Dangerous Games

'Ms Radcliff, I really need to talk to Mr. Dunleavy—'

'It ain't much use, you know,' she cut in. 'The noise stopped hours ago. It's been dead quiet since then.'

Dead being the operative term. 'Ms. Radcliff, please go inside, out of the cold I'll come and talk to you later, after I finish here.'

'Yeah, been told that before,' she muttered, but turned and went back to her town house. Though I had no doubt she'd be peering through the curtains once inside and watching my every move.

I turned back to Dunleavy's and scanned the windows. No sign of any window being forced—though really, there was no need to when all anyone had to do was push back the cardboard that took the place of two panes But no one had—maybe because of old eagle eyes in the first town house.

The garage showed no sign of forced entry, cither. Whoever had killed Dunleavy—or whoever else was dead inside—must have gone through either the side windows or back door I walked to the end of the porch and peered around the corner. No windows in sight, broken or otherwise Just a view of uncut lawn and a fence line that seemed far too close to the end of the building. I stepped from the porch and walked along the wall The ground under my feet seemed to vibrate, and the wind began to rush around me. I stopped, wondering what the hell was going on, my heart going a mile a minute—then snorted at my own stupidity as the reason came into sight. A goddamn train.

Why was I so jumpy? I might be green when it came to being a guardian, but I'd always been a jump-first, look-later type. And yet here I was, letting an old woman and a train spook me.

Why?

The blood.

The answer came almost as soon as I asked the question. I might be a wolf, I might love to hunt, and I had certainly killed in order to protect pack and self, but I'd never loved the taste of fresh blood. It was the one thing Rhoan and I didn't share. He not only loved the hunt, he loved to rent and tear and kill. I never had, even if I had occasionally participated in it.

And eating and loving a rare steak was not the same as sinking your teeth into flesh, let me tell you. Even if that flesh was only rabbit flesh—which was the only thing we wolves were legally allowed to hunt these days. Steak came in plastic containers and just had to be unpacked and cooked. Steak didn't continue to struggle for life after your teeth had found its flesh.

And yet, deep down, there was this fear that one day I would come to love it. That one day, my vampire genes would assert themselves fully and I, too, would come to enjoy the warm rush of life that flooded the mouth when teeth sunk into fresh flesh.

The shudder that shook my body was soul deep. But in reality, there was no choice for me. My destiny was gathering speed and no one really knew just what the future held. I was a dhampire, and what I would become was already patterned in my DNA. I might currently be more wolf than vampire, but who knew what the future would bring? Especially with the drugs that had been injected into my system by the psychos who'd been hiding under the guise of lovers over the last year or so.

And becoming a guardian, being around death and destruction and blood on a regular basis, might very well be the first footsteps clown the path of acceptance. It was a known fact that the more death became a part of your everyday life, the easier it was to accept. I might fight it, but for how long?

Would there come a time when I loved the hunt and its aftermath as much as my brother? As much as Gautier?

God, I hoped not. Surely fate had shoveled enough shit on my plate without adding that as well.

I shuddered and rubbed my arms as the last of the train cars rumbled past, then walked on. Blood or no blood, I had to see what had happened in that house.

I stopped near the end of the town house and took a quick peek around. No one in sight. I ducked around, keeping low as I ran past the intact windows. There was an odd, darkened patch of soot-like substance on the concrete near the back steps. Dunleavy had obviously been burning something recently, though why he'd do it so close to his house was anyone's guess.

The back door was wide open, and the scent of blood was stronger than before. I ignored the wild part of me, the part that relished the smell if not the taste, and cautiously walked up the steps.

The small laundry beyond the doorway was shadowed and quiet. The washing machine lid was open, the tub half-filled with clothes. I glanced at them, noting the dark overalls, the faint smell of oil and petrol. Work clothes. Or, more accurately, thieving clothes. I walked through the laundry and stopped at the next doorway, tasting the air and listening. The blood scent was coming from the right—from what looked to be a bedroom—the shit smell from the left. Given I could see an upturned TV and lounge chair, it was obvious that some sort of confrontation had happened in the living room.

So why did Gautier's scent seem to be coming primarily from the bedroom? As far as I knew, Gautier wasn't homosexual. In fact, he'd always seemed asexual to me. I got no vibes when it came to sex and Gautier. I had never seen him with a woman, never heard him speaking of women—or men, for that matter—in a sexual way. And yet vampires were inherently sexual beings. Orgasms were their gift for blood taking, and having experienced them thanks to Quinn, it had to be said that they were certainly worth losing a bit of the red stuff over.

Not that I was going to let any other vampire near my neck. Christ, a lot of them had a tendency not to wash, and scent alone stopped me from getting close to most.

But Gautier was a vampire created in a lab rather than via a blood ceremony. Perhaps in the process of his creation his sexual urges had been lost. Or maybe they'd been transferred to his lust for blood. There wasn't a doubt in anyone's mind that he got off on killing.

A soft moan ran across the silence, a sound so full of pain that the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I edged out into the hall. The moans were coming from the bedroom, and yet I could sense no life in that room. Though if Dunleavy was human, that was no surprise. Humans didn't show up on my sensory radar like non- humans did, though I could read and adjust their thoughts if I was close enough. I glanced over my shoulder at the living room then, as another moan emanated from the bedroom, crept toward the latter, my senses on high alert for any sign or sound of movement.

But the only sounds to be heard were my light breathing and the occasional squeak of a floorboard under my feet.

In the bedroom, I found Dunleavy.

He was lying, spread-eagled and cheek down, on the bed, but I had no doubt it was him. The height, hair color, and profile were a match for the photos I'd seen in the file.

He wasn't moving, didn't appear to be breathing, and the white sheets on which he lay were darkened by pools of blood.

Not from a wound. Or rather, not from a normal wound, like a gunshot or stabbing.

Dunleavy had been skinned.

From the base of his neck right down to his heels. Not prettily, and not particularly neatly. In some ways, it reminded me of the sort of mess an apprentice butcher might make while practicing his cuts of meats.

My stomach rose and I closed my eyes, taking quick shallow breaths through my mouth rather than my nose. It didn't help much. The stench of blood and death was so thick I could practically taste it, and the image of the bloody mass of muscle and meat seemed burned onto my retinas.

I'd seen a lot of gruesome things over the last few months, including Gautier's fatal maiming of the innocent girl yesterday. I'd welcomed some of those deaths, had mourned or cried for others. But skinning a human like he was just another animal seemed oddly worse than anything else. And the fact that the killer had draped his somewhat shredded skin neatly over the bed end, as if it were a gossamer fine but bloody blanket ready for reuse, only made it seem worse.

I dug the vid-phone out of my pocket and called in both a medical team and a Directorate forensic team. Then I set the vid-phone on record and send, sat it on top of a nearby drawer and, ignoring my still squirmy stomach, stepped into the room.

'Mr. Dunleavy?' I pulled on a glove and pressed my fingers against his neck. No pulse. I picked up his wrist and tried again. Again, nothing. It made me wonder if I'd really heard the moans or something else. Something that stepped into the realms of the spiritual.

Goose bumps ran across my skin. I tried to ignore the odd premonition that more was to come, and reported