Sliver of Silver (Blushing Death) (12 page)

Chapter 12

I sat in my office working on next year’s budget, happily submerging myself in blissfully mindless numbers and mundane tasks. No vampires or werewolves here. No emotional drama to clog up my day. It was wonderful.

My office was silent except for the clatter of my fingers on the keyboard and the click of my mouse.

A low-toned, dying cow sound filled my office as the phone rang, setting my teeth on edge. I picked it up as quickly as I could to make that horrible sound end. I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

“Hello, this is Dahlia,” I said in a semi-fake singsong voice that I hoped sounded professional.

“We found the rest of your friend,” Derek said in as close to a snarl as his human throat would allow. “I need you downtown,” he barked. “Now.”

“I’m at work,” I said, lowering my voice. I didn’t want my coworker in the next office to hear any part of my conversation. We had separate offices but the walls were paper-thin. I could hear everything that went on in his office and he could hear everything that went on in mine. They already thought I was slacking off. I didn’t need them to think I was bat shit crazy, too.

“So take lunch. This concerns you directly now, so get your ass down here.”

The line went dead.

“Derek? Derek?”
Shit!
I slammed the phone down, sitting for a minute without moving, without breathing.
I could make it quick and be back in an hour. Right? I could do it.
 

“Hey, Trevor,” I called with a question in my voice. Trevor was 52 years old, a bit on the pudgy side, slow as molasses when he did anything, and one of the sweetest men I’d ever met.

“Yeah,” he called back through the wall in the same questioning inflection.

“Do you mind if I go to lunch a little early?” I asked with an edge of desperation to my voice. He wasn’t my boss but I was in a dangerous position at the moment and couldn’t afford to do anything wrong. I was being careful for a change.

“Nah, not at all.”

I grabbed my bag and headed out the door before he could finish that thought. My phone vibrated in my bag and I snatched it from the bottom of my purse. There was a text message waiting for me.

122 W. Pearl Alley

The address was helpful but I could’ve found the place without it. The scene was the only location downtown surrounded by police cars other than police headquarters. I was tired of seeing flashing red-and-blue lights.

I’d honked my horn several times in long, solid notes before I even made the attempt to cross the police barricade. I didn’t have the time to haggle with the guy at the line in charge of keeping people out. Derek found me immediately since the head of every police officer within earshot of my horn turned. I wanted to get this over with and get back to work. Time was running out.

“Jesus, Kid, was that necessary?” he gruffed as he ushered me under the tape.

“Yes,” I answered. He handed me a pair of booties to put over my shoes. I glanced down at them and then at my heels and rolled my eyes. It wasn’t going to work. He shook his head.

“I came from work, what did you think I wore, tennis shoes?” I mocked. His attitude was killing me, absolutely fucking killing me.

“They’ll work. You’ll just have to tuck the booties in and don’t walk too hard,” he said in a huff, moving toward the group of officers gathered down at the end of the alley.

The Marriott to the right and the Federal courthouse to the left shrouded the alley in shadow. The pavement was covered in a glittering spray of broken glass and a wide gruesome splatter of blood but there was no body.

I gazed up the tall, mirrored windows of the Marriott. One of the windows of the hotel was busted out, explaining the glass all over the pavement.

The Marriott’s windows were too thick. Hotels didn’t want to be liable if someone decided to jump, so most hotels windows don’t open. In order to bust that window out, someone with superhuman strength would’ve had to put a large piece of furniture through the glass. I slipped the booties over my shoes and pushed through the crowd of cops behind Derek to get a better look.

A large pool of thick, congealed blood pooled on the ground, stretching across the alley and staining the gray pavement brown. The surface of the blood glistened as the slivers of sunlight permitted by the surrounding skyscrapers reflected off the broken glass lodged in the blood. The body of a woman dangled a few feet from the ground by her rope-bound ankles.

I counted the windows up from the ground to the busted out pane. Five, six, seven. She’d been tossed from what appeared to be the tenth floor.

“They cracked her skull like a coconut,” Derek said in a deadpan voice. “Her brain is gone,” he finished without looking at me. His eyes were completely focused on the blood staining the street and the body still hanging from her ankles.

She dangled and twisted in the wind, exposing the damage done to her body. Most of her skull was missing from the crown back and a hollow cavity where her brain had been gleamed with flashes of white. The woman’s bare skull caught the light like they’d licked the bone clean on the inside. The burning sting of bile rose in my throat. I refused to throw up.

Sonovabitch!

“They probably ate it,” I said in the same even tone. I’d forgotten there were still cops standing around. When I heard one of them retch and a second gasp, I shrank into myself and lowered my voice. “Are you sure it’s the same woman?” I asked, taking a step closer to him so the others wouldn’t overhear.

“Yep,” he said. “She’s missing her right hand. The same polish, too. We’re running fingerprints but I’m pretty sure it’s the same woman,” he said, jotting something down on his notepad.

“How long has she been dead?” I asked.

“Sometime between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. this morning. One of the other hotel guests heard a commotion around 5 a.m.” He rattled off the facts from his notebook in short succinct words.

“She was alive when they cut her hand off,” I whispered, horrified. “Was the room hers or theirs?” I asked, glancing back up at the broken window.

“Hers, and when we’re done, we’ll check the security video from the hotel. We might actually have the bastards on tape,” he said with a deadly smile.

I evaluated the scene, at the blood on the cement, at the amount of people in the alley. Even at 5 a.m., this would’ve been very, very public, especially downtown. Pearl Alley ran perpendicular to High Street, which was the main bus line. People would have been standing at the bus stop, on their way to work. Someone would have heard or seen something. These strays wanted someone to find her and quickly. What were they playing at?

We strode into the hotel room. Derek first, with me only a step or two behind. It was what I’d expected. Blood covered all four walls in splatters that looked like they’d flung her about the room, played with her. The place was tossed, furniture overturned, and the bed destroyed. They’d taken their claws to the mattress and had started digging. The same lingering sense of magic that I’d felt in the other house tingled across the air in the hotel room, like a whisper on the wind. The magic made my hair stand on end. It was stronger, earthier, and more concentrated than the previous scene.

The werewolves had spent more time in this room and by what Derek had said, probably a few days. Take-out containers littered the floor. I could taste the magic’s sting on my tongue, like eating a whole clove. The feel of the magic was overpowering and filled my senses, making my head throb in my skull with each beat of my heart. The quick fleeting tingles up my spine were wild and uncontrolled. The longer I was in the hotel room, the harder my head throbbed. I wanted out of that room and away from magic.

It was another hour before we made it from the hotel room into the hotel manager’s office to review the video. The forensics team processed the hotel room as Derek, the hotel manager, a guy named—wait for it—Guy and myself squeezed into a security office designed for one. Derek and I hunched over the hotel manager as he searched the back footage for the last time the key card to Room 1003 had been used.

The security room was cramped. The smell of garlic and cilantro oozed from the hotel manager and filled my nostrils as it seeped from his pores. The mix of the hotel manager’s scent and Derek’s cologne in such a compact space forced me to pinch my nose and try to stop breathing. I already had a headache, and they weren’t helping. Neither one seemed to notice or even mind as I held my breath.

“Where did they get all that rope?” I choked, trying to ignore the smells bombarding my sensitive nose.

“The hotel maintenance room,” the manager informed us as he scrolled through the computer listing.

“The security fence that housed the rope was ripped from its hinges on the wall,” Derek said.

“Did they need special access?” I asked, hoping there wasn’t another body somewhere.

“No, but I’ve already called corporate to get a system installed for the future,” the manager said, heaving his garlic-laced breath in my face.

“Little good that’ll do her now,” I huffed under my breath. The computer beeped and we all turned to gawk at it.

“The key card was last swiped the night before last,” the manager said.

“That would be around the time you got your little gift,” Derek said, glaring at me.

It wasn’t my damned fault that someone was hunting me. It’s not like I put an ad in the paper.

The manager sifted through the footage in rewind for twenty minutes before he got to the appropriate time. Evidently 6:30 p.m. in the hotel lobby was a busy time on a Saturday night. The lobby was packed full of people, checking in, heading to the bar, going in and out, or just sitting in the lobby. The footage was grainy and not very clear. I could barely make out any faces as the film moved in jarring starts and stops every second or second and a half. The cameras were mounted in the far corners of the lobby near the ceiling, not nearly close enough for me to pick out any distinguishing features from almost anyone, or anything.
Why have security cameras if you aren’t going to put them in places that will aid with, I don’t know, security?

“Wow, this is helping,” I ridiculed, glancing over the four split screens on the black and white monitor. A flicker of quick movement on the top right-hand screen caught my eye. “Wait,” I yelped. “There,” I said as I pointed at the screens. “Run this one back.”

The manager moved the footage back in slow motion as a man and woman crossed the screen quicker than everyone else in the frame, making no attempt to hide themselves from the camera. No one seemed to notice them either, moving either too quickly or using some of that magic I kept stumbling across.

“How’d you see that?” the hotel manager mumbled.

“Lucky, I guess.” I shrugged off his comment as Derek glared at me over Guy’s shoulder. I focused back at the screen without another word.

The man was tall, almost six inches taller than the man nearest him. The woman was pretty, slim and dark. Through the grainy black-and-white security footage, her hair was the color of onyx with facial features and dark skin that screamed Native American. She was petite compared to the man next to her. They walked side-by-side and he took great care, using his big body to keep her out of the camera’s eye. He didn’t seem camera shy at all, though.

“Is there a camera in the elevator or on the tenth floor?” I asked in hurried tones, finally getting excited. My blood pressure thumped through my veins as the chase suddenly got very interesting.

“There’s one in each elevator and on each floor,” the hotel manager said, shifting the program to the elevator cameras.

“Follow them,” Derek ordered.

The camera in the elevator wasn’t worth the footage. The werewolf had taken it upon himself to molest his mate in the elevator so neither of their faces were visible. The floor camera was more of the same until she opened the door and stepped inside. Once she was in the room, the male werewolf turned a sinister, smirking face at the camera before following her inside and closing the door behind him. I couldn’t be sure since the film was so grainy but I think he winked at me.

He was attractive in a confident, predator kinda way. His hair was light and wavy. His features were softened, like he’d been chiseled out of limestone and then worn away over time by rain and winds. His eyes were hard and empty above that sneer of a smile. He had a promise in his eyes that made me shiver.

“Why would he do that?” Derek whispered.

“He wants us to get a
really
good look,” I growled as I stood up and left the office. I’d had enough taunting.

I took a copy of the video so Jade could run it through her systems. I told Derek it was so that Patrick knew who we were looking for but I wasn’t sure he believed me. Quite frankly, I didn’t care if he did or not. I was tired of playing games. I was just tired.

I got back to work almost three hours after I’d left and hoping no one had noticed. When I walked back into the department office, the Department Chair’s office door was open. I stopped dead in my tracks as the harsh overhead light from his office filled the hallway.

Sonovabitch!

I opened my door as quietly as I could and slipped inside, hoping he wouldn’t notice I’d disappeared for most of the day. Again.

“Dahlia,” he called from inside his office. His tone was quiet and restrained.

I didn’t even have time to put my bag down before he called my name. I swallowed hard and fisted my hands to keep them from trembling as I dropped my bag into the chair next to the door. I turned with my back straight and my chin high as I circled around the corner and into his office.