Archangel’s Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(74)
Author: Nalini Singh

They walked through the businesspeople and the tourists, the occasional mother with a pram, the restaurant hawkers trying to talk them inside for a meal, the roadside stall owners calling out to them about “genuine imitation” gold watches and “faux designer” handbags. It was loud and chaotic and it was New York.

“I wasn’t sure I would like this city,” he said to her. “Yet the mad spirit of it has a way of getting under a man’s skin.”

“You miss the bayou, though, don’t you?” Rich and dark, her eyes saw to the heart of him, and that was her right. “That old hut I tracked you to once—”

“You mean the place where you threatened to bury me in a swamp hole then douse me in fire ants?”

Ashwini bared her teeth at the taunting vampire who was the only person who’d ever totally “got” her. That time in the bayou, he’d answered the door barefoot and wearing jeans only partially buttoned, his body lazily relaxed as he leaned up against the doorjamb of the house surrounded by water on almost every side. The half-submerged cypress trees in that water had been lush with foliage and heavy with Spanish moss in the thick humidity, the landscape unearthly in its beauty.

A different, bright green moss had grown up the sides of the hut, turning it into a part of the bayou, and to the right she could see a hammock slung between two submerged trees with enough height to make it worthwhile. At any other time, she’d have climbed into that hammock and let out a sigh, happy to spend the afternoon watching the bayou water move slow and sinuous as a woman intent on seduction.

Right then, however, she’d been sorely tempted to shoot Janvier in the gut. “You made me traipse through the bayou for weeks,” she muttered now. “Then, right when I had you, you made nice with the angel you’d pissed off.” It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, either. “You knew how mad that made me—why did you keep doing it?”

Lifting their clasped hands, he pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “I was courting you.”

“Only someone with a twisted sense of humor would consider that a courtship.” Turned out she was one of those people, but damn if she hadn’t had fun when she didn’t want to kill him. “I was going to ask if that place is yours.”

“Yes. It is close to where I grew up.” She saw him train a single look at a street thief who’d been eyeing them, and suddenly, the curly-haired teen with spotty skin decided he had to be across the road. “It is a simple, quiet place. There is no rush there, non?”

“Yes.” She could imagine relaxing into the hammock with him, feeling all the cares of the world slide away. “Let’s go there . . . after this is over. After Felicity can rest.”

Eyes the shade of his homeland held hers, his accent evoking the lush, humid, haunting welcome of it as he said, “After Felicity can rest.”

They kept walking, going nowhere in particular, the air cold in their lungs and the sunshine bright from a winter blue sky. When Ashwini’s phone buzzed, she took it out with her free hand. “Guild confirmed her accounts have all been closed, and our contacts in banking say it appears she did it herself.”

“Her killer talked her into it,” Janvier said with absolute confidence. “Told her he’d take care of her, that if she loved him, she’d do as he asked.”

Ashwini could almost hear the bastard convincing Felicity to do just that. Except . . . “She kept her apartment as long as she could, didn’t give up her cat,” she said slowly. “I bet you she set up an account somewhere else.”

“Or,” Janvier said, “left money with someone she trusted.”

“No.” Ashwini shook her head. “He’d cut her off from her friends by that time. I’ll get the Guild cyber-geniuses to search across all possible banking institutions.”

She sent the message, but wasn’t hopeful they’d find anything that’d lead them to Felicity’s murderer—regardless of her attempts at maintaining her independence, it was clear the young woman had been almost totally dependent on her “lover” by the end. In all probability, she’d been imprisoned soon after she was last seen, giving her no chance to access any money she had managed to hide away.

“I’m going to quietly track down and talk to the servants who work in the houses of the angels and vampires who may be capable of such cruelty,” Janvier said, the strokable mahogany of his hair lifting in the breeze. “Often, they are aware of more than their masters know.”

It was a good idea. “I might be able to help with that. I generally come into contact with the younger vamps, and a lot of them are at the servant level.”

“We’ll make a list, start circulating.” He was quiet for a minute. “Cher, something Aaliyah said is gnawing at me.”

“About how the vamp ordered Felicity not to say anything about their being a couple until she had her ‘makeover’?” That had been niggling at her, a sharp barb in her gut.

“Yes, exactly. I don’t believe she was ever part of his official cattle, that he held that out as a lure—if she was good enough, pleased him enough, she’d become one of the chosen.” A punishing edge in every word. “In the interim, he must’ve arranged to meet her outside his usual haunts, where there would be little chance he’d be seen with her.”

The more Ashwini learned about the man who’d tortured and killed Felicity after suffocating her spirit, the more she hated him. “It puts all our suspects back in the pool.” And still there remained the question of how he was causing fatal injuries so eerily similar to the results of Lijuan’s feeding. “But the servant angle is still worth following—one may have noticed signs of a woman he or she never saw.”

Janvier shoved a hand through his hair. “I wish we didn’t have to tiptoe through this investigation. Someone had to have seen her with the bastard, if we could only ask!”

Even as he bit out the words, his eyes lingered on a giggling child who’d just tugged his mother to a window display, then took in a group of women clustered around a nearby café table, heads bent in laughing secrecy. “But to give Felicity justice, we would have to rip open the wounds of a city that has barely stopped bleeding.”

Ashwini had no answers, torn between the same competing forces.

•   •   •

Eight hours later, keeping the details of Felicity’s death under wraps was no longer an issue.