Car is parked two down from his house. He’d seen the same car two days ago in the Walmart parking lot—the car must be following him.
A commotion at the door of the apartment building we were investigating the deaths in front of momentarily stole my attention, and I paused in what I was doing to stare at Nash as he stomped toward us.
He took one look at the rookie who’d just been reamed by me and sneered. “Go home.”
The kid didn’t hesitate in the least to run to his squad car and get the hell out. And the funny thing was, my brother wasn’t even his boss. He just so happened to look like him in that moment.
Corbin, who’d been inside talking to one of the residents of the apartment building, stepped out onto the landing that led to where we were.
“Nash, what are you doing here?” Corbin asked.
I ripped my gloves off, finishing up the last bit of what I could accomplish and tucking the gloves into a garbage bag that was set to go back to the station just in case.
Nash looked at me, then looked at Corbin, his eyes pleading.
“Found the vampire who was last seen with her,” my brother said grimly. “Acadia, why don’t you go on home?”
I glared at him and crossed my arms over my chest.
“No,” I snapped.
I had a feeling something bad was about to happen, and I wasn’t going to be left out of the loop. There was no reason I had to leave. None. In fact, I was still technically processing the scene, even if all I had to do was clean up after myself and I’d be done.
My brother’s long-suffering sigh was caught by everyone, but it was Grady who had his complete attention, and who asked what was wrong.
“We are almost finished,” Grady told my brother. “If you give us ten minutes max, we’ll be out of your hair.”
“I had this emailed to me,” Nash said, looking at me, then moving his attention back to Corbin.
My brother waved him closer.
“It’s fine,” he said. “She really is done. What do you have?”
Nash pulled out his iPad, looked at me pointedly, and pressed play.
It most assuredly wasn’t fine. Something in which I found out two minutes later as the man on the screen opened the door for the woman. The man touched the woman’s neck gently, asking her a question, and then turned toward the camera.
It was then that my breath caught.
I might’ve made a sound, too, but my brother and the rest of the men witnessing the scene on the screen were too engrossed in what was going on to notice that I was about to pass out due to lack of oxygen.
Holy shit.
That man—the one that I knew was the very one with his face missing—was the same man that’d pulled my car around for me at Constantine’s house last night.
The same one that was Constantine’s daytime eyes and ears.
I was screwed.
A, because I was in that very man’s presence just last night. My brother would figure that out, too. He had connections that I couldn’t even begin to think about. And B, because Constantine wasn’t going to take this death lightly.
Not even a little bit.
• • •
I knocked frantically on the door, desperation in the intensity of the way my knuckles met the scarred oak door.
No one answered.
I knocked again.
It continued like that for three long minutes until I finally got the person I was seeking. Just not the way I’d expected him to answer.
“What are you doing?” Constantine drawled.
I whirled around, my hand covering my heart as it tried to beat straight out of my chest.
My back hit the door, and I almost landed on my ass when the door opened.
Constantine moved, drawing me away from the man that was at my back, and pulling me into him.
“What’s wrong? Why are you here?”
I shivered at the way his words shot through me like a warm apple cider on a cold winter night.
“She smells of fear,” Pavlov murmured lightly.
The same vampire that’d been standing next to him only hours ago, the one with the scary yellow eyes that reminded me of a cat’s that were shining in the dark, observed.
I swallowed thickly and turned so that I had each man in my sight.
“I have some bad news,” I murmured quietly. “The man that helped me with my car the other night—he was found dead at an apartment complex next to some woman that had been bitten tonight.”
Both men froze.
“Chen?”
Before I could confirm that, though, Constantine had his phone out and he was placing a call.
“Abraham,” Constantine growled. “I need you to check on Chen.”
It took exactly point five seconds in between Constantine hanging up, and this man named Abraham, the other man that’d been at Constantine’s side, to arrive directly next to his friend.
“Gone.”
Had Abraham just teleported into existence in front of me? Or had my rational brain decided to start playing tricks on me?
I felt something ferocious roll through the air. It was almost as if a chill had swept through my body. A deep foreboding of bad things to come.
And as I finally returned my gaze to the man I’d come here to warn, I realized that maybe, quite possibly, I should have called.
I opened my mouth to say something more, but I was swept inside by Constantine.
The man, Pavlov, closed the door behind us, and all of a sudden, I was alone.
Not one single person was in the room with me anymore.
I blinked, turning in a circle to see if I’d missed something, and frowned.
The room I was in didn’t match the outside.
Where the outside was an old plantation house with the huge white columns with white shutters, hundreds of windows—okay, more like eight—and an overall ‘I’m rich’ vibe, the inside was completely different.
Gone was the stuffy ‘I’m rich’ vibe, and in its place was comfort and warmth.
The couch in the corner of the room spoke of ‘man cave.’ Pairing that with the huge bar in the other corner of the room, I realized quite quickly that that was exactly what this was. Constantine’s man cave.
I took a step out of the entranceway and peered down the long dark hallway and frowned.
I didn’t see them there, either. It was like I was alone, and they’d never been there to begin with.
Was I hallucinating? Could they have teleported?
“Fuck, I’m sorry. Come on.”
I jumped and twisted in mid-air, finding myself staring at Constantine. He was holding his hand out for me to come toward him, and I found myself moving before I consciously told myself to do so.
“Where did you go?”
Then I wasn’t in the room I’d been standing in anymore. I was in what looked like an office.
“What. The. Fuck,” I breathed, looking around. How could I be in a completely different room?
There was a large mahogany desk in the middle of the room the size of a small country. In one corner was a row of filing cabinets, and one wall was made completely of glass that overlooked a rolling field. The wall opposite that one looked out over the rest of his office, and it was then that I realized that not only was I not in the same room, I wasn’t even in the same house!
“Sit.”
I blinked, turned to where Constantine was pointing from the edge of his desk and walked stiffly toward the couch that was taking up the single empty wall of his office.