Page 66 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
“Nope,” I said, ignoring the cops, who were still demanding to know if I was armed. “Please don’t eat the cops, Twist. I get why you want to, but it would just make this worse.”
One of the cops snorted and grabbed my arm, which Twist decided was a step too far. She yowled at him, lunging, and he reared back.
“Sir, you’re going to have to control that creature, or I’ll have it taken by animal control and put down.”
“Are you seriously threatening a kitten right now?” came the unimpressed and oh-so-welcome voice of Detective Tobias Cain.
I almost collapsed in relief. “It’s the person who killed Charles,” I said, immediately turning to him as I picked up Twist and held her against my chest. I knew I shouldn’t tell him. Vampires didn’t want humans in their business, but dammit, this was important for him as much as it was for me. “That was Kate Morton. She was his assistant; the one who was in San Diego when the murder happened. She came to see me tonight. Said she’d remembered something suspicious. Something about a woman. But before she could tell me—” I looked over at where her body lay, blood soaking out into the sand.
“Christ, Knight, you can’t get out of the middle of this one, can you? Any idea who she was talking about?”
I brought a hand up to my face, as though to scrub it, or rub my eyes, or?—
Then I remembered that my whole face was covered with gore and dropped my hand, desperately holding back a gag.
Instead of asking anything else, Cain scowled a moment, looking around the scene. Then he turned to Davin. “Is there a public restroom around here? I don’t think wet wipes are going to fix this.”
“My office,” I said instead, motioning toward the building. “I have a bathroom in there if it’s...can I? I can shower.”
Cain nodded, but motioned to the whole length of my body. “We’re going to ask you to bag the clothes, but I doubt you’re ever going to want to see them again anyway.”
He wasn’t wrong about that.
Too bad, because it had been one of my favorite shirts.
Was I a bad person for even having that thought in the moment?
Kate was dead. Murdered, right in front of me, her brains and blood spattered everywhere, including my fucking face.
That was when Davin’s prediction came true, and I turned and vomited right there in the parking lot.
An hour later I was clean, at least physically, and wrapped in gray sweats, a plain black T-shirt, and a heavy blanket. I sat on my sofa with Twist curled in my lap, right next to Davin.
Cain was across from us in a chair, and Detective Miller was conspicuously absent. Uniformed cops were coming and going from the shop, mostly to answer to Cain or give him information as they “processed the scene.”
It seemed like an impersonal way to say that a woman had been brutally murdered just outside my shop.
Me? I couldn’t stop staring at Cain.
He was wearing a giant, almost Mr. T-esque gold cross around his neck.
Garlic. Cross. What was next, was he going to start spritzing everyone he met with a spray bottle of holy water? Like they were misbehaving cats rather than potential vampires.
An inappropriate laugh bubbled up in me at the notion, but I managed to hold it down.
Unfortunately for him, a spray bottle of holy water would do better at warding off cats than vampires. My mother was probably older than Christianity; why would a cross or other religious relic have any effect on her?
“I swear, she didn’t name any names,” I told Cain for probably the third time. Not because he’d asked again, but because I was wracking my brain trying to remember anything she’d said that would be useful. “She didn’t say if it was afriend of my mother or an enemy. She didn’t say precisely how someone had made her suspicious. Just that she hadn’t wanted to be. Hadn’t wanted to believe it. Then”—my eyes glazed over, reliving the moment in my mind where Kate’s head had just disappeared in a spray of gray and red and the whole world had seemed to go abstract and wrong, like one of Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings.
“If that’s all she said, that’s all she said, Flynn. You can’t make the conversation any deeper than it was.” Cain was using his most soothing voice, the one I’d heard him use on relatives of victims before. He was worried about me.
Worried aboutme, when he had apparently decided vampires were real and he was surrounded by them.
Who had given it away, I wondered?
Carmen? No, probably not. Not unless Cain was a big fan of old Spanish silent films, and he’d somehow recognized her from them.
Gerald seemed the type to flash a little fang if some uppity human pissed him off enough.
