Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
The faint scent of whisky hung in the air. Needing my wits about me, I hadn’t joined Channing and Ji-ho with the smoky malt. For all I’d sent the men home, I was far from done for the day.
I fed Loki some ham and made myself a quick toastie. I gaped when I opened one cupboard and found it overflowing with food. The fridge was the same. At some point, Robbie had gone shopping for me. Either that or I had a grocery fairy.
I ate the gooey cheese toastie with some mayonnaise to dip it in, because I wasn’t a monster, and then I comfort-ate half a pack of Pringles and downed a can of Dr Pepper.
Filled with salt and sugar, I felt better. Calmer. Which meant I was on an even keel when my phone lit up. The screen glowed too brightly in the dim kitchen. Loki clicked his beak once, watching the phone like it might bite. With good reason. The screen said: Death calling. My nickname for Bastion.
In the past, when the assassin had rung me out of the blue, someone had been dead or bleeding. Here’s hoping this call ended with a tale of puppies and flowers or something equally nice – answers.
I swiped to speak to the griffin. ‘Bastion. How are you?’ I put the call on speaker and set the phone down beside the sink. My fingers found my PNB by reflex, flipping it open to a fresh page, then grabbing a pen.
There was a long beat of silence. ‘People don’t ask me that,’ he said finally.
‘Well, I do. How are you?’
‘I am … well.’ Pause. ‘Are you?’
I began to doodle on the blank page. ‘I’m okay. We’re trying to get into Wraithmore, which doesn’t make me excited, but it’s necessary.’
‘Let me know if you get an in. I’ll come with you, if I can. You might need my skills.’
‘All right.’ Having a griffin along could only be a good thing. At the very least he was excellent at intimidation. ‘Have you found any information on the vampyr that attacked me?’
‘Yes. I have two pieces of news, and neither of them is good.’
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. ‘I’m braced. Hit me.’
‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news,’ he began.
‘No you don’t!’ I objected. ‘You’re an assassin. You’re the bearer of bad news all the time.’
‘The deaths aren’t bad news to the people who hired me to kill them,’ he pointed out. ‘That’s good news. Contract fulfilment. Besides, I hardly ever kill people for money now. Amber gets weird about it.’
‘Now you just kill evil witches instead,’ I muttered.
‘Exactly. Now, do you want your news or do you want to philosophise on the morality of my situation?’
I winced. Griffins had to kill to survive.
If they quashed the homicidal urges for too long, they exploded, killing everything in sight in a horrific massacre that took generations to recover from.
Therefore, the Connection, in their wisdom, had formed an assassins’ guild, deciding that the griffins taking the occasional contract kill was a far better solution than them murdering vast numbers of innocents.
Particularly since the Connection got a cheaper rate.
‘Right. Sorry. You’re right. I didn’t mean to preach. What have you got for me?’
‘I’ve got the name of your vampyr attacker. Jasper Cathill.’
For a second my brain refused to translate the syllables into meaning. Then it did, all at once, and heat rushed up my neck. My fingers tightened around the pen until it bit into the pad of my thumb. Loki went still again, feathers subtly lifting.
‘Oh fuck.’ I sat heavily on my dining-room chair. The chair scraped the floor with a harsh squeal that set my teeth on edge.
‘Indeed,’ he said drily.
Jasper Cathill was the son of Lord Cathill, the recently true-dead Lord of the Cathill Clan, who used to be the vampyr Symposium member. He had died recently, following a literal deal with a daemon that granted him extra powers but ultimately led to his dramatic demise.
My pen moved faster, scrawling Cathill’s name twice, once for him, once for his father.
Volderiss had stepped into the power vacuum in the Symposium, becoming the new vampyr member, but word on the street was that Jasper Cathill had been preparing to formally take over his father’s clan.
Having all of eternity, vampyrs moved slowly with such things, and as such the Manchester clan was currently leaderless. But Jasper had been widely touted as the next leader.
And I’d killed him.
Why the hell had Jasper Cathill, the bloody Lord apparent, attacked me?
I stood and paced to the window, phone still on speaker. Outside, the street looked normal, wet tarmac reflecting a streetlamp, a neighbour’s telly flickering through curtains. I pressed my forehead to the cold glass and forced myself to think like a cop: cool and emotionless.
I hadn’t known Cathill, so the attack hadn’t been personal. Wizard blood made vampyrs go absolutely bananas – it made them feral and it was addictive – so the attack hadn’t been because he was feeling snackish either.
He’d said he had orders, but who could order the heir apparent to a Clan Lordship to do anything? Whoever it was, they would almost certainly be at the top of the food chain.
Volderiss could have given the order, theoretically, but there was no love lost between the Liverpool and Manchester clans. I could easily imagine Jasper telling Volderiss to take a long walk off a short pier if the Symposium member had tried to order him to do anything he didn’t want to do.
If not Volderiss – and I wasn’t ruling him out– then who was pulling the strings here?
I thought of Ambrose Beeks. He’d been Domini. Domini collected powerful people like others collected stamps. Jasper Cathill, soon to be a leader of one of the biggest vampyr clans, was powerful all right. And his body had turned to ash before I could check him over for any interesting tattoos.
‘Did you ever get anything on Ambrose Beeks?’ I asked Bastion.
The line went quiet except for the faintest crackle. Somewhere on Bastion’s end, I heard a soft shift of movement, like he’d adjusted his grip on the phone. My skin tightened, bracing before my brain could. ‘That’s the second piece of bad news.’
‘You didn’t get anything?’
‘Oh, I got something, but you’re not going to like it. I did some digging. A decade or so ago, Beeks used to run with Jude Jingo.’
Fuck. Did that mean Jingo was Domini? Why then had he given me the damned picture with their symbol on it?
My thoughts were sprinting and I needed them to slow down and line up. I took another sip of cold Dr Pepper and rubbed my forehead with newly cooled fingertips. This was a clusterfuck.
Loki hopped down onto the table with a soft thump, claws skittering on the wooden table as he walked closer to me, offering support as he felt my turmoil.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said aloud. ‘This is a mess.’ I gently stroked the caladrius. Just the small action soothed me a little more.
‘You’re not wrong,’ Bastion said grimly.
‘Beeks was Domini. At least he was when he died. Is Jingo?’
‘I haven’t ascertained that. But I found out that Beeks acquired his new tattoo in the last five years. Before that, no mark on the shoulder.’
‘Social media?’ I asked.
I flipped the page in my PNB and the paper rasped loudly in the quiet.
My handwriting had turned into lawyer scrawl, ugly, barely legible and scribbled, the way it did when adrenaline took over.
Another reason to appreciate the SPEL app: notes typed in it were legible, though that wasn’t an option when we were operating off the books.
‘Yeah, he had a couple of accounts. I looked through a lot of holiday photos. The man was a narcissist.’
‘My brain thanks you for doing that so I didn’t have to. All right, so Beeks may have been a relatively new recruit.’
‘He may have been, or he may have been slow to indelibly tattoo an organisation’s symbol on his body,’ he said drily.
‘Yeah. True.’
‘What are you planning to do with this information, Inspector?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’re certain it was Jasper Cathill?’
‘Yes. Not only does he match the description and photos perfectly, but he’s unexpectedly missing.’
I grimaced. ‘All right. I’ll have to update my report.’
‘Don’t be so hasty. Another vampyr went missing the same night.
A female from Clan Heylin. Word is, they’ve run off together.
Having a sordid affair. No one’s looking too hard for Cathill yet.
Don’t update the report yet. Stay off the radar a while longer.
Let people think Cathill has run away with the other vamp. ’
‘But we know that’s not true.’ Jasper was too true-dead to have run away with anyone.
I ran my hands through my hair.
Lady Heylin of the Cheshire Clan didn’t like the Connection or the police. Rumour had it that she and Faraday had once had a tempestuous affair that ended badly.
When we had issues with the Cheshire vamps, Faraday always handled them himself, but …
‘Do you have the name of the Heylin vamp that’s missing?’ I asked Bastion.
‘Sarah Greengrass. She was relatively new, only sixty years old or so. Has a wife who denies she’d ever run away.’
‘Wife’s name?’ I was making notes in my PNB.
‘Leanne Greengrass.’ He gave me their address, and I went cold. It was only a dozen houses down from Kate. I stared at the address on the page until the ink blurred.
‘She went missing on the same night I killed Jasper Cathill?’
My mind snapped the information together and I didn’t like the picture it painted. Aspen dead. Jasper ash. Sarah missing. Three separate threads all on one day.
I tapped the pen against the page once sharply.
‘Yeah,’ Bastion confirmed.
It was too much to be a coincidence: Sarah went missing on the same night Aspen and Jasper died.
No one had been around when Jasper died, no witnesses.
And if there had been, I sure as hell hadn’t culled them.
That meant her disappearance was more likely related to Aspen’s death, especially given her home address.
I couldn’t be certain, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that she had seen something she shouldn’t have, and someone had cleaned up house.
Jingo had never been shy about collateral damage.