Chapter 11
Evie fell silent in the back of the car, thinking through everything she’d just discovered. A small voice in a far recess of her brain – a voice that she was duly trying to ignore – was urging her to reorganise her priorities. With so many new Thirsters on the streets and a coven of Originals to find and destroy, she knew she should think about parking the Victor issue.
But what if she focused on this and he slipped through her fingers? What if it was then too late for revenge? She couldn’t just put it to one side. Not now.
She turned it over in her mind and then figured that there was no harm in trying to do two things at once. She was a female of the species, after all. And they were in LA. It wouldn’t hurt for them to detour and try to discover what they could about Victor’s whereabouts. It would only take an hour or so. She pulled the map out with the address on and thrust it under Ash’s nose.
He glared at her in the rear-view mirror then exchanged a brief glance with Vero. Finally, barely suppressing the sigh, he tapped the address into the GPS.
Carter Holdings, the address on the letter she’d found in the store, turned out to be a squat brick building with metal shutters clamped over the windows. It was situated in an area so deserted and derelict that Evie half expected the building to be cordoned off with yellow tape. The street stank of urine and dead animal.
Evie crunched across a sidewalk littered with old syringes and dog mess until she was standing in front of the door. She tried the handle. There was no give. It appeared to be double bolted.
‘Let’s try around the back,’ Ash suggested, heading for the corner.
Evie followed him, Vero bringing up the rear. They made their way down a stinking, garbage-strewn alley and found the back door also double locked. To the side of it, though, was a window, which looked just big enough for someone to squeeze through, if they contorted themselves enough.
‘Stand back,’ Ash said.
Evie ducked as he slung a brick straight through the glass.
Straight away an alarm started blaring. Evie glared at Ash.
‘Better get a move on,’ Ash said, grinning at her as he cleared the broken glass off the sill with his sleeve.
Evie paused for a fraction of a second, trying to listen for any police sirens, but the noise of the alarm was deafening. Damn it. They would only have this one shot. She placed her hands carefully on the sill and squeezed herself through the narrow frame.
She crunched down onto a carpet of broken glass and blinked through the gloom. It was a sparsely furnished office: a couple of desks were pressed against the wall on one side and opposite the door stood a filing cabinet. She crossed straight to it and yanked the top drawer. It was locked.
‘Have you got your knife?’ she yelled to Ash, who had wriggled through the window behind her.
Ash nodded, slipping it out of its sheath on his waist. Evie took it and slid it around the metal rim of the drawer, jimmying it against the lock. She felt a slight buckle of resistance and smacked down harder on the hilt with the heel of her hand until she felt the lock give.
She tossed the knife to Ash and pulled open the drawer. It was jammed with brown manila folders. Holding her breath, Evie rifled quickly through them, slowing when she got to L.
It was there. Victor’s name, stamped in black ink on the cover. With shaking fingers Evie dragged the folder free and stared at it.
Lassonde, Victor.
She was about to start rifling through it when Ash snatched it out of her hands.
‘Hey,’ Evie yelled, lunging for it, ‘give that back!’
‘Let’s just take it and get out of here,’ Ash said, tilting his head in the direction of the street. Evie opened her mouth to complain and then snapped it quickly shut. Over the noise of the alarm, she could hear a siren screaming.
She nodded and raced Ash to the window.
Twenty minutes later they pulled up in front of a house in West Hollywood. Set back from the road, almost completely hidden behind a row of ornamental bushes, and with a trellis of pink roses trailing around the front door, it didn’t look like the kind of place Victor would call home, but then what did she really know about Victor, other than that he liked to wear silk ties and that he was a lying, murdering psychopath?
Ash parked a block down the street and killed the engine.
‘You two can wait here,’ Evie told Ash and Vero, throwing open her door.
‘We’re coming with you,’ Ash answered, climbing out of the car and blocking her path.
Evie glared at him and at Vero, who had come to stand beside him. She didn’t want them being dragged into this. They had no fight with Victor. But more than that, she had to admit, she wanted this revenge all to herself.
‘We’ve got your back, Evie. You’re not walking in there alone,’ Ash told her quietly.
Evie thought about arguing some more, but finally relented. Having backup probably wasn’t such a bad idea.
‘He’s all mine though,’ Evie muttered as she shouldered her way past them.
‘Understood,’ Ash answered, striding past her and around to the trunk. He popped it open and begun rifling through the contents of a duffel bag. ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘You can’t go in there unarmed. Here, take this.’ He offered her a semi-automatic pistol, threw Vero a knife and pocketed some nunchuckers for himself.
Evie stared down at the gun, feeling its dull weight in the palm of her hand. Victor had once told her that guns weren’t worth fighting with – that bullets ran out and you couldn’t trust a gun to hit its target or not jam on you. He’d claimed that knives were better, that they became an extension of yourself. He had once told her that if your intention was true it would always strike home.
He’d killed Lucas with a knife.
Evie reached into the trunk and took hold of the longest blade that she could find. It was something she’d seen Ash fight with once. An Oriental antique sword with intricate engravings wrought down the length of the blade. It looked like it had been hewn with cruelty in mind and it slid into her hand as if it belonged there.
She caught the nervous glance Vero shot Ash as she turned back around to face them, holding the blade at her side.
‘Ready?’ she asked, the lightness of her voice belying her jangling nerves.
Ash nodded, closing the trunk. ‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said, taking a deep breath.
They walked up the street, their footsteps ringing in unison, and for a moment Evie had a sense of the brotherhood that Cyrus, Ash and Vero had once shared. She felt as if her sides were protected, that she was being looked out for. She hadn’t felt that since Lucas had died.
She slowed almost to a standstill as she absorbed that truth, falling out of stride with the others. They slowed too, instinctively, and she quickly upped her pace, not wanting them to think she was having second thoughts about what she was about to do.
As they approached the house, she felt the atmosphere grow heavy around them. The house was completely, ominously, dark. As silent and still as a graveyard.
‘He’ll have sensed us,’ Vero whispered, as they made their way up the path.
Evie pushed the hood of her sweater down so she could hear better. ‘Good,’ she said, scanning the front of the house. ‘I want him to hear me coming. I want him to be ready. I want him to fight back.’
She caught the troubled sideways glance that Ash gave her but ignored it and stepped forward, heading along the path that ran down the side of the house. Breaking in through the back door would be less conspicuous, she figured. She couldn’t afford to be interrupted by the police.
The back of the house was also sunk in darkness. Evie crept slowly towards the door. Her senses were blazing. ‘Can you feel anything?’ she asked the others.
‘No,’ Ash and Vero both answered simultaneously.
Evie scowled at the back door. Damn it. He wasn’t here. Had he ever been? She tried to zone out all the other noises – the hiss of cicadas and thrum of traffic in the distance – and focus on her senses.
Yes. It was the right house. He might not be here now, but Victor had been here once. She could feel the trace of him in the air, almost like a scent.
‘Let’s take a look inside,’ Ash said. ‘We may as well while we’re here.’
Evie didn’t need any further invitation. She smashed her elbow into the glass panel in the back door and then pushed her hand through and unlocked it from the inside.
They stepped over the broken glass and walked into a kitchen – clean, modern, a coffee cup on the draining board, but no other sign of life.
Evie strode to a door straight ahead of them and opened it. It led out into a narrow hallway. Her eyes fell immediately on a pair of leather loafers sitting neatly by the front door. There was a coat stand to the left. On it hung a suit jacket and a red silk cravat. Three swords were sticking out of an umbrella stand beside it.
‘Well, we’ve definitely found him,’ Evie remarked, feeling her heart rate almost double at the sight of the swords and cravat.
She turned her head, scanning the hallway for the best place to hide in order to get a clean strike the moment Victor walked in the door.
‘Er, guys?’
Evie spun around. Vero was calling to them from another room.
‘You might want to come and take a look at this,’ she shouted.
Evie’s stomach clenched. She followed Vero’s voice down the hallway and into a front room, the hairs on her arms bristling. Something wasn’t right about this house.
She found Vero standing in the centre of an empty room. She glanced around, unsure what she was supposed to be looking at. The room was bare – there was no furniture, not even a lampshade.
Then she saw it. What Evie had first dismissed as wallpaper was actually a collage made of newspaper clippings, maps, sheets of paper and large colour photographs. It covered the entire far wall of the room.
Evie took a faltering step forward, trying to take it all in, trying to understand and make sense of the hideous mosaic that was materialising in front of her. The pictures were crime scene images of bodies and body parts.
‘What’s he doing?’ she murmured in horror.
‘He’s hunting them, just like we are,’ Ash answered quietly.