Inked

I tore my gaze from the old man, and glanced down at what he had given me. The plastic card was a hotel key, and I held it up over my shoulder. Grant took the key without a word, and slid it quickly into his pocket.

The other item was far less mundane. It was leather, and covered in an intricately inked design that resembled roses. But it was not normal leather. At least, not from anything that had moved on four legs.

I was holding a flap of human skin.

Chapter 2

No escape. The old man named Ernie was dead in front of my Mustang, but even if his body hadn’t been blocking the car, it would not have felt right to simply leave him. He had been murdered. Murdered, while looking for me. And those two things, I feared, were related.

The police arrived with the ambulance. We stood aside as the EMTs checked the old man’s vital signs and came to the obvious conclusion. And then we stepped aside even more as the police cordoned off the area and took us back to their vehicle for questioning.

Before they were done, a black sedan rolled up. Two familiar men got out. They took one look at us, whispered to each other, and then walked to the dead old man. Hovered, crouched, poked and prodded with latex gloves on their hands. I tried not to watch them. Or think about the hotel key and leather burning a hole in Grant’s pocket. Red eyes blinked lazily from the shadows, and two hot tongues rasped the back of my neck.

When Detectives Suwani and McCowan were done with their cursory examination, they held three plastic bags, which they passed off to one of the uniforms waiting on the sidelines. Then, with careful deliberation, they walked over to where we were waiting.

Suwani was a slender black man, not quite as tall as me, but lean, with a sinewy strength that started at his hands and wrists, and no doubt reflected the rest of his trim body. McCowan, on the other hand, had already lost most of his neck behind his sagging chin, and the rest of him was built like the love child of a dump truck and an elephant. Big, lumbering—kind of cute, kind of soft, kind of bullheaded—kind of this, kind of that, which I suspected was just a mask, given that his eyes were anything but dull or dithering.

Suwani gave me a sharp once-over, but only McCowan stared at the low neck of my dress, his gaze traveling down my legs and then up again—barely reaching my face. Grant cleared his throat. “Gentlemen. I wish we could have met again under better circumstances.”

I wished we had not met again at all, but those were the breaks. Suwani nodded, and looked at me. “Did you know the victim?”

“No,” I said. “We were coming back from a party, and found him in front of my car.”

“You have a bad habit of collecting corpses,” McCowan replied. “Last time we met there was a dead man who had your name in his pocket. And now another corpse just happens to be found beside your car. You sure you didn’t know him? Or that he didn’t know you?”

Grant frowned, and this time when he spoke there was a faint melody in his voice, soft and filled with a thread of that old familiar power. He could do things with his voice. Change people. He could reach inside the heart of a soul and make something new. I could not imagine a more dangerous ability—nor a man whom I trusted more to wield it.

Grant was the last of the Lightbringers, just as I was the last of the Wardens, and the two of us should never have met. But we had, and now I was the only person who could keep him alive while he used his gift. We were bound together. Our hearts shared the same steady rhythm. Even now, I felt his pulse riding mine, soft and warm as a coil of sunlight.

“What did you learn from his body?” Grant asked, his voice sliding through me with a shiver. I could not be affected by his power—nor the boys—but I felt the ripple nonetheless. Zee said it tickled. I had told the little demon that it made me uneasy.

Suwani blinked. McCowan swayed ever so slightly. But then their gazes cleared, and the black detective coughed into his hand. “He had a gun in his possession. Recently fired. Shots were reported near here less than an hour ago. We were called out to investigate, which is why we arrived so quickly.”

“He killed someone?”

“We don’t know that,” Suwani said, and then frowned, as though he wasn’t quite certain why he was talking so much. “But there was a body, a young man. Heavy drug user. His arms were so eaten up with needle tracks he had started injecting into his leg.”

“Anything else?” Grant held his gaze, but this time it was McCowan who stirred.

“The old fellow’s name was Ernie Bernstein,” said the burly man, rubbing his brow as though he had a headache. “Israeli passport in his suit jacket, along with a thousand dollars cash. Nothing else on him except for that gun.”

Nothing except a hotel key, and a piece of human skin.

And a message from my grandmother, dead now for more than thirty years.

The distinction between human and animal skin was subtle, especially when aged and treated. Human skin was softer than animal, fine and supple, even more so than lamb; and thin, with a delicacy that belied its inherent strength. Most people would have been unable to tell the difference. That I could was not something that made me proud, but I had seen human skin before, dried and preserved for horrific reasons. It was not something I would ever forget. And it was on my mind now as Grant and I climbed the steps to his apartment: the entire top floor of the former furniture factory that housed his homeless shelter.

The detectives had driven us home to the co-op. My car was part of evidence. Luckily, there were three little demons in my life who were capable of playing housekeeper when they wanted to, and when I had opened up that door—slowly—there were no knives to be found on those vintage leather seats; no chewed-up baseball bats, rusty nails, decapitated teddy bears, or issues of Playboy. Sixty seconds of good hard work. All they had left behind was a decorative square pillow that had not been there before, and that had i love the police embroidered on it in big red letters.

My boys. Such comedians.

I carried my high heels in one hand, and held Grant’s with the other as he made his way slowly up the stairs. His jaw was tight, but not entirely with pain. It had been a hard night. Zee paced through the shadows ahead of us, while Dek and Mal—now that I was in a safe place—uncoiled from my neck and slithered down my arm to join Raw and Aaz in the shadows.

“How long will you be gone?” Grant asked, when we were safe inside the apartment and its spacious golden comfort: oak floors, exposed brick, dark windows that filled the entire length of the southern wall—almost as many bookshelves built into the other. A grand piano stood in one corner, in addition to a cherry red motorcycle that Grant would never be able to ride again; and my mother’s trunk, pushed against the wall alongside the workstation where he carved all his flutes. His gold Muramatsu was the only exception, and lay gleaming upon the dining table.

Zee and the others were suddenly nowhere to be seen. I headed directly to the bedroom, shedding my dress as I walked. Grant’s sharp intake of breath cut through my heart, and I tossed the slip of red silk at his face. I was wearing a lace thong and nothing else: a far cry from the cotton gra

“Not long.” I glanced over my shoulder, watching as he crumpled the dress against his chest and made a slow inspection of my nether regions. “And if I find any answers, I’ll come here first before I make any mission to mayhem.”

“Hmm.” Grant limped after me, a bit more spring in his step. He dropped the dress and began unbuttoning his shirt, exposing his strong throat. The bow tie already hung loose beneath his collar. I turned to face him, backing into the bedroom, slowly enough that he caught up with me before I was hardly through the door. His gaze was dark with something deeper, more raw, than hunger, and I placed my hand against his chest, over his heart. I trembled, or maybe that was him. Both of us like kids.