Page 65 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
She looked away again, back toward the water, so I stepped up beside her so that I could see her reaction when I spoke. “Do you have more information on who killed Charles?”
“I didn’t think so,” she said, but the look on her face said something else. Something pained. “I thought it had to be one of those awful people he’d been talking to about turning against the senator. Those are the kind of people who commit murders, right? Traitors. But then I was thinking about it. About everything that’s happened. About everyone he’s talked to in the last few months.”
She was struggling to just spit out her suspicion, clearly. That meant it wasn’t someone expected. It was someone she hadn’t thought would be a traitor or a murderer, like Mei or Gerald or Carmen. The main person on my list that fit those specifications,though, was her. So I really needed her to tell me what was going on in her head.
She turned to me, and there were actual tears in her eyes. “It’s her, though. I’m sure now. I didn’t want it to be her, but it has to?—”
And then her head was just...gone, in a spray of gore.
CHAPTER 27
Kate Morton was dead, and my brain seemed to flip off the moment it acknowledged that fact.
A loud noise made me full-body flinch.
A shot?
Or was it shouting?
Kate’s body moved with the momentum of the impact, falling forward onto the sand.
But where was her fucking head?
What was . . . what . . . was . . .
I was being jerked down and away suddenly, arms around my waist, and I fought, instinct telling me that I was in danger, even if I didn’t understand what the hell was happening.
Then a deep burr that was becoming familiar sounded in my ear. “I’ve got you. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
As though in counterpoint to the words, hands started moving over my body, not in a sexual way but a clinical one, patting every inch of me, looking for injury.
There was blood, I realized.
Blood . . . everywhere.
I lifted shaking fingers to my cheek, pressing them just under my eye and then pulling them back to find them coated with something greasy and gray and?—
“Oh god,” I whispered. “I?—”
“I know,” Davin’s voice agreed, a little breathy and close to my ear. “I know. If you need to be sick, you be sick.”
“But Kate?—”
“I’m sorry Flynn. She’s dead.”
That was when the sirens started. I hadn’t thought the sound of police sirens would be a relief at any point in my life. They were always bad, weren’t they? They meant a speeding ticket, or someone hurt, or something else awful happening.
But the awful thing had already happened here.
Someone had murdered Kate right in front of me, because she’d rethought the last few weeks of Charles’s life and realized someone unexpected had done something suspicious.
A woman.
A woman she was sure had killed him.
The nearest siren cut off suddenly, and then there were cops. They started by forcing us to our knees and demanding that we disarm, which was—well, Davin was unimpressed, and Twist was even less impressed, squeezing her way out of my pocket, then dropping onto the pavement and hissing at the shouting cops.
She looked up at me, her little fangs bared. “Do you want me to eat them, Father?”
