The Beast

FORTY-TWO

“I did not expect your call.”

As Assail spoke, he pivoted around and smiled at Naasha. “Not so soon, at any rate.”

This eve, Naasha had chosen to receive him at her hellren’s abode in a dark and dramatic study full of leather-bound volumes and furniture that reminded him of humans’ private gentlemen’s clubs. Tonight, and she had dressed herself again in red, perhaps to match the velvet curtains that hung down like arteries from the ceiling—or perhaps because she believed he enjoyed her in the color.

“I found myself bereft of your company.” As she spoke, she enunciated the words with deliberation, her glossy lips pursing and releasing the syllables as if she were giving them a blow job. “I could not sleep this day.”

“From checking on your mate’s health through the hours of sunlight, no doubt.”

“No. From aching.” She came forward, crossing the thick red carpeting without making a sound. “For you. I am starved.”

When she stopped in front of him, he smiled coldly. “Are you now.”

She reached out and stroked his cheek. “You are quite an extraordinary male.”

“Yes, I know.” He removed her touch, but kept hold of her wrist. “What is curious to me is why my absence is so troubling, considering that you already have a cock under this roof.”

“My hellren is infirmed, if you recall,” she said in a remote tone. As if he were the last thing on earth she wished to speak of.

“It was Throe to whom I referred.” Assail smiled again and began to rub his thumb o’er her flesh. “I beg of you, what is your relation to him?”

“He is of distant blood to my mate.”

“So you have taken him in out of charity.”

“As is proper to do.”

Assail put his arm around her waist and drew her to his body. “You are not very proper sometimes, are you.”

“No,” she purred. “Does that turn you on?”

“It certainly turned you on two eves ago. You enjoyed my cousins very much.”

“And yet you did not participate.”

“I wasn’t in the mood.”

“Tonight?”

He made a show of looking over her face. Then he stroked her long hair back, moving it over her shoulders. “Mayhap.”

“And what would it take for you to get in the mood.”

As she arched her body against his, he pretended to find her captivating, closing his eyes and biting his lower lip. In truth? He might as well have been stropped by a dog.

“Where is Throe?” he asked.

“Jealous?”

“Of course. In fact, I am consumed.”

“You lie.”

“Always.” He smiled and bent to her mouth, running one of his fangs across her bottom lip. “Where is he?”

“Why do you care?”

“I like threesomes.”

The laugh she let out was husky and full of a promise he had no interest in. What he did care about was getting back down into that basement of hers—and that would be literally, not figuratively. Although if he had to fuck her to get there, he would.

She had clearly not wanted him to explore the other evening. And that made him wonder if she hadn’t something to hide.

“Alas, Throe is not in this evening.” She turned about in Assail’s arms and drove her ass into his pelvis. “I am by myself.”

“Where has he gone?”

She glanced over her shoulder, a sharp look in her eyes. “Why e’er do you focus on him so?”

“I have appetites that you cannot service, my dear. Much as your wares appeal.”

“Then mayhap you shall call your cousins in?” She resumed rubbing herself against him. “I should like to welcome them again.”

“I do not fornicate with my blood relations. However, if you should like to?”

“They do have a way of filling a female up. And mayhap I am too much for you to handle alone.”

Doubt it, he thought. But his cousins herein was a good idea.

Keeping an arm around her, Assail spun her back to face him, took his phone out, and a split second later, a discreet chiming sound from the front of the mansion was heard on the far side of the closed study doors.

“Ask and you shall receive,” he murmured as he kissed her hard and then disengaged her from him, giving her a push toward the exit. “Answer that yourself. Welcome them properly.”

She hurried off with a giggle, as if she liked being told what to do—and God, he couldn’t help but think of Marisol. If he had ordered his lovely cat burglar around like that? She would have castrated him and worn his balls for earrings.

A burning in the center of his chest made him reach for the vial of coke in the inner pocket of his Brioni suit jacket, but it wasn’t actually his addiction calling his hand to home for once.

The extra dose made his head hum, but that was going to work for him.

He had a lot of ground to cover tonight.

“Okay, where are you, where are you . . .”

As Jo drove ever deeper into Caldwell’s main, mostly failing, industrial park, she leaned into her VW’s windshield and wiped the sleeve of her jacket on the glass to clear the condensation. She could have cranked on the defroster—except the damn thing wasn’t working.

“I need another month before I can pay for that,” she muttered. “Until then, I’m not going to breathe.”

As she thought about Bill confronting her on her parents’ wealth, she had to laugh. Yes, it was true that principled stances were laudable. They rarely paid the bills, however—or fixed broken blowers that smelled like an electrical fire when you turned them on.

You did tend to sleep better at night, though.

When her phone started ringing, she grabbed for it, checked the screen, and tossed the thing back to the seat. She had other stuff to worry about other than Bryant’s after-hours demands. Besides, she had left his dry cleaning right where he’d told her to, on the front porch of his condo.

“Okay, here we are.”

As her headlights illuminated a flat-roofed, one-story building that was long as a city block and paneled in gray metal siding, she entered its empty parking lot and continued down toward its unadorned entrance. When she pulled up to the glass doors and the sign that had the name of the factory blackened out with layers of spray paint, she hit the brakes, killed the engine and got out.

There was yellow police tape in a circle all around, the fragile barrier whistling in the wind . . . a seal plastered on the door crack with the words CRIME SCENE in big letters on it . . . and evidence of a lot of foot traffic having been in and out, a path carved in the leaves and debris by shuffling feet and equipment that had been rolled or dragged along the ground.

Man, it was dark out here. Especially as her headlights turned themselves off.

“I need to get that carry permit,” she said out loud.

When her eyes adjusted, the graffiti on the building became visible again, and the pitted parking lot reemerged in her field of vision. There was no ambient city glow going on out in this part of Caldwell; too many abandoned buildings, the business park having failed when the economy went into the crapper seven years before.

Just as she was getting antsy and thinking of calling Bill, a car came over the rise and entered the lot as she had.

As Bill pulled up next to her, he put his window down and leaned across some other man. “Follow me.”

She gave him a thumbs-up and got back in her car.

Around they went, down the long front and the shorter side of the building. The facility’s rear door was even less fancy than the front; it didn’t even have a sign. The graffiti was thicker here, the signatures and angled line drawings layering one upon another like people talking over each other at a party.

Jo got out and locked her car. “Hey.”

The guy who emerged from Bill’s car was a little bit of a surprise. Six feet, maybe taller. Prematurely gray hair, but the hot kind, like Max’s from Catfish. Dark heavy glasses, as if being ocularly challenged and having a sense of style were prereqs for hanging with Bill. The body was . . .

Well, very good. Broad shoulders, tight waist, long legs.

“This is my cousin, Troy Thomas.”

“Hey,” the guy said, offering his hand. “Bill’s told me about you.”

“I can imagine.” She gave him a shake and then nodded over at the rear entrance. “Listen, you guys, there’s a seal on this door as well. I’m not feeling good about this.”

“I have clearance.” Troy pulled out a pass card. “It’s okay.”

“He’s in the CSI unit,” Bill explained.

“And I need to pick up some equipment, so this is authorized. Just please don’t touch anything, and no pictures, okay?”

“Absolutely.” Jo dropped her arm when she realized she was about to swear, palm-to-heart.

Troy led the way, cutting through the seal with a box knife before inserting his card in a CPD electronic padlock.

“Watch your step,” he said as he opened the door and flipped on the lights.

The shallow hall had two-toned carpet: cream on the outsides of the footpath, a mucky gray/brown where work boots had trodden. Streaks of dishwater gray grit lined the wall vertically, denoting leaks in the ceiling. The smell was something between moldy bread and sweat socks.

And fresh copper.

As they walked forward, there were cans of drooling paint to step over, some tools, and a couple of drywall buckets, all of which seemed to suggest the old owners, or maybe the bank that had repossessed the place, might have taken a stab at some renovation—only to give up when it proved to be too costly.

There were two offices, a reception area, a unisex bathroom, and a pair of steel doors, next to which were hard hats covered in dust hanging on hooks.

“Let’s go through over here. It’s easier.”

Heading to the left, Troy led them to a third option, standing aside once again as they went through a much narrower door. On the far side, he hit not a light switch, but something that looked like a fuse-box pull.

With a series of bangs, huge panels of lights came on one after another in a cavernous manufacturing space that was mostly vacant, nothing but empty brackets bolted into the floor and great grease shadows on the concrete indicating where machines had been.

“The massacre happened over here.”

Jo popped her eyebrows. Yes, it most certainly had, she thought as she caught sight of the pools of coagulated blood, once bright red, now browning with time’s passage. There were more of those drywall buckets here and there, and when she walked across and got a closer view of everything, she put her hand over her mouth and swallowed hard.

“It’s just like the farm,” Bill commented as he wandered around.

“Like what farm?” Jo said as she shook her head at the gore. “God, this was so violent.”

“You remember—almost two years ago? There was a scene just like this one only ten times more blood.”

“No bodies,” Troy interjected. “Again.”

“How many people do you think died here?” Jo asked.

“Ten. Maybe twelve?” Troy came around and crouched down next to a series of swipes through the blood on the floor—as if someone might have tried to escape but had slipped and fallen. “We can’t be sure. This place has been on the market for a year or two. The bank stopped using the security cameras five months ago when a lightning strike knocked them out during a spring storm. We’ve got nothing.”

“How do you get rid of that many bodies?” Jo wondered. “Where do you take them all?”

Troy nodded. “The homicide division is looking into all of that.”

And as for the vampire angle? she thought to herself. Those types usually took blood, right? They didn’t leave it behind in five-gallon lots.

Not that she was about to pose that one to Troy. Way too crazy.

She glanced over at Bill. “How many other mass murders or ritual whatevers have taken place in Caldwell in the last ten years? Twenty years? Fifty?”

“I can find out,” he said as their eyes met. “I’m thinking the exact same thing you are.”