Cause of Death: Unnatural (The Cause of Death Series) (9 page)

Nick grunted. "A warehouse with history,"
he said. "Oh yeah, that's really helpful."

"Shut up, Nick," said Em. "
Thanks,
Will. Thanks for talking to us." She stood up
and tilted her face so that Nick couldn't see the wink and the grateful smile
she gave to Will. "If you think of anything else you can tell us..."

"Yeah," said Will. "I know
where to find you."

Em had the spoonful of pasta halfway to her lips when
Jarek materialized suddenly next to her on the sofa.

"Ugh," she said, juggling the bowl
on her lap and clutching at the glass of red wine which had been balancing on
the cloth arm of the sofa and was now tottering precariously. "What was
wrong with the door?"

A few trails of black smoke pulled themselves
into Jarek's figure. He had dropped the visiting English medical examiner form
and returned to his favourite muscles-and-black-silk persona. Em was glad. That
weedy British thing had been getting on her nerves.
So not
her type.

Jarek peered dubiously into her dinner and
raised an eyebrow.

"
It's
pasta
sauce," said Em.
"Made with tomatoes.
You
should try it sometime."

Jarek snorted.

He stretched his legs out and rested them on
the coffee table next to hers. His shoulders shuffled back into the cushions of
the sofa. When he turned to look at her their eyes were level. Em held his gaze
and felt him push out a subtle but demanding wave of dark energy toward her.

Em considered him. She allowed his mind to
flow right up to the gates of her own then carefully strengthened her defences
against him. Slowly and gently Jarek intensified his mental thrust until the
weight of his existence swelled and swirled darkly against the edges of her
mind. His eyes stared into hers and threatened to pull her into the deepening
dark energy that pulsated between them.

She thought about how inviting that seemed -
how exhilarating it would be to let herself fall.

She smiled, blinked, and with that Jarek's
carefully constructed advance disintegrated and vanished, like a flurry of
dandelion seeds in the breeze.

Jarek snarled. He unfolded himself from the
sofa angrily and flopped down in an easy chair on the other side of the coffee
table. Em's smile widened into a grin. He could be such a boy sometimes, and
how easy it was to provoke him.

"It isn't funny, Emilia," Jarek
said eventually. "Your father sent me here to bring Alina home to face her
doom. You too if I decided you'd been aiding her. I'd have dragged you both off
without a thought if it was anyone but you. You told me to wait, Emilia."
He leant forward in his seat and rested his elbows on his knees, feet wide
apart, shoulders square and strong. "I've played your silly game, lover,
and I'm tired of it. This embarrasses the Family, it embarrasses your father,
and it embarrasses me the longer you drag this out. My patience is nearly at an
end."

Em sighed. She'd known this was coming.

After letting go of her hold on Will's mind
she'd slipped into Jarek's - a skill she'd realized she had hundreds of years
ago. Jarek couldn't enter her mind without her invitation, but she could penetrate
his in a heartbeat, sometimes without him even knowing. It infuriated him, and
she'd spent some very enjoyable centuries exploiting her talent and his
weakness shamelessly. Perhaps now hadn't been a good time to remind him of that
weakness, but she'd asked him, in his mind, to visit the warehouse location
that Will had given her. She and Nick had to follow protocol and find the
warehouse the hard way, the human way, but Em wanted to know now, and she'd
sent Jarek on an errand. No wonder he'd come back in a foul mood. He didn't
take orders meekly.

"I told you, Jarek, there's something
bigger happening here.
Alina's part of it, somehow.
You don't want to go running back to his lordship with the wrong fish on the
hook, do you?"

He said nothing.

"What was at the warehouse? Who was
there?"

"Nothing," said Jarek, petulantly.
"No one.
Oh, there was a mess alright. Someone had been
there recently, but there was no one there at all."

"No one?" said Em. "Not even
Alina?"

"No one," said Jarek, sighing
suddenly and leaning back in the chair again. "In fact, there wasn't even
the scent of anyone, other than humans, of course. And you say this 'bigger
fish' you think is out there is not human? Not Family?"

"Of course it's not human. And it's
definitely not Family. I'd know if it were Family," said Em.

"Yes." Jarek seemed to be
considering the problem. "So what is it?"

Em ran a hand through her hair in
exasperation. "I don't know, Jarek." She was aware she was wailing
slightly. This problem, and the headaches that went with it, had been bugging
her for too long. She wasn't used to this level of helplessness. "Don't
you feel it?" she asked. "I've had the same headache for weeks now.
It just doesn't go away. And I'm sure it's connected."

Jarek frowned.

"I don't feel it, Em," he said. His
voice sounded flat, but his eyes glittered at her. He didn't believe her.

"It's real, Jarek. And it's ...
strong." Em wondered how much to say. "I think it's pretty powerful,
I mean, if you can't feel it..."

Jarek let out an explosive breath and turned
his face to one side. The scar on his cheek pulsed as he clenched his jaw.
"Well, it must be a human thing then," he said derisively. He
sneered. "My energy is
pure,
yours is mingled
with the human blood of your filthy whoring human mother. Maybe you can only
feel it because you're weak, a
halfling
,
tainted..."

Em unleashed a burst of energy that picked up
Jarek's human body and the chair he was sitting on and threw them both against
the wall. Jarek didn't even have time to assemble his thoughts and spin his
body into smoke. His head connected with the corner of the door frame and split
crazily spilling dark energy into the room in a messy cascade of black mist,
stars and swirling nebulae. As he recovered from the shock of the attack and
collected his thoughts, Em spun into smoke and flew across the room to engulf
him in her fury.

Not even caring, or even noticing, the
barriers he'd suddenly erected around his own mind she pushed through his defences
and howled inside his very being.

"How dare you?" she screamed.
"How dare you?"

She gathered up every tendril of the headache
that had been plaguing her for weeks and bundled it into a tightly wound ball
of energy. Then she pushed it with all her strength into the deepest part of
Jarek's being that she could reach. And when it was there, she kicked it.

"A human
thing,
is it?" she spat. "Is that human, Jarek? Is it?"

Jarek was barely holding on to his human
form. He'd tried to spin out into dark energy to avoid the worst of Em's
attack, but she'd held him in the material dimension. His form was splitting
and cracking and dark boiling tempests of blackness were spilling out of him,
laced with stars, crackling with electricity. He threw his head back and choked
out a cry as his human form screamed in pain and his vampire self howled in
outrage at being overpowered.

"Is this filthy tainted human hurting you,
Jarek? Am I, Jarek?" Em's being seethed through a handful of dimensions at
once, and coiled around the writhing man contorted on the floor of her lounge
room.

She pulled her human form back together and
stood before him. He wrapped his arms around his head and knelt at her feet.

She let him go. Her anger faded as quickly as
it had arisen. She pulled the pain out of his being and drew back entirely. She
sighed.
And watched him.

Jarek staggered to his feet. In a blink his
form was perfect again. His ripped silk shirt was repaired, the rents in his
skin were healed,
the
chair was back in its place in
the middle of the room. His chest rose and fell as he sucked in air and his
black eyes regarded her coldly as she walked back around the coffee table to
sit again in the sofa.

She picked up her bowl of pasta, refilled her
wine glass and went back to her dinner.

Jarek slowly returned to his seat.

"There is no one in all of creation that
I would tolerate that sort of treatment from but you, Emilia," he said darkly.

Em sniffed. "I don't think 'tolerate' is the
right word," she said. "You didn't 'tolerate' that. You
suffered
it, because you had no choice
but to endure it. And that is because you don't have the power to stop
me." She picked up her wine glass and held it with her lips just brushing
the glass. "You know that, lover."

Jarek stared a few moments longer, and then
smiled.

"Come home with me, Emilia," he
said. "You and I are meant to be together. We are powerful, ruthless,
lethal
together." His eyes narrowed and his nostrils
flared. His voice was deep and seductive. "We are perfect..."

"I know," said Em, simply.
"And I miss that, Jarek, I really do. But I'm here now. And I like
it."

"But..."

"And that's it, Jarek. That's it."

They stared at each other. Em found she was
the first to drop her gaze. She was tired.

"Do you want some wine?" she said,
standing up to grab another glass from the kitchen. "And I have
chocolate...?"

Jarek followed her into the kitchen and took
the glass from her hand. He laid it on the counter and stepped close to Em
until they were almost touching. With a finger, he brushed a strand of hair
from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. His eyes travelled over her face,
and the finger traced a line down her cheek, his thumb brushing the corner of
her mouth, the rest of his hand curling around her neck. His other arm reached
around her waist and pulled her into him.

He sighed, and she rested her head on his
chest while his hand stroked her hair.

"If you ever change your mind," he
said.

They stood there in silence for a long
moment. Em felt the coldness of his body, the lack of heartbeat in his chest.
She thought about Nick.

"It wasn't human, was it?" she
asked.

"No," said Jarek. "You were
right. But I ..."

In her handbag on the counter, Em's cell
phone rang. Neither of them moved for a moment and then Em dragged herself out
of Jarek's embrace.

"I have to get that," she muttered,
allowing her hair to fall across her face again, not wanting to meet his eyes.

It was Nick.

"What's up?" she said. "It's
late. You're not still at the office are you?"

"I was thinking about what that dealer
said." Nick sounded wired. He usually got this way when he thought he'd
cracked something - when a case started coming together. Em felt the little
flutter of excitement she usually got in the middle of her chest when this
happened. Nick's enthusiasm was infectious.

"This warehouse with a history he was going on
about," he went on, talking at top speed. "I was
googling
stuff about... Forget it, doesn't matter. And then I realized I was being too
literal about it. He didn't mean ancient history, just
a history
. So I hit the crime maps, and the one place kept coming
up. It's a pretty random history - all sorts of jobs there over the last couple
of decades, almost like the place has some kind of criminal attracting
vibe..."

"Nick," Em broke in. "What are
you talking about?"

"I think I've found it.
The warehouse.
Well, I've found something we should look at.
Shit, I've been drinking coffee out of that crummy machine for hours. Em, do
you want to go and check it out?"

He sounded so eager. Like a puppy with a
stick.

Em looked at Jarek. He had a resigned
expression on his face. He shrugged.

"Yeah, I've got time," she said
into the phone. "Meet you at the lab?"

Em made Nick stop for pizza before they headed off to
the warehouse. She knew what that coffee machine in the office was capable of,
and if Nick hadn't eaten he'd be strung out for hours.

She also knew, thanks to Jarek's little
re-con mission, that they were unlikely to find anything usable at the
warehouse, even if Nick had found the right one. If she thought about it, she
had to admit she'd chosen to come along on Nick's little adventure at such a
crazy hour of the night because she wanted his company.

She shared his meat-lovers with extra cheese,
sucked down a Coke and watched Nick eat. He ate like he worked - with
determination and with enjoyment. She envied him.

He looked up at her and caught her watching
him.

"What?" he said smiling, a string
of melted cheese stuck to his chin.