Page 106 of Tin God

Tenzin shifted and put her arm around the girl’s back, lifting her so she could watch the river as her breath grew more and more labored.

The warrior stepped closer, his hand reaching out before he clenched it into a fist. “She’s suffering.”

“Very unlikely.” Tenzin had sent a wave of amnis over the woman as soon as she touched her hand, clouding her mind and easing her into the darkness.

“Why don’t you kill her?” the man asked.

“Because you already did.”

“I didn’t.” His voice was bitter. “What do these people have? Nothing we need. I didn’t want?—”

“Whether you wanted it or not, you did.” Tenzin stroked a hand over the girl’s copper hair. “Isn’t she pretty? Such unusual hair.” Tenzin hadn’t seen hair so bright in a long time. Was that what sunlight looked like? It reminded her of rubies in firelight.

Beautiful.

The vampire stared at the dying girl. “She’s… human.”

“Is that all you can say?” Tenzin looked up, then reached over and plucked a purple violet from the base of a rock. “A flower. I should crush it because I can.” She squeezed the violet in her hand and dropped it on the grass. “See how stupid that sounds?”

“Who are you?”

“Someone you don’t want to meet if you make a habit of crushing flowers.” Tenzin lowered the girl’s head to her shoulder and stroked her hair. “My name is Tenzin.”

He sucked in a sharp breath.

He’d heard of her. Good.

“Go, Varangian.” Tenzin glanced at the young fire vampire before he melted back into the darkness. “If you survive, I suspect I will see you again.”

ChapterTwenty-Five

“Someone is attackin’ Katya Grigorieva’s territory and people.” Brigid tapped her tablet with a stylus, and blurry images popped on-screen. “And I believe we are in agreement that Zasha Sokholov is most likely the perpetrator of all these attacks.”

Brigid, Tenzin, Ben, Carwyn, Buck, and Jennie were in a makeshift conference room in the community hall set back in the woods behind Jennie and Buck’s house in Ketchikan. The building was long and narrow, roofed with wood beams with a stone fireplace on one end. Running down the center of the great room was a carved wooden table with benches along either side.

A large TV hung from the ceiling opposite the fireplace, and Buck had done something with Lee on the phone to make Brigid’s case files jump onto the screen.

“Yeah,” Buck said. “I mean, that’s what all you folks seem to think. And what we’re hearing around.”

“To clarify, Zasha is the oneleadingthe attacks,” Carwyn said. “All the raid sites so far show evidence of violence from fire vampires, water vampires, earth, and wind.”

Brigid put up more pictures. “And these are copies of the pictures we took in Kenai and a few other spots farther north.” More burned houses. More blood. More destruction. “These attacks were also orchestrated by Zasha Sokholov. In two cases, there were eyewitnesses that spotted them.”

“Zasha and their friends are running wild,” Ben said. “And they’re doing it in Katya’s and Oleg’s territory.”

“Correction,” Jennie said. “Katya’s territory. The Russian does not have territory in this state.”

Brigid barely kept from rolling her eyes.

Buck said, “So this Zasha character wants to run Alaska? Take it from Katya?”

“That’s one possibility.” Brigid continued with the briefing that Jennie had requested at dusk. “It would be out of character for them—they only expressed interest in takin’ over Las Vegas because they’d been hired by the Ankers; Zasha didn’t want it for themself.”

Carwyn handed her a thick manila envelope, and she opened it.

“But I want all of us to consider that there’s another likelihood based on what Carwyn found on Henri Paulson’s barge last night.”

“One could call it a barge.” Carwyn was sitting at the conference table and looking at a heavily insulated tablet in his hands. “Or one could call it what it is.”

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