, whoever it is.”

I pulled up one of the hard plastic chairs to the first group of pictures and sat down, setting the folder under my seat. “I might find nothing, but there’s something bothering me about the photos I took. I’m hoping with Harper’s help, and your photos to compare mine to, I can figure out what it is.”