Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
A scent registered and his head craned to the left. The prevailing wind was coming from the south tonight, ushering a not-quite-as-cold kind of frigid winter air, and on the surging currents, the smell of death and baby powder was a welcome stench.
Well, maybe tonight was looking up, after all.
Slipping one of his silver daggers out of the holster on his chest, he doubled back and moved like the predator he was through the shadows. As his blood hummed with deadly intent and his fangs dropped even lower, he had to admit that Rhamp probably had a point about him getting off on hurting those fucking assholes.
But the guy was wrong about the why. It wasn’t just because it was what he’d been bred to do. And it wasn’t just because he was honestly enraged by the deaths last night.
When he was hurting the enemy, he wasn’t thinking about Bitty.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Before Denne left the restaurant, she made an excuse to Marco. She didn’t even know what she said. Something about fish. Which was stupid because the monger was beyond closed after five p.m., and also because she hated everything surf-related and Chef knew that: From the way the shit smelled, and how it felt raw, to the fact that a lot of the stock came with eyeballs, she just couldn’t handle the stuff.
If there was one errand, ever, that she would farm out, it would be an after-hours fish-pedition.
Still, Marco bought whatever the hell she’d said, waving a white- handled knife with the Sal’s logo on it over his cutting board as he stayed focused on trimming fat off a hunk of roast beef.
The fucking knife from the carving station.
Goddamn it.
As she went out the back door and it clapped shut behind her, she was kicking her own ass. All brains could be manipulated, and human gray matter was especially easy to work with. But what was impossible to control were those fucking CPD cop-bots that were everywhere in the last decade. No minds to influence. No memories to hide. And their recordings were instantly sent back to police HQ.
For fuck’s sake, that male in the hoodie and the jeans had caused her to get beginner-basic sloppy. Leaving the murder weapon behind? With an identifying mark on it like, oh, say, the fucking name of the goddamn restaurant the guy had been to?
OMG, at that level of stupid, they should first take her driver’s license away as a public service.
Courtesy of her mental lapse, Sal’s was going to get a visit from the Caldwell Police Department. ASAP.
The place was probably staked out already.
As she went around to the dark side, she thought about Marco and Emilio. She’d brought a murder to those two men, and turned them into accomplices. Sure, she hadn’t forced them to help with the young woman and the car, but they were men of worth who protected their own. There was no way they wouldn’t have chipped in like they had, given the situation.
And now shit was very complicated.
Motherfucker, she thought as she closed her eyes.
It took longer than usual for her to dematerialize, to the point where she thought she might have to go the mist route. Shadows had the option of traveling over the ground in a vapor, something that required less concentration, but was also less efficient, than the complete ghosting out. Her brain was scrambled, and the cooking scents from the blowers on the roof, coupled with the crunching of tires over the ice as guests arrived up in front, made focusing even harder.
She’d ruined it. All of it.
Because she’d just had to get involved in shit that wasn’t her business—
Her corporeal form finally broke apart and she traveled in a scatter of molecules through the night. When she re-formed, it was in the woods by the river, just north of the clearing where she’d left the body.
The scene could well still be active. Who the fuck knew.
It wasn’t.
No bright lights glowing as lab techs in white suits took pictures of tire treads and tweezered individual hair fibers. No battle-weary detectives smoking on the perimeter, frowns on their faces as they pieced things together. No uniformed patrolmen regulating access. No cop-bots recording everything with their camera eyes and their audio ears.
She stepped carefully through the snow, allowing the brilliant moonlight to be her guide versus getting out her phone flashlight and giving away her position.
But what was she hiding from. Nobody was here.
Then again, she’d been ducking her true identity around humans for her whole life, and staying on the down-low had always served her well.
As she stopped on the clearing’s periphery, the aftermath of the daylight activity made her think of ants all over a picnic. Tributaries of footprints linked up and formed proper paths around and inside a ring of bright yellow tape, and there were plenty of tire grooves clogging up the broad running path she’d come down in her truck. She could just imagine the lineup of Caldwell PD–branded patrol cars and CSI vans, and all the accompanying personnel.