Ilona Andrews - Dark and Stormy Knights

“What are you going to do?” She sounded very young, but she hadn’t thrown up yet. She was dealing with this better than he had his first time out.

“Cut off what’s left of his head, babe.” He didn’t sound sarcastic, just tired. “Then I’m going to look for your husband.” And he was pretty sure he was going to wonder, the whole time, how she’d got down the stairs—and why she’d pulled the trigger.

The widow was turning out to be just full of surprises.

“Do they always scream like that?” She hunched her shoulders. Pale, rainy sunlight through kitchen windows flooded her hair, now tangled and not so glossy. She looked a lot less suburbia and a lot more terrified.

And she hadn’t fainted when the Thing that had been her husband had let loose its dying wail.

Rookwood taped down the bandage. He’d heal, but there was no point in irritating the wound. He uncurled his arm, and the white glare of gauze against his biceps tinted itself faint pink. Claw marks stung like hell, and he was glad he didn’t seem to ever get infected. “Every one I’ve killed.”

She swallowed audibly. “How many have you . . . killed?”

I was a cop eight months ago, babe. This is a new line of work for me. “Enough to be a professional.” His shirt was torn, and as he shrugged back into his jacket, he saw that it was also torn, but not as badly. “Listen, Mrs. King—”

“It’s Amelia,” she said flatly. “How long have you been doing this?”

The time for those questions was when you first met me, you know. But she was a civilian. Still, she’d come down to the basement and blown the head off a daywalking old one. She was made of stronger stuff than most civvies.

But then he thought of the bites all over her. The more he thought about it, the more he thought a new one wouldn’t play with her like that. Which made the widow a question mark.

Still, he hated himself for what he was about to do. “Long enough. Look, you should go to a hotel or something. Don’t come back here, unless it’s during the day. Even then you probably shouldn’t come back. They have human bodies to do their dirty work, you know.”

“For Christ’s sake, this is my home !” Her hands on the kitchen counter were white-knuckled. The two paper cups of coffee were probably cold by now, but they smelled good to him. Almost as good as she smelled. The burning tang on her had faded a little.

It wouldn’t go away completely, but most probably the one who’d bitten her was dead. If she didn’t get bitten again, she’d probably be okay. And when she died it would be a true death.

Of course, there was always the alternative. If what he was thinking was right, he’d probably end up shoving a stake through her and lopping off her pretty head as well.

It wasn’t a comfortable thought. Especially when his eyes drifted down of their own accord behind the shades and touched the shape of those bitten breasts under the spattered white shirt. What was a woman like this doing wasting herself as a housewife? Did he even want to ask?

Of course not.

“Stay here and die, then.” The kukri was clean; he slid it back in its sheath. The stake was strapped to his thigh again, hawthorn wood easily shedding acidic corruption. “Or get bit again, maybe by Chisholm or another one of their protégés.” He felt low and dirty even as he said it.

“I hired you for—”

“You hired me to kill your husband. He’s dead. Anything else is extra, and I’m busy.” He checked the gun again. The spare ammo in his jacket pockets was a negligible weight. “Enjoy your coffee.”

He turned on his heel, scooped up his duffel bag, and was halfway down the hall before he heard her footsteps behind him. Staggering just slightly.

“What am I supposed to do ?”

It was a forlorn little cry, and he almost stopped.

But his work wasn’t done. He sped up, heels jabbing the hardwood, and crunched through the remainder of the vase in the hall.

Outside, the cool, rainy air was a balm to his burning cheeks. He made it to the Cadillac, dropped into the driver’s seat, and was gone before she could come out in her yard and start yelling. Not that he thought she would—Mrs. King wasn’t the type.

But if she did come out, he wasn’t sure his resolve would hold. There was a suspicious blurring in his eyes, and Rookwood wasn’t sure how much more he could hate what he was about to do—or himself.

The house crouched, one window glowing gold. Someone was up late, probably sitting in the kitchen. He didn’t get close enough to look.

Rain flirted down, kissed the leaves of trees planted when this housing development was put in. It touched the wide sidewalks, drenched the thirsty lawns, dripped from eaves, and gurgled in gutters. There was no drone of traffic as there was in the city, just the sea-sound of the city in the distance and the occasional rolling breaker of tires on wet asphalt closer.

The rain didn’t matter. He stood or crouched easily, moving only enough to keep himself flexible. The night breathed, full of damp dreaming.

The neighbors had both had dinner. Someone brought garbage out across the street behind him. But the widow’s house stood, closed and self-contained as the woman herself.

Rookwood waited. She’d come home before dusk, in a silver SUV, and didn’t open the garage but carried plastic and paper bags inside with her shoulders up, hurrying. Since then, just the light in the kitchen, mocking the gathering and fallen night.

Lights turned off in the houses around hers. A dog yapped a few yards away until someone yelled, “Max, get in here!” A series of happy yips, then a door closing and more silence.

The neighborhood prepared itself for sleep. Rookwood lifted the flask to his mouth, took another swallow of the red stuff. The problem wasn’t with it being cold or the flat copper tang to it.

The problem was how good this pale substitute tasted. And how good he could imagine it coming straight from the vein.

His nape tickled. He eased farther back into the shadows, melding with them, his pulse and breathing smoothing out into an imperceptible hum under the ambient nighttime noise. Quiet as a mole in a hole.

It had taken him two months to get his pulse under control. It was worth the work.

The widow’s house was like a sore tooth. His gaze kept drifting across it. What was she doing in there? What had she brought home? Had she made any phone calls?

Do your job, Rookwood. He was barely breathing under the dripping fringes of some kind of evergreen. He almost stopped blinking, his pulse struggling with the iron grip of training, instinct whispering that it would be soon, very soon.

He still almost missed it. A shadow flitted over the roof, a quick, lizardlike movement. A faint tinkle of glass breaking, almost lost under the rush of rain, half swallowed by the cloak of fetid silence suddenly drawn choking close around the white walls and green shutters.

He moved. Slippery, squishing grass underfoot, getting up a good head of speed. Spatters of rain broke against his face. The UV in one hand, its light stuttering on as his thumb flicked, the gun in the other, he streaked for the French doors with only a slight squelching sound betraying his position.

And hit, hard, the glass shivering away in fragments and long swords. The noise was incredible, a crashing through the silence the Thing had pulled close around the entire house, and he saw the short white blond hair, the blue eyes, the expensive business suit, in flashes before Rookwood’s gun spoke and Chisholm’s arm flicked, throwing Amelia King across the kitchen and into the wall as though she weighed less than nothing. She slid down the wall in a queer boneless way, leaving a huge dent behind, and the hot red fury bubbled up under Rookwood’s skin.