Harlequin Nocturne September 2014 Bundle: Beyond the Moon\Immortal Obsession (33 page)

Chapter 7

T
he knocking sound seemed to come from a long way off. Annoyed, Madison rolled over.

The sound came again.

This time, she came fully awake and glared at the door in the haze of the early-morning light coming through the window.

“Chase, you in there?” Teddy called from the hallway. “Open up.”

A surge of adrenaline propelled her into alertness. Grabbing the blanket off the bed to cover up with, she padded to the door and yanked it open.

“Ted? What's up?”

“Why didn't you answer your cell?” Teddy's voice was tinged with wary excitement.

“It didn't ring.” Madison looked to the bureau, where she usually put her phone. “Great. I must have left it somewhere.”

“Well, that's bloody inconvenient,” Teddy said. “Get dressed and be out here in five.”

“Why?”

“I'll tell you then. It's something you'll want to hear.”

Knowing better than to prolong the five minutes Teddy had asked for by demanding more details, Madison closed the door. There was no time to worry about the dreams, or that damn window. The dimensions of the room were small enough to prove that she was alone in it.

She knew the routine. Her makeup case sat in her bag by the desk, ready in case of emergencies. Clothes were on hangers and easy to grab. Shoes... Hell, her feet hurt just standing on the carpet.

She wiggled into jeans, pulled a loose black sweater over her head and slipped her aching feet into a pair of worn athletic shoes. With everything she'd need to be camera-ready in hand, she stepped into the hall in just three minutes flat.

Every member of her crew was there, crowded into the narrow hall and looking rumpled. Madison tossed her things to the assistant in charge of details, and tore an elastic band off her wrist to tie back her unruly hair.

“Dish,” she said.

“There's news,” Teddy explained as they headed for the stairs. “The police have found something they think might be important.”

“Pertaining to the girls' case?”

“In lieu of you not answering your cell, I got the wake-up call to get our butts in gear and get over there to find out.”

“There's a hotel phone in my room,” Madison pointed out.

“Have you heard how loud that thing is? It would have woken the entire hotel and scared the pants off everyone, including you.”

“Yeah, and a rap at the door wouldn't do that.”

“It was a gentle rap,” Teddy said.

Madison threw him a sideways glance. Teddy appeared to be more rumpled than the rest of the guys. That call for action he'd mentioned must have just happened. Then again, Teddy always appeared to have just gotten out of bed. His short dark hair stuck up at odd angles. He hadn't shaved. His blue shirt was partially unbuttoned, and untucked. It appeared that Teddy had also had a sleepless night.

“Where are we going?” she asked, racing with him and the other crew members down five flights of steps, hearing the bump of the equipment bags they carried striking the walls.

“The London Eye,” Jerry, the new assistant, said.

“That's the big Ferris wheel thing,” Teddy clarified. “By the Thames.”

“What do we know?” Madison brushed through the lobby toward the revolving glass doors that showed a white van with its door wide open waiting curb-side. The crew had gotten the rented vehicle here quickly.

The others began storing the equipment inside. After they'd jumped in, the metal door slammed behind her, and they took off.

“Okay. What?” she said, looking to Teddy.

“Clothes,” he said. “They found some clothes.”

“Belonging to the girls?”

“No.”

The fine little hairs on the back of her neck lifted.

“Whose clothes?” she asked.

“There's a whisper about a possibility they might belong to your brother.”

Although Madison tried to take this news in, she had a hard time digesting it.

“Stewart?” she managed to say.

Teddy nodded. “The network told me that the authorities are hoping you might be able to identify the items. I said we'd be there shortly, before the morning newscast, and that we didn't want the police coming to get you.”

“Thanks.”

It was a miracle she'd gotten that one word out. No further conversation seemed possible. Someone had found what they believed might be her brother's clothes? Clothes he wasn't wearing?

Her empty stomach turned over.

The ride was short at that early hour. As the sun rose in the east, the London Eye appeared above a sparkling glint off the Thames—a humongous, permanent carnival ride perched on the bank in front of a block of centuries-old buildings. She had always wanted to go up on the Eye, in one of the glassed-in baskets that provided a bird's-eye view of the rooftops of London. Now, the contraption was still, and slightly ominous in its silence.

“Are you going to be okay?” Teddy asked.

She nodded. “When were these articles discovered?”

“Either sometime last night, or early this morning. That's all I know.”

The van stopped in front of a line of yellow crime tape. The sight of that tape rendered Madison speechless.

A male uniformed officer met the van, but Madison hardly took in the guy's features. She was out of the van in seconds, with Teddy showing his press badge behind her.

She rushed toward the three men in suits standing near the ticket booth for the Eye. Suits were always the guys to see in situations like this.

Situations. Hell, what have they found?

“You're expecting me,” she said to them without taking her attention from the Eye itself.

Where were the clothes she was to identify? How had they been found? Who had found them and why did these cops assume that whatever had turned up might belong to Stewart?

Most of all, she wanted to know how they knew Stewart was her brother, and where to find her.

She thought about asking all of those things before any of the men had offered a greeting. She was on the other end of the crime spectrum here, not only reporting on missing cases, but involved on a personal level. She had to keep it together, somehow. As a representative of her network, she had to stay grounded.

“I'm Madison Chase,” she added for clarification.

One of the men turned to her. Six feet in height, with close-shorn brown hair, dark eyes and an age she gauged to be approaching forty, he said solemnly, “Sorry to get you up so early. I'm D.I. Crane. Thanks for coming, Miss Chase.”

She nodded at the detective inspector. “You have something for me to see?” There was no time for any “cut to the Chase” jokes that had become so prevalent in her job. This detective wore a serious expression.

“We do. Can you step this way, please?” he said.

He moved away, and then stopped to wait for her. Swallowing her fear, and knowing she would have to look at whatever they had found, no matter how sick she felt, Madison followed him, passing several other uniforms until she and the detective had reached the entrance to the Eye itself.

She looked up at the mechanical beast with trepidation.

“We won't be going up,” D.I. Crane said.

“You think you might have found something of my brother's here, on this thing?”

Crane gestured for her to step toward the open door of one of the Eye's baskets. “The supervisor stumbled upon this when he got to work this morning.”

Madison was starting to feel really panicky.

D.I. Crane seemed to understand. “Right here,” he said. “Can you take a look? Are you up to it?”

“There's no body or anything?”

“Nothing like that. Just this.” He carefully lifted up something dark that had been stuck behind a pole.

Madison recognized what it was immediately. Though her whole body tightened, she kept the reactions in check with a stern warning that this was just a coat. A black leather jacket, to be exact, with worn patches on the sleeves.

The coat was very similar to the one Stewart often wore in his off time, though reasoning suggested that there wasn't only one leather jacket in the world, and that this one could belong to anybody. There was just one way to find out if this one belonged to her brother.

“Can I touch it?” she asked D.I. Crane.

He shook his head. “We'll take it to the lab for processing.”

“Can I smell it?”

That question earned her a raised eyebrow from the Detective inspector.

Madison leaned close to the jacket, and inhaled.
Stewart, is that you?

What came to her was a shocking nightmare of images. Stewart, running. Being chased. Hurt. Limping to this spot. Removing his coat to see whatever damage he'd been dealt. Leaving in a hurry.

Oh, no. Stewart...

She kept her eyes shut for what seemed like forever as her heart pounded with a fury suggesting it would never slow down again. She feared that if she opened her eyes, she'd scream, and that if the scream came out, she'd lose consciousness.

“Miss Chase,” D.I. Crane said.

Just a minute more,
she wanted to say.
Please.

Stewart had been hurt. She had seen that, or so she thought. Their connection ran deep, but she had never felt as though she was inside his skin. She felt like that now.

But Stewart had been alive here, and alive when he left that morning. She didn't want to believe that any lingering aura of death stuck to his jacket, discovered only that day. There was no trace of blood on it that she could see. If there had been blood, the investigators wouldn't have allowed her to get so near to it.

So there was hope. God, yes, a chink of light had opened up after a long dark spell. She felt her brother's presence here.

“Miss Chase?” D.I. Crane repeated, resting a hand on her arm.

“It's his,” she said. “The jacket belongs to my brother, Stewart Chase.”

To the detective's credit, he didn't ask how she knew this by smelling the coat. Maybe he was saving the hard questions for later.

“It's his scent,” she said to gain some credence with the trained detective. “The only scent he wears. Have you looked in the pockets? What made you believe it might belong to my brother?”

D.I. Crane said, “We found your brother's business card in the pocket. Since he has been reported as missing by both you and his law firm, your ability to identify the jacket could help our investigation.”

He held up a plastic evidence bag. “What about this? Do you know what this is?”

Madison gaped at the item in that bag with a disbelief that bordered on horror. The bag contained a pointed wooden stake.

“That's an odd item to be carrying around,” D.I. Crane remarked. “Don't you think so, Miss Chase?”

She couldn't possibly answer. Having just gotten the word
vampire
out of her mind, she found that the word again began to blink with the vibrancy of a Vegas neon sign.

* * *

St. John felt the chill that riddled Madison's body and knew she was thinking of him. How easily he read her. This was the way the connection he'd set into place between them worked, and the result of helping her out of last night's mess.

Glad of the tip about this meeting at the Eye, he stared down at Madison from his penthouse above the Thames. He saw her sway in reaction to the sight of a weapon made for piercing the chest of a vampire.

He didn't like this.

Hell, he didn't like anything about this.

With his enhanced senses and superior vision, he watched Madison's features go from shock to relief, eventually settling into an expression of defiance. Already, she was putting two and two together, rerunning their interesting vampire foreplay of the night before.

Stewart Chase had been a fool to leave such a thing behind. Finding that stake in her brother's jacket had just upped the ante of not only his strained relationship to Madison, but also endangered her safety.

Each minute she remained in London, now that she and the detectives had viewed an example of her brother's strange obsession, the degree of risk to Madison's security would escalate. Cameras were everywhere. Eyes other than those belonging to law enforcement were watching. If she set her agenda to causing more trouble over this, she'd become a liability.

Two Chases in a row.

That ungainly adjective,
tenacious,
blinked in St. John's mind. Madison was in a state of wary suspension right now, but when the initial surprise wore off, she'd be bolstered by what the detectives had found and driven forward by it.

She'd assume she had discovered a clue to her brother being alive, and tonight she would double her efforts to find him, whether her twin was dead, alive or occupying the space in between.

She would start by going back to the club where Christopher St. John hadn't laughed at her vampire game, and had, in fact, played along. She might demand answers about her brother's research. She might wield a similar weapon to gauge his response.

“Don't you be foolish, too,” he whispered to her, his throat tightening due to the knowledge of how dangerous her next appearance at Space
could prove to be.

“Take your time and think this through. If you don't believe in vampires, there must be another explanation for that wooden stake.”

The way she was staring at that stake made him frown. The way her hand opened and closed, as if she wanted to wrap her fingers around it, left him uneasy.

An icy chill crept up his spine.

He narrowed his gaze.

Madison looked different.

He thought...

But couldn't be sure...

Had some kind of alternate reasoning been awakened in her just by seeing a damn sliver of wood? Was this a reason for the darkness trailing her?

It was possible, and terrible. St. John leaned against the window frame as if those few inches could get him closer to her.