“Cold shower time,” she muttered, shoving off the sheets to see that she was naked.
Panic spiked and she went to reach for the gun under her pillow—until she saw the clothes strewn on the floor, as if she’d thrown them about in the night. Laughing, she said, “Some dream.” One she wouldn’t mind repeating, if she was being honest. Being tormented to orgasm by a man her dream self clearly trusted . . . yeah, it was far better than remembering that black pit filled only with pain.
The clock showed that she’d actually slept for a serious amount of time—it was half past five in the morning, and she’d fallen into bed at six the previous day. Showering, she got dressed, weapons included, and was about to call Dmitri when her cell rang.
She picked up to find Sara’s deputy, Abel, on the other end. “There’s some kind of a situation in Little Italy,” he said. “Can you check it out?”
Every part of her hungered to get to the Catskills, but she was a hunter and that meant something. “Signal’s going to drop in the elevator,” she said. “Call you back when I reach the ground floor.”
Once there, she headed out onto the street. “So, details?”
“Yeah, not so much,” Abel said. “Cops are out there. No one’s quite sure what’s happening, but if you think it’s ours, call me back and I’ll assign someone—your Tower contract takes priority. Here’s the street.” He read it out.
“Got it,” she said, hailing a cab and sliding in. “I’ll call you after I’ve had a look at the scene.”
The cabbie began to drive. “Hunting?”
She nodded and gave him the address. It felt oddly comforting to be pegged as a hunter, because for months after the abduction, she hadn’t been. “Fast as you can.”
The cabbie’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, down, back again. “Hey, aren’t you that hunter that was missing?”
Her gut twisted. “Yes.”
There was lurid speculation in the eyes in the mirror this time. “I heard you came into the hospital covered in vampire bites.”
The Guild had done everything in its power to tamp down the gossip after her return, but there’d been nothing they could do about the non-Guild personnel involved in her recovery. Add in the numerous tests she’d had to undergo to find out if the bastards who’d taken her had left her with anything other than bruises, bites, a body on the edge of starvation, and more than a few fractured bones as well as a number of internal injuries, and she’d been seen at her weakest by dozens of people.
Most of those people had been good and kind. Some had been like this cabdriver.
The cabbie’s gleaming eyes, his lips half parted, threatened to shove her back into the pit, those ugly, probing hands violating her until there was nothing left. A month ago, she’d have curled into herself and gone silent. A month ago, she hadn’t shot bullets into two of her attackers. “Vampires’ tongues,” she said, sliding her finger carefully over the blade she’d pulled from the sheath on her thigh, “grow back when you cut them off. Humans, unfortunately, don’t have that ability.”
He whimpered and dropped his head. Sweat was rolling down his temples when they arrived at her destination, and he couldn’t even get the words out to ask for the fare. Swiping her credit card, she paid and got out.
Never again would anyone drag her into the dark.
17
“Nicholas!”
Glancing up at the sound of her name, Honor saw a big black cop with distinctive salt-and-pepper stubble that appeared to be a permanent fixture.
“Santiago,” she said, having worked a case with him a couple of years back, one of the rare few times she’d been put on a situation in Manhattan. “What do you have?”
“This.” He ducked under the barrier of crime scene tape to crouch down beside a body lying half on, half off the sidewalk. Lifting away the tarp that covered the victim, he nodded at her to have a look.
“Looks like he got attacked by a dog.” The young male’s neck was shredded, as if it had been gnawed on.
Santiago grunted. “Yeah, except the only places he’s been gnawed are the neck and the inner thigh.”
The carotid and the femoral arteries.
Leaning in close, she visually examined both wounds. The victim’s pants were bunched around his ankles, but he still had on his underpants, so the attack had been about the blood—though his attacker had wasted a great deal of it, from what she saw around the body. “I’m no pathologist, but looks to me like the wound is too degraded to determine if this was a vampire.” The fang marks had been obliterated in the mess of flesh.