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A block later she asked, “I interfered?”
So she cared beyond herself. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that. I’m just … I’d hate to think someone else might suffer because you saved me.”
“Your danger seemed the most immediate.”
“Thank you. I was terrified.” And she sounded reluctant to admit it. “I’d have fought, but with four of them …” She let it trail off.
“I know.” He could still smell the fear on her, though it had faded considerably. Making it easier for him to maintain control. But the scent of her blood—there was a time he would have followed that scent around the globe.
With another squeal he took a sharp corner, then zipped into a parking space in front of his off ice.
“We’re here,” he said. “I’ll take you to Chloe.”
It didn’t look as if anything was alive or awake on the street, but one little light burned redly next to a doorbell a half dozen steps below street level. He guided her down, swiped his key in the security lock, and heard the bolt slide open.
He shoved the heavy steel door open and urged her in ahead of him. She seemed reluctant now, afraid again. Of course, the hallway was unlit out of deference to his night vision.
“Chloe?” he called out to reassure his companion.
A moment later a doorway opened in the dark hallway, and yellow light spilled forth. Chloe emerged from her office, dressed in some weird version of not-quite-punk, not-quite-stripper black leather and lace. She dyed her hair black and wore it in spikes. The whole getup was topped with an amazing amount of black eyeliner and dark shadow.
“Jude,” she said, her light, youthful voice sounding surprised. “I didn’t expect you for a couple of hours.”
“A little hitch,” he explained, motioning to the woman beside him. “She was about to be assaulted by some thugs.”
Chloe, for all she was weird—and to deal with him she had to be weird—at once surged forward. “Oh, my gosh! Are you all right?”
His rescued human relaxed at last. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”
“Take care of her,” Jude said to Chloe. “Get her home. I’ve got to go back.”
Chloe’s eyes leapt to him even as she wrapped a supporting arm around the woman. “You mean you didn’t …?”
“Not yet. I have to get back.”
Chloe started to shake her head. “It’s late, Jude. Way late. Let it go until tomorrow.”
He’d been dealing with the threat of sunrise for nearly two hundred years. He didn’t need anyone to remind him, or warn him. But when he checked internally, he reached a conclusion that displeased him.
“You’re right. It’ll have to wait.” The passage of the night hours somehow had engraved themselves inside. Hours before dawn he could feel the sun’s approach, and while he needn’t fear the light until the sun fully rose, he had learned to measure his nights by an internal clock.
His clock said there wasn’t enough time to retrace his steps and approach the man he’d been seeking. Not at the height of summer when the days were so long, the dawn so early.
He hated to let this matter wait. It had taken him a whole month to track down this one man. What if he moved again?
But truthfully, he would probably be able to follow the guy’s trail even if he moved all the way across the city. Because he had scented it, caught it, memorized it.
Much like he’d memorized the scent of the woman he’d saved. In some corner of his brain, she was catalogued, and he could follow her anywhere. Or recognize her again even if decades or centuries passed.
Hell. He swore under his breath, watching as Chloe settled the woman with a cup of tea and plenty of youthful mothering. Himself he took into the back office, a room without windows, one where he could work even during the day if it was absolutely necessary.
It seldom was a good thing, because the sleep of death was hard to resist. And when he did resist it, sooner or later he had to make up for it, usually during night hours that were rightfully his.
He pulled some blood out of the refrigerator by his desk, and drained the bag without bothering to use a glass. Cold, and not completely alive, tainted with anticoagulants, it never quite satisfied the craving, but it kept him healthy. One of these days soon he needed to call on one of his acquaintances, one of those who would let him feed. No substitute quite made up for the warm, pumping blood of a living donor.
When he finished draining the bag, he sealed it away in an airtight container marked Biohazard. Soon the drops that were left would begin to rot, and the smell of rotting blood was even more repulsive to him than it was to humans. At all costs, that sickly odor had to be concealed.
He’d made the right decision, he told himself. By dawn that nameless woman out there would probably have been a brutalized corpse. While he couldn’t read minds, he could smell intentions and emotions, and those thugs had been full of evil intent and a determination to leave no witness behind.
And something more. Something not quite right in their scents. Not drugs, which he could identify almost as accurately by scent as by a lab test. No, some other odor that left him feeling deeply disturbed.
He would have to deal with them eventually. Of that he had no doubt. But right now he was concerned about his more immediate target. The killer he sought was demonically oppressed, if not possessed, which meant the cops would never find him. Never. At least not until the demon was removed from the picture.
He drummed his fingers impatiently on his desk, and looked at the clock. It told him what his body already knew: not enough time, not tonight. For an ordinary killer, maybe he could squeak it in, but not a possessed one.
A knock on the door called for his attention. “Come in, Chloe.” He knew it was her because her scent wafted more strongly under the door.
She pushed the door open and stuck her head in. “Our lady friend doesn’t want to go home just yet, and Garner just arrived.”
“Garner?” Just what he needed: a visit from an inept hunter who was trying to win his spurs while making a complete nuisance of himself. And a rescued woman who now didn’t want to go home. A damn three-ring circus in his outer office.
“Sorry,” Chloe whispered. “I told him you were busy but he seems to know something about the, um, target.”
Things really couldn’t get any better, could they? he thought sarcastically as he pushed back from his desk. Garner mixing in with a dangerous case and that woman ….
Realizing he hadn’t yet shucked his leather coat, he tugged it off and tossed it over his chair. It was the kind of oversight a human might notice, and he didn’t want the woman to notice any more than she already had. Though he was fairly impervious to the ambient temperature, he kept the office comfortable enough for humans, like Chloe. That coat would appear out of place, and with Garner adding to the chaos of the night, he didn’t want one more damn thing to seem out of place.
He stepped into the front office, his gaze first going to the woman. Not only was her scent absolutely intoxicating, but she was far prettier than he’d noticed in the earlier chaos. Long inky hair, wide blue eyes and lips that seemed to beg for a kiss. She sat in one of the client chairs near Chloe’s desk, her legs crossed in a way that revealed surprising length in a woman so small. Her arms were folded tightly, but they failed to conceal the mounds of her breasts, not too small, not too large. She was as much a visual delight as an olfactory delight. Eminently desirable, eminently drinkable. A dangerous combination.
He dragged his gaze away and looked at Garner, who was leaning casually against the wall. Blond, barely twenty-four, Garner suffered from delusions of grandeur brought about by a Gift. The young man looked elegant, in a rough sort of way, and appeared composed, although Jude could smell that he was far from as calm as he appeared. “What do you want?”
“I know something about the, ah, target you’re after.”
“And how would you know that?”
Garner actually flushed a little. Since he wasn’t undead, he still had blood pressure that responded to his emotions.
“Get in my office,” Jude said impatiently. “And close the door.”
Garner didn’t argue, for once. He did exactly what he was told.
Then Jude returned his attention to beautiful and problematic woman. “Why don’t you want to go home?”
She bit her lower lip, revealing a glimpse of perfect, white teeth. “Because that guy who offered me a ride? He knows where I live.”
Chloe spread her hands as if to say, How can you argue with that?
Easy. “Chloe will take you to the police. File a complaint against him for sexual assault. They’ll run him down.”
“But I don’t have any proof he did anything. And if I go to the police …” Again she stopped, as if unwilling to say more. “I don’t want to make him madder,” she said finally.
“More likely he’ll cool down and decide he made a big mistake. Maybe he just had too much to drink.”
The woman shook her head, biting her lip harder.
Jude smothered a sigh. “What aren’t you telling me?”
The woman hesitated, then the words came out of her in a rush. “I kicked him in the groin. And he got so mad he started to swing at me and that’s when I stabbed him.”
“Stabbed him?” Had Jude been mortal he was sure that by this point he’d be looking for a double whiskey and a chair.
“With a pen,” she said quickly. “It’s not like I had a knife or anything.”
Jude decided on the chair after all. And maybe a whiskey later, though it would have little effect on him. He sat.
“How badly did you stab him?”
“Not too badly. I got him in the shoulder and I’m pretty sure the pen couldn’t have gone in more than two inches, max. I’m fairly certain I didn’t hit anything but muscle. Then I got out of the car and started running, and he chased me for maybe half a block screaming he was going to kill me.”
“Oh.” He wondered how he had missed that part of the night’s activity. Probably too focused on what he was there to do, or maybe he’d arrived shortly after this altercation. Either way … So the guy had threatened to kill her. Even on his most sanguine day he couldn’t dismiss such a threat out of hand.
He looked at Chloe, then looked at the woman. “What’s your name?”
“Terri. Theresa Black.”
“Okay, Theresa Black, are you absolutely certain you’re telling me the truth?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because there could have been other reasons to stab this guy.”
He smelled the indignation as much as he saw it. All right, she was telling the truth. She’d defended herself from an attacker.
Chloe spoke. “You don’t have time.”
“You’re always worried about my time,” he grumped at her.
“Maybe because I don’t want to look for another job? You don’t have time tonight. There’s Garner. And other things.”
Like he needed her to remind him.
“Don’t have time for what?” Theresa asked.
“Never mind,” he answered shortly. His inner clock was starting to tick more loudly, warning of dawn’s approach. He glanced at the clock on Chloe’s desk and saw he had less than two hours. Not enough to hunt down a man he knew nothing about.
He looked at Chloe. “I want all the information on the guy who attacked her. Every detail. Right away.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Then you and I are taking her to the cops.”
“Maybe Garner could …”
He interrupted her with a look. “Garner? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Well, it was a thought. He’s got to learn sometime.”
“Not today. Garner can turn the smallest task into an earth-shattering catastrophe. I don’t have time to clean up after him. No Garner.”
“I don’t want to go to the cops,” Theresa said firmly. “That’ll just make things worse with Sam. And if they keep me too long, I’ll be late to work. I can’t afford that.”
“Call in sick.” Jude had had enough. Another minute in the same room with this woman and he might revert. He rose. “If you don’t go to the police, if you go home or go to work instead, then I take no responsibility for anything that happens to you.”
Turning, he walked into his office. Before he closed the door he heard Theresa say, “Is he always so harsh?”
“Only when his night gets messed up.”
Then he closed the door, leaving the problem of Theresa in the capable hands of Chloe, so he could face the much less capable hands of Garner.
Garner lounged in the client chair facing Jude’s desk, one leg thrown over the arm. The instant Jude entered, however, he straightened up, putting both feet on the floor.
Jude said nothing as he rounded the desk and took his own seat. Only then did he speak. “What the hell are you doing here, Garner?”
The younger man shrugged. “I smelled the, ah, target.”
“And?”
“I smelled that same odor somewhere else, earlier today. On someone else.”
At that Jude straightened a bit. “Victim?”
Garner shook his head. He might still be new at all this, but he was sure of his innate instincts. “The oppression involves more than the one guy you found.”
“Hell.”
Garner leaned forward, a little too eagerly. “Look, I know you think I’m too untrained to help at all. I still haven’t figured out how you think I’m going to get trained if you keep me out of all the action. But even you know how good my gift is. And I’m telling you, this is no minor infestation. I bet if I keep moving around town, I’ll find others.”
It was possible, entirely too possible. Such things had happened before, and when they did they invariably signaled a huge problem right around the corner.
“We need to stop it before there are five of them,” Garner said. As if Jude didn’t already know. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. “I followed the guy home. We can find him here.”
Jude caved, just a little. Reaching into his desk he pulled out a container of pushpins. “Put it on the map.” The map of the city that was tacked to one wall. The red pin already there indicated the target he’d been after tonight.
Garner seemed pleased to be allowed to do even this much. Jude, remembering other times when Garner’s attempts to help had proved more problematic than anything, wondered once again what he was going to do with this young man before the kid got himself into serious trouble. The dead kind of trouble.
Garner marked the spot with a blue pin and returned to his seat. “I can help,” he said again.
