When Darkness Hungers: A Shadow Keepers Novel (Shadow Keepers 5) (5 page)

“What’s happened?” he demanded, stepping aside to let Jonathan stumble past him.

“Colin’s gone—staked—and Mitre’s a fucking mess. He called me. I was at the Z Bar, and I went to him. Told him I’d help him hunt, but he was out of his head. Said he’d get his own damn blood and then he’d kill the bitch if it took him a lifetime to find her.”

The words spilled out, but Derrick understood. Some female had staked Colin and injured Mitre, who was now on the hunt, searching out healing blood.

“Mitre said she was good. Trained. I gotta think maybe she’s the one who’s been—”

“Giving us all the problems,” Derrick finished for him. “Yes, I’m inclined to agree.” He turned away from Jonathan for long enough to school his expression into one of calm control. It wouldn’t do for one of his men to see how deeply the news had cut him. When he turned back, he knew that the younger vampire would see nothing but a veneer of determined strength. “Mitre will be in touch once he feeds. And then we’ll have him take us back to the place where the woman attacked him. We’ll find her scent. We’ll track her. And then I will personally make sure that she understands why it was a very bad decision to go meddling in the affairs of vampires.”

Alexis winced as Leena pressed an ice pack against the knot on the back of her head. “Thanks,” she said, then reached up to hold the pack in place. “I appreciate you being here, but you should have gone home. You look wiped.”

“Bet I don’t look as bad as you do. Besides, I wanted to wait and see how it went. I’m glad I did. You got hurt because of me.”

Alexis had been inspecting an abrasion that ran down the side of her thumb and over her wrist, but now she looked up into Leena’s face and saw the guilt and regret in her friend’s eyes. “That is such bullshit. You don’t have a thing to be sorry about.”

“How many vamps have you staked since I told you the truth? You’ve been training like a … well, like an I-don’t-know-what, and you’ve nailed almost a dozen now. And
this
one you miss? Not once but three times?”

“Thanks so much for reminding me.”

“I shouldn’t have told you. It messed up your concentration. Got under your skin.”

“Conversation over,” Alexis said, because Leena was right. But no way was she going to admit it.

“Want to talk about it?”

“I just …” She trailed off, glancing at the diamond-shaped scar on her wrist as she tried to gather her thoughts. “What if I don’t get the chance again?”

“You will. That’s why you came to LA. To find the vamp who killed your sister. And you’re not even certain that the one who got away was the guy. Maybe you did dust him.”

Alexis shrugged. Leena was right, of course, but until she knew for sure, the thought was cold comfort. They’d known only that the vampire who’d killed Tori was in that alley. They didn’t know which one he was.

“You’ll get him,” Leena said firmly. “
We’ll
get him.” She gave Alexis a stern, motherly glance, ironic since she was the younger of the two. After a second she reached for her cane and stood. “Coffee or ibuprofen or both?”

“I’ll get it.”

“Sit. Keep the ice on that knot. I’ll bring you coffee first, and if that doesn’t work we’ll shift over to the hard stuff.”

“Bourbon?”

Leena snorted. “Whatever works.” She limped off toward the kitchen, and Alexis realized that she was smiling despite the pain in her head and her frustration at having missed the second vampire. And why not? She had an important mission and a damn good friend by her side.

Hard to believe that so much had changed so fast. She’d once been hopelessly naïve. Now she wasn’t.

She could remember with absolute clarity the day it had all started. She’d been a young FBI agent, ridiculously proud at having been handpicked for a newly formed national task force with only one year out of Quantico under her belt. She’d been assigned to the New York office, where the task force was based. It had been created to investigate a series of violent deaths that had crisscrossed the country, the nature of the fatalities
suggesting that the deaths were related, possibly by interstate cult activity.

The murders were showing up in clusters all over the States, but the highest percentages were in dense urban areas, which made sense if the FBI’s gang- and/or cult-related theory was accurate. Somewhere, though, there was a ground zero. There had to be a leader who was organizing all of this. Some David Koresh–type nutjob with a Dracula complex who was telling his followers to go out and suck the blood from his victims—yes,
suck—
and to do it from the neck.

It was sick. It would be one thing if all these folks did was drink blood from a butcher store and wear black and file their teeth to points. Weird, perhaps, and certainly not Alexis’s thing. But harmless enough. That’s not what they were doing, though, and they’d crossed a line. A very dark, very scary line.

Unfortunately, whoever these people were, they weren’t stupid. They were operating under the radar and doing a good job of it, too.

The case had been occupying her time 24/7, but when her college roommate flew into town to audition for a soap opera, Alexis took a rare day off. They’d been out shopping—playing a game where they picked the tourists out from the locals—when Antonio Gutierrez had called. He was the SAC—Special Agent in Charge—and he’d offered no niceties about interrupting her day off. “Get your ass down to the First Precinct,” he’d said. “Ask for Detective Lanahan.” He’d clicked off, and Alexis had turned to Brianna.

“Let me guess. You’ve got to go.”

“The exciting life of an FBI agent.” She spoke ironically, but the truth was that she loved it. The job. The
excitement. It was what she’d worked toward since she’d turned twelve. That was the year her sixteen-year-old sister Tori had gone missing, and even though her parents and the police had told Alexis that Tori had run away, Alexis refused to believe that her sister would leave. Not Tori. Sure, life was shit at the Martin house, but Tori had always been the one who stuck up for Alexis. Who comforted her when their dad went off on one of his tears. Who’d dried Alexis’s eyes when their mom had thrown out all of Alexis’s favorite books because she’d caught Alexis reading under the covers with a flashlight, and rules were rules were rules.

No, Tori wouldn’t leave Alexis. Not on purpose. She’d been taken—Alexis was certain. And for years she’d fantasized about joining the FBI and tracking down the son-of-a-bitch who’d abducted her sister. After her parents died six years ago in a Colorado plane crash, Alexis had discovered Tori’s diary in a box in their attic, and she’d been forced to acknowledge that maybe her sister
had
run away. It had been a hard reality to swallow, but not as hard as the horrible truth that the diary had revealed—a pattern of physical and verbal abuse from both parents, with the worst being the way their father would creep into Tori’s bed at night.

The words had been practically etched onto the page, Tori’s pencil pushing so hard that it sometimes ripped the paper. The scrawled, rambling sentences were accompanied by strange splotches—dried tears, Alexis assumed—along with awkward, violent sketches that were enough to make Alexis nauseated. Remembering, Alexis shivered. She’d been boxing up her parents’ personal effects when she’d found the diary, and the uncomfortable emptiness that accompanied the loss of her parents had
morphed into anger when she learned what they’d done to drive the older girl away. If Alexis could have taken some of that abuse onto her own shoulders, she would have, but she hadn’t even been aware it was going on, even though Tori’s diary made clear that it had been a pattern since she was in first grade. She’d run because she couldn’t take it anymore, but she’d stayed as long as she could to protect her little sister. Knowing that, Alexis loved her even more. But to her shame, she still hated her for leaving.

She knew she was an emotional mess where her family was concerned, but she’d channeled her roiling emotions into her work. Even once she’d realized that Tori had left of her own accord, Alexis’s desire to join the FBI hadn’t faded. By then, the thought of being an agent—of honoring that badge and helping victims of unspeakable crimes—had invaded her soul, become a part of her. She’d clung to the dream, shifting it around only slightly for Tori’s benefit. Alexis was no longer looking for her abductor; now she was looking for Tori herself. She wanted to throw her arms around her sister and tell her that their parents were dead. That Tori could come back. That she could be a big sister again.

It was a fantasy that Alexis clung to with determined tenacity. So far, she’d done everything a civilian could do to search for her sister, and a few things only an FBI agent could manage. One of these days she was going to ask official permission to use FBI resources to track Tori down. She had to, because Tori was all the family she had. Considering what she now knew about her parents, Tori was all the family she’d
ever
had.

Until then, though …

Well, until then, the FBI was her life. And if Gutierrez
wanted her on her day off, then she’d been more than ready to go.

What she hadn’t understood was why she was going to the police department. By then, the task force had been in place long enough that the cops knew to call the FBI and the forensics team from the get-go. It had to be a cold case. An unsolved crime filed away that the local cops had dug out to pass off to the task force. A pain in the ass for the cops, maybe, but for the task force it could be gold.

She’d arrived at Lanahan’s office eager to see the file, and he hadn’t disappointed. After the briefest of introductions, he’d passed her a thick sheaf of papers fastened with a binder clip. “Only a few months old,” he’d said. “So tepid, not cold. But the detective assigned didn’t realize he should call you folks in.”

“Didn’t realize!” Alexis said, but Lanahan only shrugged.

“There were wounds on the neck, but those weren’t the only injuries. Sure, he should have realized, but what can I say? He fucked up. And he’s moved on—Kansas, Nebraska, one of those corn-fed states. Soon as I got the file, I called you folks.”

She skimmed the initial detective’s notes from the scene. “Unidentified female?” she asked, glancing up at Lanahan. “She’s a Jane Doe?”

“It’s all there,” he said. “We didn’t get anything back with prints. Girl looked to be a recovering junkie—but there wasn’t any physical evidence of drug abuse. She did have some old puncture wounds on her neck and some scar tissue on her wrists. Could be drug-related, but the coroner thinks no.”

“Self-mutilation.”

Lanahan shrugged. “Who knows. Our guy canvassed the streets, but he didn’t come up with anybody who knew the female.”

“She was found in the subway system?” Alexis asked. The answer was on the report, but she wanted to hear what this detective had to say. As she waited, she flipped pages, looking for the crime scene photos.

“Not far from the Battery Park station,” he confirmed. “In a pile of debris in one of the homeless squats.”

Alexis frowned, hating the thought of some poor girl, probably a runaway, holed up in one of the areas carved out within urban subways where the homeless would park their carts, warm their hands over Sterno cans, and trade needles and bottles of Jack. At her lowest, she wondered if that was where Tori had ended up, but always immediately banished the thought.

“I can take you there if you like,” Lanahan offered.

“That would be great,” Alexis said as she flipped another page. She knew she wouldn’t find a clue, but just being close to the scene and seeing what the victim saw could help. “Maybe we could go—”

She stopped talking, her eyes riveted on the morgue photo in front of her.

“Agent Martin?”

She could hear the concern in Lanahan’s voice. She didn’t care. She couldn’t look away from the page.

Because despite the bright fuchsia hair and emaciated cheeks, Alexis knew that face.
Tori
.

Her stomach cramped, and she had to force her hands not to shake. Her sister had been murdered. Violently. Brutally. And by the very killer that Alexis was looking for.

Time slowed to a crawl, and it seemed to take forever
for her to lift her head to meet the detective’s eyes. “I’m going to catch him,” she said slowly and carefully, in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “I’m going to catch all of them. And I’m not going to stop until they’re all behind bars.”

She wouldn’t stop until she’d avenged her sister.

At the time, though, she hadn’t understood what that meant or just how deep into the world of nightmares she’d have to sink in order to make good her promise.