Page 29 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
“Of course,” she agreed, searching my face as though confused. “She killed him, didn’t she? I don’t want her to think I was plotting with him. I talk a big game, you know how we all are. But I don’t want a fight. We have a good life here.”
That was exactly what I’d been saying, both to myself and aloud, all along, so my instinct was to agree instantly, except for one thing. “I don’t think my mother killed Charles, Carmen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m investigating her alongside everyoneelse, but why would she have asked me to look into it, if she’d been the one to kill him?”
That seemed to stop her in her tracks. She let go of my arm and entirely dropped the innocent act, frowning as she turned to face Davin and me. “That...doesn’t make sense, no. It’s a waste of your time, and she cares more about that than about what we think. But if she didn’t kill him, then who?”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
She considered for a moment before answering. “Rigoletto, at the opening on Saturday. He was thick as thieves with that pendejo Forsyth.” She shook her head sadly. “I’ve never met a vampire with such awful fashion sense. It’s like he doesn’t know colors exist. All black and white, every day.”
She meant Forsyth, then, and not Charles with his plaid...tie? tuxedo?
I considered what Gerald had been wearing when we were at his house, and it had been mostly gray, which wasn’t far off what she was saying. She probably hadn’t been offended by Charles wearing plaid, either.
“Did you see him talking to anyone else? Anyone new? Anything unusual happen?”
She crossed her arms, and her eyes went distant as she considered, darting back and forth. “No one new. No one new has come to town since Forsyth. Almost like no one wants to be around him.” She looked up and met my eye, more serious than I’d ever seen her before in my life, and said, “But the only strange thing that happened was that he wasn’t talking to your mother at all. Like maybe they had a falling out.”
I could see where she found that pretty damning, and I couldn’t deny it. So instead, I nodded. “And yesterday? Did you do anything special?”
She shook her head. “No. I stayed in. No alibi, if that’s what you’re looking for. Though the person you should really talk tois that dragon of an assistant of his. I doubt anyone could have seen him without talking to her first.”
And that, well...that was an excellent point. Maybe I needed to add her to the list of people to talk to as soon as possible.
CHAPTER 11
“Let me guess,” Davin said as we got back into the car. “Now we’re going to Charles’s house?”
I winced, but looked at him from the corner of my eye. “Would you mind?”
He waved me off, almost disinterested, and spun the conversation back to Carmen as he turned on the car and headed toward the main road. “You don’t think she did it, do you?”
“Nah. I mean, I don’t buy the innocent ingenue act for a minute, but she genuinely seemed to believe that my mother had killed him.” I peeked in at where Twist was fast asleep in my pocket. “Plus Twist didn’t wake up specifically to tell me that she stunk.”
At that, he laughed. “Was that what she said before?”
I closed my jacket back up and nodded to him. “I mean, she’s not wrong, is she? Forsyth sort of smells like old blood. Vampires never smell like their emotions, not like people, but usually they just smell like...not much?”
He slowed the car, turning to look at me, his eyes narrowed. “You could smell that?”
“Sure. Humans smell like sweat and hormones and all the stuff happening in their bodies, so sometimes you can tell what’sgoing on in their brains because of how they smell. Vampires don’t have all that.” I was waving my hands around as I said it like if I spoke with them it would be easier to understand what I was saying. It was a bad habit I should have broken ages ago, since I knew damn well it didn’t work.
Davin didn’t seem bothered, didn’t duck away or glare at me for it. Mostly, he seemed deep in thought. After a moment, he shook his head. “No. I mean, yes, you’re right, humans smell different than vampires. But when I was human, I couldn’t smell any of that. Maybe if they smelled rotten, or sometimes if they’d just been exercising, but not mood swings.”
Huh.
“But you can smell it now, right?”
“Right,” he agreed. “Because now I’m built to hunt humans, so I can smell them, and hone in on little changes in their scents.” He pointed to a spot on the road. “Where am I turning again? That one?”
“No, the next one. So...maybe I somehow inherited that from Mother.” It was a weird thought, but it also wasn’t as though there were a lot of children born to vampires for me to use as examples. I was the only one I was aware of at all.
He shrugged, turning into Charles’s driveway, then tutted and shook his head at the lack of a gate or security. “We’ve really got to drag these arseholes into the modern century. Cameras that upload to the cloud, and we wouldn’t have to be investigating this.”
“Then they’d kill each other in other places,” I pointed out.
I was just helpful like that.
He huffed a sigh and pulled the car to a stop in front of the dark house, then peered at it dubiously. “You sure she’s here?”
