Succubus Lost (Files from the Otherworlder Enforcement Agency, #2) (2 page)

“Her hair is different.” I swallowed hard, trying to rid my voice of its strangled tone. “I don’t have any photos of the new cut, but it’s shorter than in that one. Shoulder length around her face and shorter in the back.” My hand shook as I waved it around my face. At their blank looks, I added, “Like Missy, the new receptionist. But blond.” Their wide eyes narrowed in understanding, and they nodded in unison before heading out the door.

I leaned against one of the guest chairs and met Vasquez’s hard gaze. “What else have you started? Did you get the missing person report filed?”

“It hasn’t been twenty-four hours. Hell, Marisol, you don’t even know if she’s been gone twelve.” I struggled to keep my voice even. “You know that every second she’s gone makes it more likely we won’t find her.”

His mouth was drawn in a hard line, but worry creased his brows. “I know. But she’s a college student. How do you know she didn’t just meet some guy—”

“She wouldn’t do that! She…” My nails dug into the vinyl lining the back of the chair. Telling Vasquez about her past wouldn’t help me. He’d just assume the worst of her, more so than he already did. A boy in her high school had decided that Elaine was fair game because she was a succubus. He’d attacked her, and lost his life for it. Elaine was still more than a little fearful of men showing any interest in her, but Vasquez might see things differently.

Might decide that because she’d killed before, she was some sort of criminal.

Vasquez got up from his desk and walked slowly around it. He reached for his office door and I blinked at our audience. Every eye in the station was directed at us.

I swallowed a sob, and Vasquez slammed the door shut.

“Look, Whitman, I know you’re worried—”

“Please! Jesus Christ, Vasquez! What if she were your sister, or your daughter?”

Vasquez frowned and considered it. I met his gaze with my own and refused to look away. I pushed my worry and fear and dread into my expression, hoping he would understand. Finally, he looked down.

“All right. We’ll send out some more officers. But we can’t put everyone on this.”

I sat down heavily. “What about Claude? Is he back in town?” The vampire could help. He had great senses, sure, but even more than that, he had resources in the vampire community. Ones he might be willing to tap for a colleague.

Claude had never shown me anything but respect, and his good-hearted nature had shown through his actions more times than I could recall. He’d help.

“Desmarais is out of town for at least three more days, on personal business. He specifically asked not to be bothered, and he told me he’d be unreachable anyway. I’m not tracking him down to help find your sister—who in all likelihood is playing hooky.”

“Fine. I’ll take Astrid.” I pushed up from the desk.

“No. I’ll send out a few more officers, but I’m not taking Holmes off a murder investigation.” He raised an eyebrow. “Where am I sending the officers?” I stopped, halfway between sitting and standing.

Where should they go? One set of uniforms was already en route to the library where Elaine had supposedly been studying.

“The campus,” I said around the lump in my throat.

“See if anyone outside the library saw anything. And there’s a pizza place not far from there they liked to go to after studying.” I rubbed my temple, remembering the time I’d picked Elaine up from the restaurant. She’d looked so happy. Finally.

“Name?” Vasquez asked. I looked up at him. “The pizza place?”

“Oh. It’s, um…” My mind went blank and I forced back tears. What the hell was the name of the pizza place?

“Never mind,” Vasquez said. “We’ll find it. Go talk to her friends.”

I nodded, unable to trust my voice.

Wendy Larson didn’t answer her door, so I moved on to the other friend of Elaine’s I’d met, Teresa Robertson.

Teresa’s address put her in a downtown apartment building, and I parked directly in front, ignoring the No Parking signs guarding the curb. I trotted up the steps and scanned the list of names on the front of the building, then pressed firmly against the one that read Robertson.

Unlike Wendy and Elaine, Teresa was a normal. The fact that she chose to spend most of her time with a couple of otherworlders surprised me, but she was a nice girl. And she didn’t seem to mind that Elaine was a succubus or that Wendy was a siren. Part of a generation where OWs had always been a fact of life, Teresa was a bit more open to the idea of otherworlder friends than older normals were.

“Yeah?” The young woman’s voice was staticky over the line, but I recognized Teresa’s deep tones.

“Teresa, it’s Marisol Whitman, Elaine’s sister.” There was a pause, and then she said, “Elaine isn’t here.”

I took a deep breath. It had been a reach to think I might find her at Teresa’s, but I’d still hoped. “Can I come up and talk to you? It’s important.”

“Yeah, sure.” The door buzzed and I yanked it open and stepped inside. What passed for a lobby in Teresa’s building was small, and covered in brown carpet that carried obvious stains. The small mailboxes that had been incorporated into one wall were the only things that broke up the room. A stairwell rose at the end of the narrow room, with a hallway next to it leading to the first-floor apartments.

I walked up the stairs to the third level and knocked on the fourth door on the left. Apartment 308.

Teresa opened the door almost instantly. Eyes wide, she stepped back and let me in. The small apartment was a studio style. The bed sat in one corner of the large room and a couch sat against the other wall. A small television was sitting on a dresser next to the bed, right across from the couch. A tiny kitchen was off to one side, with a bathroom across from it. The apartment was small but tidy. No sign any crazy party had happened there lately, and no sign of Elaine.

“Is everything okay?” Teresa asked.

Teresa looked like a deer in headlights, and I suddenly realized that I’d only met her once, when Elaine brought her to the house for a study session. I pasted on a smile and did my best to make it soothing instead of forced.

“I hope so. When was the last time you saw Elaine and Wendy?”

“Last night at the library. We headed out together, but they went to the south parking lot and I took the L.”

“Elaine didn’t take the L?”

“No, I think she was planning on it, but—”

“So she left with Wendy? Did they talk about going anywhere else before they headed home?”

“No, it sounded like they were going right home.” Her eyes were still wide, like any moment she expected me to pull my gun.

“I’m sorry, Teresa. I’m not trying to scare you, but I haven’t seen Elaine since yesterday. She didn’t come home last night.”

Teresa grasped her hands together and tugged her fingers nervously. “She didn’t come home? That’s not like her.”

I nodded, doing my best not to yell that I was well aware the behavior was very unlike my sister.

“They didn’t say they were going anywhere else. I’m sorry. I just assumed they went home.”

“Why didn’t you ride with them?” Wendy’s apartment was less than a mile from Teresa’s.

Teresa shrugged. “I was going to my boyfriend’s. He lives up north.”

I paced in Teresa’s small room. From the end of the bed to the end of the living room. Back and forth. Teresa watched me, nervously chewing on the inside of her cheek.

Halting in midstride, I pivoted to face her. “Nothing unusual happened at all yesterday? I need to know everything. Start at the beginning, from when you met them at the library. Every detail you remember. Every.

Thing.”

Teresa took a deep breath and began her story.

I pulled into the parking lot, taking one-and-a-half spaces, then strode into the station. Vasquez’s door was closed. I paused in front of it. Barging into his office not once, but twice in one day? I steeled myself. I didn’t have time for knocking.

I swung open the door and stepped inside. Vasquez sat across from a man who looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.

“Thanks for knocking,” Vasquez said, but his voice lacked anger.

“No one has seen Elaine or her friend since last night.

I’m going to pull contact information for Wendy—the friend she was with. But we need to file a missing person’s report on Elaine now, Vasquez.”

The lieutenant’s eye twitched at my lack of proper address, but he didn’t call me out for it. I guessed that having a missing sister helped my latitude with him.

“Already done, Marisol.” He gestured to the man across from him. “This is Agent Valerio Costa. He’s from the OWEA. I’ve already briefed him on your sister’s case.” The Otherworlder Enforcement Agency was a federal investigative force similar to the FBI, but they mainly investigated crimes that involved otherworlder victims and criminals. Why would an OWEA agent be interested in Elaine?

I nodded at Costa. Even sitting, he looked tall and deceptively slender because of his height. I could make out the muscles under his dark gray button-up shirt. He wasn’t built like a meathead, but he definitely visited the gym regularly. His nose was hawk-like and a touch imperfect, like he’d broken it a few times. Black hair topped his head and waved around his face, softening his otherwise sharp features, and I had the sudden desire to brush a lock of hair away from his face with my fingertips. Dark brown eyes met mine—not angry, but hard and closed-off.

Costa reached out and I met his hand with my own.

He shook it, his fingers firm and almost cold against mine.

I frowned and examined him more closely.

“Vampire?” The question was rude, but propriety was the least of my worries. I needed to know who I was dealing with. He didn’t have the slight paleness that vampires were known for, but then he may have fed recently. No fear emanated from him, but that didn’t disqualify the vampire angle altogether, since some vampires exuded more fear than others.

A grimace touched Costa’s features, gone so quickly I wasn’t even certain I saw it. “Salamander.”

“Ah.” Salamanders were essentially a type of elemental. They could control fire and were resistant to its effects. I didn’t know any personally, but they weren’t the rarest of otherworlders, and most were only slightly more powerful than a match.

“Agent Costa is investigating the disappearance of succubi around the country.”

My heart skipped, and I dropped Costa’s hand as if the cold had suddenly been replaced with fire.

“Tell me.” My voice was firm and void of the emotion that boiled just below the surface.

“Nearly twenty succubi have disappeared from various locations around the country over the last two years. Most young, under thirty.” Costa’s voice was deep and smooth, with a hint of an Italian accent.

“None…recovered?” I asked, fearing his response.

“They are still considered missing, not presumed deceased.”

I dragged out the chair next to Costa’s and sat down heavily. “Why do you think they’re still alive?”

“We’ve picked up rumors of a man who is selling succubi to the highest bidders.” He paused and took a deep breath, eyes on mine as if assessing my ability to take whatever news he was about to give me. I met his stare with a hard expression that seemed to reassure him that I could take it, but he glanced at the lieutenant and waited for his slight nod before continuing. “It seems he’s selling them as sex slaves.”

My stomach dropped and the room spun. I gripped the arms of my chair and tried to grasp my thoughts. God.

With everything Elaine had already been through, it just wasn’t fair. Couldn’t be real. “That doesn’t make any sense.

Succubi can kill with their powers. It can be suppressed with drugs or magic, but then they wouldn’t be any more interesting than normal human women. Why target succubi?”

“We’re not sure. The bit of information we’ve been able to glean is unreliable, and it varies depending on who we talk to. The one consistent rumor is that they’re still alive. And that’s what you should focus on.” I opened my mouth to tell him not to tell me what to focus on, but then snapped it shut. My strength was in my ability to deal with people, even bossy, know-it-all OWEA people. I’d get more info from him playing nice than playing hardball. “All right. What else do we know?

I’ll need some specifics.”

“I’ll get you files on the victims and the case summary I’ve put together so far. We need to figure out where they took your sister and how. This is the quickest a disappearance has been reported, so we might be able to get them while they’re in the area.”

“Wait—when exactly did you get into town?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Did you know there was a danger and not warn us?”

Vasquez turned a suspicious glare to Costa, but the OWEA agent didn’t look the slightest bit uncomfortable under our scrutiny.

“I got into town last night. There was another kidnapping here several months ago, and then two weeks ago a succubus disappeared in Phoenix. The one here took a while to get reported, since she was estranged from her family. My partner is in Phoenix right now. I didn’t expect them to hit the same city more than once in such close succession.” He met my gaze. “I got lucky.” I flew from my seat and Costa grabbed my wrists to protect himself from the blows I was trying to level at his face.

“Get off him, Marisol!” Vasquez barked.

“I’m sorry,” Costa said. “That was…a poor choice of words.”

Poor choice of words. Yeah, sure. I yanked my wrists out of his cool hands and sat back in my chair.

“I really am sorry,” he murmured.

I looked up at him. His mask had fallen just enough for me to see that he meant his words. Or that he wanted me to think he did, anyway. I gave him a short nod, not trusting myself to speak.

Costa cleared his throat. “I would like your help on the case, if you don’t mind. My partner is in Phoenix for a few more days, at least. I could use another investigator.”

“Of course!”

“Now wait just a damn minute,” Vasquez said. “This is personal. No way am I putting her on this. Her judgment is impaired.”

“My judgment is fine,” I snapped, pushing myself up from the chair to tower over the seated lieutenant.