Pray for Dawn

TWELVE

Back on the street, I paused beneath the streetlamp next to Mira, letting my gaze sweep up and down Factors Walk. The whole area was thick with shadows and intermittently broken by dim lamplight. To my left, I saw a small figure scurry down the alley before cutting down between a pair of buildings. It was only a brief glimpse, but my vision was keen enough to pick out what appeared to have been a young girl with a ragged backpack. Could it have been the same girl from earlier? I needed to find her again, ask her what she saw. But it was too late to go chasing her now. I would have to do my searching by daylight with James at my side.

“What if there was a witness?” I asked, staring at the empty spot where I had seen the girl.

“Who?” Mira inquired. She moved out of the lamplight and back into the shadows. I looked over in time to see her putting her glasses back into her pocket, staring in the same spot I had been just moments ago. Possibly she had seen the girl too.

“What about a homeless person? This has got to be an area where they occasionally gather,” I suggested.

Mira frowned, crossing her arms over her stomach as she looked up and down the alley. “It’s definitely possible,” she slowly conceded but then shook her head. “But the odds of finding that person are pretty slim. They’re not likely to go to the police. I would need to meet the witness so I could pick the image of the killer out of his or her mind. The chances are pretty slim.”

“True, but we don’t have much to go on at the moment,” I reminded her. “We haven’t even narrowed it down to a particular race.”

“I’ll call Daniel later,” Mira sighed. “See if I can get him to question some of the locals.”

We silently walked to Mira’s car, bogged down by our own thoughts. James lagged behind. In the silence of the night, I could hear his heart pounding in his chest. He was nervous about something.

“W—where do we go now?” he stammered.

“The morgue,” I replied, turning to look at him. “We need to look at the body and talk to the coroner. The way she died may tell us more about our killer.”

“Oh,” he whispered.

“I want you to stay behind. Start doing some more digging into the girl’s past. See what you can uncover,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he asked, though the relief was already evident in his tone.

“Yeah, get out of here. I’ll need you with me in the morning.”

With a quick nod, he wished Mira good night and briskly walked down the street, back to the hotel.

I turned to find Mira watching me with a strange look on her face. “Should I ask what that was about?”

“After the attack on Themis last summer, I think he’s seen enough of mangled dead bodies. He’s more useful to me researching Abigail Bradford, not passing out at the sight of her dead body,” I said.

To my surprise, Mira simply nodded and starting walking back toward her car, passing up the opportunity to mock me and my decision to set the eager researcher free.

But in truth, I shouldn’t have been surprised. We both had bigger issues on our minds. Was a new war brewing, and the catalyst the death of a human that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had Abigail Bradford gotten in over her head? Or just ended up on the wrong side of a fight within the local pack? Lycans and nightwalkers were killed all the time. Heaven knows that I was more frequently than not the cause. Yet, no one digs into their deaths. The situation is quickly swept under the rug and the body disappears. Sometimes humans are caught in the middle regardless of whether they fully understand the situation or not.

Was this the case with the Bradford girl? Maybe, but there were other players lingering in the shadows. Creatures that would like nothing more than to see Mira’s head roll because humans were enlightened in her city ahead of schedule. There were factors I was afraid Mira wasn’t considering that could get us both killed.

“It seems doubtful a nightwalker killed her,” I hedged when we reached the car.

Mira looked over the roof of the black BMW, her eyes narrowed. Her whole body seemed to have tensed in the pregnant silence that hung between us. “But…” she prompted.

“What if the order had come directly from the coven? Just kill the girl. No feeding,” I suggested.

“No,” she said with a shake of her head. Her answer had come so quickly that I thought it was more from fear of it being a distinct possibility than actual knowledge.

“Even an Ancient?”

Mira didn’t reply, her eyes darting away from me to look at the side of the car. My heart did an odd little skip as I watched her expressive face turn over the implications. It was an angle she hadn’t considered. Until now, I think we had both considered the woman’s death to be accidental or an act of local revenge.

“I would have known if an Ancient had come into my territory,” she stubbornly said at last, pulling open her car door.

I opened my door and slid into the leather interior at the same time. “Not if you were in London,” I countered.

“If you’re implying that Ryan—” she began, but I quickly cut her off. Was Ryan working with the coven? Maybe, but doubtful. From what I had seen, the warlock didn’t play well with others. He liked being in control of a situation, and a herd of nightwalkers with their own agenda would not allow him to remain in control. Right now, I think he saw Mira as more malleable than trying to work with the whole coven.

“No. I think someone might have taken advantage of your brief absence,” I ventured, trying to ignore the fact that if I was even slightly right, we were in serious trouble. “The Ancient could be in the city now. Jabari cloaked himself from you. I’m assuming this isn’t a skill unique to him.”

“Jabari was never in that room. I know his scent as well as my own,” she argued. Mira shoved the key into the ignition, but didn’t turn on the car, seeming content to sit in the darkness.

“It doesn’t have to be Jabari. Any Ancient. Anyone with a grudge. What about the vampire from Machu Picchu?”

“Stefan.” Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel.

Months ago, Stefan had been sent by the coven to aid us in our ascent to the ruins on the mountain where the naturi were attempting to open the door between our worlds. I didn’t know how old he was, but judging by the power that rolled off him, he was fairly close to the thousand-year mark, if not already past it. He also didn’t seem to be a very big fan of Mira’s. Of course, neither were most of the vampires I had run across.

“My point is,” I stressed, trying to bring Mira’s dark thoughts away from whatever torture she was devising for Stefan. “Speeding along the Great Awakening meets with the desires of your liege and starting it in your city would give the coven yet another excuse to cut your heart out.”

Mira growled in the back of her throat, balling her right hand into a fist. She raised her hand to pound on the steering wheel, but I caught her wrist in my hand. The nightwalker’s glowing lavender eyes snapped to my face.

“You’ll hurt your ‘baby,’” I reminded her in a soft voice as I slowly released her wrist. The glow in her narrowed eyes instantly faded as a crooked smile lifted one corner of her mouth. Her skin was surprisingly cool to the touch with a somewhat waxy feel. I couldn’t begin to guess how long it had been since she had last fed. A grudging respect for the vampire began to take hold when I realized she hadn’t even made a move to bite me at the feeding earlier.

A new thought twisted in my gut, sending a wave of chills running up my flesh. Would I have stopped her if she had tried to bite me? Lost in one wave after another of mind-numbing pleasure, I couldn’t imagine pushing her away if she had come offering to send me along that next wave. Hell, my own face had been buried in her neck and I could clearly remember the feel of my own teeth running along her skin. Even now, something dark and primal demanded I taste her flesh, to drink her in so that she would become a part of me.

“The coven doesn’t need a fresh reason to confiscate my heart,” she said, her grim voice bleeding into the darkness.

“They already have ample reason to cause problems here,” I replied, forcibly pulling my thoughts back to the current quandary at hand.

“I know,” she whispered, turning the key. The engine turned over with a feral growl then settled into a steady purr that would have been the envy of any large cat. “This is all great speculation, but that’s still all it is. We need answers and I think we’ll have a few more after we have a look at the body and autopsy report.”

First, a rather posh apartment in the heart of the River Street club district, complete with body outline, and now the morgue. Traveling with Mira, I always got to see some of the more interesting sights within a city.