"They are peripherally involved, but as I said, the students are adults legally, as well as is the maintenance man, and it has not yet been two days. They are investigating, but as there are no signs of foul play as of yet …" He spread his hands wider, then placed them on the desk. "They are certainly not here in force." The brown eyes sought out us all one by one. "This is my home, but I am no warrior. Mrs. Nottinger has said you are for hire. I will pay whatever you require to take care of this situation before it worsens."
Someone was actually going to pay us to risk our lives. Hot damn. It made horrific, near-death experiences a shade less annoying. I shoved my hand into the pocket of my black leather jacket and fingered a well-worn rip. I'd given Delilah my good one, but I liked this one too. I couldn't replace it; it was a classic, but I did need to replace the Glock, and explosive rounds for the Eagle didn't come cheap.
"Results will not necessarily be immediate. We will do our best, but Sawney is a one-creature slaughterhouse, quite literally," Niko cautioned. "And if the killer is human, the police would probably find him before we did."
"Then your best is all that I can ask." Dr. Nushi bowed. Nik bowed. And the meeting was mostly over. Except for Promise politely but firmly asking for Nushi's home address for billing purposes. She flashed a bit of fang in either strong incentive or flirtatious behavior. With vampires it was hard to tell. As the tips of Nushi's large ears flushed pink, I went with flirtatious.
We were given false student ID that would pass anywhere on either campus if we were stopped for any reason. Although I couldn't imagine why we would be. I looked the twenty-year-old punk-ass kid that I was. Niko, twenty-two, looked twenty-six, and could pass for a grad student or the TA that he was easily enough. Promise…Promise had an ageless quality, but no one would stop her because they thought she was a serial killer.
One student had disappeared on the way to French class, one while doing laundry in the basement of one of the dorms, and the maintenance man was a mystery. He'd gone out on a call, but taken the documentation with him. No one confessed to putting in a request and no one knew where he'd gone.
We separated to cover the most ground, mingling among the potential meals and looking for dead bodies and/or monsters. I took a map. Niko navigated by either the stars or his innate sense of place on the planet. It was past seven and dark; Promise carried her cloak over one arm and drifted. Two seconds later I'd lost sight of her. She knew how to move. I only knew the direction she'd vanished by the turning of male heads and one or two female ones.
I looked down at the map, considered it for a second, and then wadded it up to toss it into the nearest trash can. It wouldn't help me find Sawney. Smelling him would and thinking like him would. I wasn't entirely happy with the fact that I thought each would be an identical exertion. I'd been a happy-go-lucky maniac myself for over a week once. It wasn't difficult at all to remember the curve and slide of that particular thought pattern. Far too easy, in fact. One jump and you were on the ride, whizzing along with the wind cackling like insane laughter in your ears.
I tried my nose first. It felt safer.
Columbia is bigger than it looks, and it looked plenty big enough. We were concentrating on the Morningside Heights campus, where the students and employee had all disappeared. Nothing had yet happened at the med school and hospital fifty blocks up. There was Morningside Park bordering one side of the campus and Promise said she would inquire of any nonhumans within, a polite way of saying she'd ask the local yokels if they'd seen a new monster in the neighborhood.
I went from building to building, and first I thought it was going to be easy, because I smelled him right off the bat. But it wasn't long before I realized that, yeah, his scent was present…everywhere. Rank and unmistakable. He was hunting here all right. From what I could tell he'd roamed every nook and cranny of the school. Keeping to the shadows, avoiding the security lights, but owning it … every inch.
Hot damn. We were finally on to something. From the smell of it he was here almost if not every night. Every night…but not that many students were missing. This couldn't be it, could it? One of his possible locations? Or his new home? He liked caves, and there wasn't much cavelike about this place. Still, something was going on. All we needed to do was find the bastard, slice off parts, and ask him what.
But finding him was a problem. With his smell literally everywhere, I wasn't sure how to pinpoint it. It's never easy, is it? "Well, shit." I stopped and crouched on the long strip of grass between Broadway and Amsterdam that connected two sections of the campus.
"Pretty boy." A hand tickled behind my ear. "Frustrated?"
Delilah.