Keri Arthur - Dangerous Games

After locking the car, I shoved my hands into my pockets and made my way across the road. A curtain covering a window in the first town house moved, and a face briefly peered through the glass. An older woman, her features pinched and harsh looking. I gave her a smile of acknowledgment and she quickly dropped the curtain back in place.

Maybe the reason Dunleavy had been caught so often wasn't so much a product of his carelessness, but rather his nosy neighbor.

I continued on past the second town house. The eleven o'clock news was blasting out from either a radio or TV inside, and the smell or burnt toast hit the air. I drew it in, savoring the sharp aroma even as my stomach rumbled a reminder it had only had toast for breakfast, and made a mental note to grab a burger on my way back to the Directorate.

There was a small van parked out the front of Dunleavy's garage. A quick look through the windows revealed piles of newspapers, discarded take-out containers and, stacked neatly in a plastic box attached to the van's side, several duffle bags. Dunleavy's tools of trade, no doubt. I climbed the crumbling concrete steps and raised a hand to knock on the door. Only to freeze as a familiar smell spun around me.

Blood. Thick, ripe, and very, very fresh.

And with it came the scent of death and excrement—smells I knew entirely too well.

Dunleavy—or someone else—was dead inside the house.

And Gautier had been here.

For several heartbeats, I didn't move. Scarcely even dared to breathe as I listened to the wind, sorting through the scents that ran with it, nothing the sounds that ran underneath it. There was no hint of life—or even un life—coming from this flat. Only from those behind me.

Gautier might have been here, but he wasn't now. I'd feel him—or any other vampire, for that matter.

And while part of the excrement scent was definitely his, there more to the smell than simply his presence. It had a very human aroma to it—and the one thing Gautier had never been was human.

Meaning someone had probably shit themselves inside the town house. Of course, anyone who had any brains would be scared shitless by Gautier. He was one nasty mother.

I stepped back from the door. The lock was in place, and there was nothing to indicate it had been forced in any way. If Gautier had been here, he hadn't come through the front door to get at Dunleavy. Though the only way he could have forced his way through the door in the first place was if Dunleavy had previously invited him in. If there was one rule about vampires that was true, it was the fact that they couldn't cross thresholds uninvited.

"I called the cops, you know."

I wasn't sure what leapt higher—my feet or my heart—and even as I spun around, I was reaching for the weapon I didn't have. Mainly because I'd taken it off near the coat stand at home last night, and had gone back to pick it up in my rush to get out Kellen's door this morning. Jack would have my hide if he found out.

Thankfully, I didn't need it. The voice belonged to the sharp-faced old woman from the first flat. I took a deep breath, trying to calm my racing pulse and ignore the fact that it could have been anyone who'd crept up on me. God, I was still so green at this, I was a danger to myself.

"What?" I said, perhaps more brusquely than I should have.

"I called the cops."

Great. Just what I needed to deal with on top of a possible murder. "And you'd be Mrs… ?"

" Ms. Radcliffe." She drew the knitted shawl draped over her frail shoulders closer to her body as the wind gusted again.

"Ms. Radcliffe, I'm a guardian." When her expression showed little comprehension, I added, "With the Directorate of Other Races." I grabbed my badge—which I always carried—and showed it to her. "I'm here to talk to Mr. Dunleavy, so there was no need to report—"

"Not now," she interrupted, expression suddenly cross. "Before. When all that racket was happening."

"Before when? And what sort of racket are we talking about?"

"Must have been seven-thirty, eight o'clock, something like that. And the noise—" She sniffed. "Sounded like they were throwing things about and smashing up the place."

"No screaming? No arguing? Nothing like that?"

"No. They were quiet this time—except for smashing things up, that is."

"They who?"

"Him and his dirty little piece."

I raised my eyebrows and somehow resisted the urge to grin at the bristling disapproval in the old girl's voice. "His girlfriend?"

She sniffed again, and somehow managed to make the sound disparaging. "If that's what you want to call her."

"What does she look like?" Not that I actually wanted to know, but I had no idea how good the old girl's sight was. Maybe she'd seen Gautier and didn't realize it.

"Thin, with big tits. Dark hair, dark skin."

Not Gautier, then. The wind swirled around us again. His scent was fading fast. If I wanted to uncover what, exactly, he'd been up to, I had to get inside. Which meant getting rid of the old biddy—and that obviously wasn't going to be easy.

"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.