Definitely not now. Not with Jude, Terri and Chloe likely to walk in at any moment with dinner.
“Soon,” he promised. “Very soon.”
She actually hoped so. She had to get this vampire out of her head and out of her dreams. She struggled for a coherent thought, something else to talk about before she ceased to give a damn if someone walked in.
“Why was I so sleepy?”
“I don’t know and that worries me. It definitely wasn’t a natural sleep.”
“It didn’t feel like one. I felt drugged. But when I took a nap this afternoon, that was normal sleep.” Well, normal except for her dreams. “Do you think that energy was doing something to me?”
“That’s my guess.”
“But it killed the others. It hasn’t killed me.”
“Perhaps because of that gris-gris Alika gave you. Or perhaps because we got you back to Jude’s office before it could finish its work. One thing I’ve decided is that if you want to go back to your apartment we need to make sure Jude wards it thoroughly.”
“Okay, I’ll agree with that. But we’ve still got to figure out how to deal with this elemental.”
“I’m beginning to think the only way to deal with it is to find the person who summoned it.”
That didn’t cheer Caro at all. Millions of people in this city. Thousands who could be dabbling with occult powers. Finding the one responsible for this sounded a whole lot harder than finding a human murderer. “You know, when the police hunt for a killer, we usually have a clue or two. Some indication of a troubled relationship. Fingerprints, other physical evidence. There’s no evidence in this case.”
“You were the one who cautioned us not to narrow ourselves too much. A wise caution. But it remains that elementals don’t kill people for their own reasons. They kill because people set them the task by creating a curse that calls them. So we still have the clue of motive to guide us.”
“And any one of thousands of people who might have done this. Unless we find
“You found nothing today that stood out?”
“With all Chloe and I did, we came to the realization that this guy was a developer and landlord with his fingers in so many pots around the city that we might be able to narrow our suspect list to a few thousand rather than tens of thousands.”
“Great.” He sounded as unhappy as she felt.
The others returned with steamed crab legs, boiled shrimp and some lobster tails. The women gathered around a folding table to eat while the two vampires sat farther away.
“So,” said Chloe, as she forked some threads of lobster from a tail and dipped them into drawn butter, “Caro and I spent our entire day trying to sort through Pritchett’s dealings. It would be only a small exaggeration to say he was involved in about fifty percent of what goes on in this city, from real estate to development to belonging to the boards of banks and other companies.”
“In short,” Caro said, “he was probably a huge target in a lot of ways. You don’t get to that level without making some enemies.”
“What about the rest of the family?” Jude asked.
“Kids had no reported problems at school,” Caro answered promptly. “The police interviewed their friends and school officials. Nobody was aware of any troubles.”
“The brother-in-law?”
“He just started working for Andrew Pritchett a couple of months ago. That’s the only association we could find other than the marriage.”
“What did he do?”
Chloe and Caro exchanged looks. “We don’t know,” Caro said finally. “We only know when he went on the payroll.”
“What did he do before that?”
Caro’s heart accelerated a little and she leaned toward Jude. “He worked for the city-planning department.”
“Ah...” The sigh seemed to emerge from both vampires at the same moment.
“It could just be a coincidence,” Caro reminded them. “He did his job okay, according to everything I could find. Pritchett might have hired him to make his wife happy.”
“Or something else could have been going on.”
“Agreed.”
Damien spoke. “We need to look much closer at that. “While I’ll be the first to allow that life has plenty of coincidences, this one seems just a bit suspicious. We need to look more closely at what Pritchett was doing over the last six months and why he might have found someone from city planning useful.”
Then he swiftly changed the subject, turning to Jude. “I want you to put wards on Caro’s place. Something got to her last night. In her home. From what she said of her dreams, it may have been trying to kill her in her sleep.”
Jude’s smile was almost wry. “I thought you were the mage.”
“I’m taking a refresher. Regardless, Caro came out of whatever was being done to her after she got here. So there’s some protection in your spells.”
“And Chloe’s,” Jude remarked. “All right. When I take Terri to work, we’ll all go and try to make Caro’s place safe.”
They all piled into Jude’s ramshackle car and dropped Terri at the morgue. Then Jude and Chloe warded Caro’s apartment and Jude gave her some holy water and a tiny vial of sanctified oil. “Carry them with you,” he suggested. “You never know.”
But after they’d returned Jude and Chloe to the office to do more research on Pritchett’s background, Damien and Caro took the car to go visit some more shops that catered to the adherents of alternative religions.
“I really hadn’t realized how many of these shops there are,” Caro remarked. “And I thought I knew this city, being a cop.”
“I imagine they keep a fairly low profile. Most would tend to have a small, select clientele, and they wouldn’t want problems with mainstream religionists.”
“I guess. It just seems odd I’ve never really noticed them before.”
“Why? Because of your grandmother?”
Caro glanced at him. “Maybe I didn’t notice
“Ah.” He let that lie, giving her space to work it through if she wanted.
It was then that she remembered another dream from her nap that afternoon, one that had nothing to do with her incredible desire to hop in the sack with a vampire.
Her grandmother. She had been sitting on her grandmother’s lap in the old rocking chair that creaked with every movement. Grandma had been telling her another of her fantastical stories—or had she?
Dreams were elusive at the best of times, and since she’d already almost forgotten she had had this one, it was a struggle to remember much more than how good she’d always felt sitting on Grandma’s lap.
How safe. How cherished. A lump rose in her throat.
What had that meant? Had her mind made it up? But no, something deep within her felt convinced that her grandmother had said that. A great gift?
She closed her eyes and tried to pull more of the memory or dream to mind, sensing it might be important in some way, whether her sleeping brain had manufactured it or whether it was the result of something she recalled.
