What in the hell had that woman done at Benloise’s?
Clearly, she was a professional, with both the proper equipment and know-how, and a practiced approach to infiltration. He also suspected she’d either gotten plans to the house or had been in there previously. So efficient. So decisive. And he was qualified to judge: He’d followed her the whole time she’d been inside, ghosting through the window she’d opened, sticking to the shadows.
Tracking her from behind.
But this he did not understand: What kind of thief went to the trouble of breaking into a secured house, finding a safe, burning it open, and discovering plenty of portable wealth to lift…but didn’t take anything? Because he’d seen full well what she’d had access to; as soon as she’d left the study, he’d hung back, freed the shelving section as she had done, and used his own penlight to glance in the safe.
Just to find out what, if anything, she’d left behind.
When he’d come back out into the house proper, avoiding any pools of light, he’d watched as she’d stood for a moment in the front hall, hands on her hips, head rotating slowly, as if she were considering her options.
And then she’d gone over to what had to be a Degas…and pivoted the statue only an inch or so to the left.
It made no sense.
Now, it was possible that she’d gone into the safe looking for something specific that was not in fact there. A ring, a bauble, a necklace. A computer chip, a SanDisk, a document like a last will and testament or an insurance policy. But the delay in the hall had not been characteristic of her previous alacrity…and then she’d moved the statue?
The only explanation was that it had to be a deliberate violation of Benloise’s property.
The problem was, when it came to vendettas against inanimate objects, it was hard to find much significance in her actions. Knock the statue over, then. Take the damn thing. Spray-paint it with obscenities. Beat it with a crowbar so it was ruined. But a minuscule turn that was barely noticeable?
The only conclusion he could draw was that it was a kind of message. And he didn’t like that at all.
It suggested she might know Benloise personally.
Assail opened the driver’s-side door—
“Oh, God,” he hissed, recoiling.
“We were wondering how long you were going to stay in there.”
As the dry voice drifted over, Assail got out and looked around the five-car garage in distaste. The stench was somewhere between three-day-old roadkill, spoiled mayonnaise, and denatured cheap perfume.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked the cousins, who were standing in the doorway from the mudroom.
Thank the Scribe Virgin, they came forward and closed the way into the house—or that hideous smell was going to flood the interior.
“It’s your drug dealers. Well, part of them, at any rate.”
What. The. Hell.
Assail’s long strides took him in the direction Ehric was pointing to—the far corner, where there were three dark green plastic bags thrown in a heap without care. Getting down on his haunches, he loosened the yellow tie of one, yanked apart the neck, and…
Met the sightless eyes of a human male he recognized.
The still-animated head had been severed cleanly from the spine about three inches below the jawline, and had oriented itself so that it could look out of its loosey-goosey coffin. The dark hair and ruddy skin were marked with black, glossy blood, and if the smell had been bad over by the car, up close and personal it made his eyes water and his throat tighten in protest.
Not that he cared.
He opened the other two bags and, using the Hefty plastic as a skin barrier, rolled the other heads into the same position.
Then he sat back and stared at the three of them, watching those mouths gape impotently for air.
“Tell me what happened,” he said darkly.
“We showed up at the prearranged meeting place.”
“Skating rink, waterfront park, or under the bridge.”
“The bridge. We arrived”—Ehric motioned to his twin, who stood silent and watchful beside him—“on time with the product. About five minutes later, the three of them showed up.”
“As lessers.”
“They had the money. They were ready to make the transaction.”
Assail whipped his head around. “They didn’t come to attack you?”
“No, but we didn’t figure that out until it was too late.” Ehric shrugged. “They were slayers who came out of nowhere. We didn’t know how many of them there were, and we were not taking any chances. It wasn’t until we searched the bodies, and found the correct amount of money, that we realized they’d just come to do the deal.”
Lessers in the trade? This was a new one. “Did you stab the bodies?”
“We took the heads and hid what was left. The money was in a backpack on that one on the left, and naturally, we brought the cash home.”
“Phones?”
“Got them.”
Assail started to slide a cigar out, but then didn’t want to waste the taste. Reclosing the bags, he rose up from the carnage. “You are certain they were not aggressive?”
“They were ill-equipped to defend themselves.”
“Being badly armed does not mean they weren’t there to kill you.”
“Why bring the money?”
“They could have been dealing elsewhere.”
“As I said, it was in the correct amount and not one penny more.”
Abruptly, Assail motioned for them all to proceed into the house, and oh, the relief that came with clean air. With the screens slowly descending over all the glass, and the coming dawn getting shut out, he went to the wine bar, retrieved a double magnum of Bouchard Père et Fils, Montrachet, 2006 and popped the cork.
“Care to join me?”
“But of course.”
At the circular table in the kitchen, he sat down with three glasses and the bottle. Pouring the trio, he shared the chardonnay with his two associates.
He didn’t offer the cousins any of his Cubans. Too valuable.
Fortunately, cigarettes made an appearance and then they all sat together, smoking and taking hits of bliss off the knife edge of his Baccarat.
“No aggression from those slayers,” he murmured, leaning his head back and puffing upward, the blue smoke rising above his head.
“And the exact amount.”
After a long moment, he returned his eyes to level. “Is it possible the Lessening Society is looking to get into my business?”
Xcor sat in candlelight, alone.
The warehouse was quiet, his soldiers yet to come home, no humans or Shadows or anything walking above him. The air was cold; same with the concrete beneath him. Darkness was all around, except for the shallow pool of golden illumination he sat at the outer rim of.
Some thought in the back of his mind pointed out that it was getting dangerously close to dawn. There was something else, too, something he should have remembered.
But there was no chance of anything getting through his haze.
With his eyes focused on the single flame before him, he replayed the night over and over again.
To say that he had found the Brotherhood’s location was mayhap a stretch of the truth—but not a total fallacy. He’d been following that Mercedes out into the countryside incremental mile by incremental mile, with no real plan of what he could or should do when it stopped…when from out of nowhere, the signal of his blood in his Chosen’s body had not just been lost, but wildly redirected—sure as a ball thrown against a wall sharply changed its trajectory.
Confused, he had scrambled about, dematerializing this way, that way, up and back—as all the while, a strange feeling of dread came over him, like his skin was an antenna for danger and it was warning of imminent harm. Backing off, he had found himself at the base of a mountain, the contours of which registered, even in the bright, clear moonlight, as fuzzy, indistinct, unclear.
This had to be where they stayed.