Page 17 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
I sighed and shook my head. “Well I don’t have any more right now, kiddo. I hope you didn’t eat any of the paper.”
It didn’t look like she had, since there was a mound of shredded paper under and around her, but still, that couldn’t be healthy.
I started pushing it all together, and trying to put it into what remained of the paper bag, only to find Tobias Cain staring at me. “Did that cat eat your whole lunch?”
I blinked, thinking quick. “Healing,” I blurted after a moment. “I, um, found her last night, after some dick hit her with his car, and took her to a body mage. So she’s pretty depleted. I guess I just didn’t realize how depleted.”
It was his turn to blink, staring at me. “A body mage. You took a stray cat to a body mage? How much did that cost you?”
Oh, that.
Well, Ihadbeen willing to pay, even if...“Let’s be honest here, Detective. I’m basically Charles. My mother is even richer than he was. I know all her rich friends. One of them is a doctor and a body mage. He helped me because he knows me. He was my pediatrician when I was a kid.”
Cain scoffed at that, pushing himself up onto his feet. “I may not think much of your chosen career path, Knight, but you are not some rich guy who’s never worked a day in your life. We met because you were working and found a body in a dumpster. More than that, because you were too honest to ignore it and walk away, so you reported it.”
That was...was it sweet? I wasn’t sure. He seemed to be indicating something resembling respect for me, which was nice. But also taking the opportunity to take a swipe at my job? Yeah, I had no idea. The whole situation was confusing as hell.
But at least it had distracted him from just how much food Twist had consumed.
“Speaking of reporting things, if you want to keep an eye on a guy who hits kittens with his car and then leaves without even stopping, here’s his license plate number.” I pulled a piece of paper off the corner of the bag and a pen from my pockets, and wrote the number on it then handed it over to him.
If the look on Cain’s face was any indication, I saw parking tickets in Mr. Kitten-Hit-and-Run’s future.
He put the paper in the pocket of his suit jacket, then motioned toward the hallway. “Let’s take a walk. You can tell meabout the names we found on a list in the office. We don’t have any context, so it could just be people he wanted to invite to a party, but—well, I will say, your mother’s name was at the top.”
“Anything I can do to help,” I answered back, once again sounding stilted to myself. Because well, I wasn’t going to help them arrest my mother, but I was also sure she hadn’t done the deed. And frankly, if she had, I didn’t think there was a chance the cops could do anything about it.
My mother was far from perfect, and I didn’t doubt she’d killed people in her past.
Charles, though? I would believe that she’d killed him when I saw proof.
So I picked up Twist and tucked her back into my front pocket, continuing to be weirded that she still seemed to weigh maybe a pound or two, even after eating multiple pounds of food. I’d figure it out or I wouldn’t; I just hoped that in the meantime, I didn’t go broke trying to feed her.
CHAPTER 6
Detective Cain and I reached the dining room just in time to see the butler snap. Jennings, I was pretty sure his name was.
He was a staid, older British guy, and as one might expect, he’d always been the sort of person who didn’t display his emotions. As we walked under the great gilded archway into the dining room, though, he looked at the maid, who was somehow still sobbing, still incredibly loud, and said, “For god’s sake, woman, control yourself. You’ve been working here a week, you’ll be fine.”
It wasn’t quiet—couldn’t be, since he was sitting near the opposite end of the very long dining room table from her.
Then, for a moment, he looked...as though he was in literal, physical pain.
I imagined that was because he, unlike the maid, had been working for Charles most of his life. What other job could he find, anywhere, at his age? Let alone another job with someone he knew as well as Charles. Working for the same guy for like, fifty or sixty years wasn’t the kind of thing you just moved on from. It wasn’t like he was a vampire, who was in the samehealth he’d been in before, and would have another century or five to keep going.
“I’m sure Charles’s will is going to provide for the staff who’s been with him the longest,” I offered, even though we both knew damned well that Charles probably didn’t have a will.
Why would a vampire ever have a thing like that?
Jennings, though, looked at me like I was the sun rising in his window after the world’s longest night, turning bright, hopeful eyes on me. “Do you think so, Mr. Knight?”
“I’m sure,” I confirmed. Because yeah, I was almost certain that Charles hadn’t had a will, because no vampire expects to die, but I also knew that the vampiric community always circled the wagons in situations like this one, and that circle included people like Jennings, who was as much “one of us” as I was. “I’ll talk to Mom, I’m sure she knew who his lawyer was. You and the household staff who’ve been with him for years would never be expected to just walk away with nothing.”
For some reason, this made the sobbing woman sob even harder. Maybe because she hadn’t been with Charles for fifty years, and couldn’t expect a big windfall.
Frankly, I didn’t know how she had the lungs for it. I hadn’t ever cried much, but I remembered it being...kind of hard? Like, prolonged sobbing led to silent sobbing because you just didn’t have the strength to keep it up that long. Maybe this woman had been an opera singer in a previous life, though, because her lungs were not struggling at all.
I looked her over, in case the dramatics were designed to make people look away, but I was quite sure I didn’t know her from anywhere. Also, she was sobbing something about “all that blood,” which seemed like a valid reason to freak out to me. It had sure as hell turned my stomach, and I’d walked in knowing something terrible had happened. Poor thing was probablygoing to need years of therapy after discovering her brand-new employer with half his face crushed.
