• • •
Having split from Janvier earlier to follow through with their plan of speaking to those who staffed the homes of the powerful and wealthy and cruel, Ashwini ran into the intensive care section of the hospital to find he’d beaten her there.
“Where is she?” It came out a gasp, her heart pumping; she’d received the call while at Guild HQ, giving Sara a progress report, had decided to leg it rather than try to negotiate the heavy traffic in a cab.
“In a room down the hall.” Janvier’s jacket was open over his black T-shirt, his scarf missing. “This way.”
She fell into step with him. “Have you spoken to her?”
A shake of his head. “The physicians are with her. I think she’ll react better to a woman, in any case.”
Painfully conscious of what Janvier didn’t say—the torture the woman may have suffered at male hands—Ashwini met the gaze of the angel who stood guard beside the closed door at the end of the hall, wings of silver-blue pressed against the wall. “You brought her here?”
“Yes,” Illium said, his golden eyes colder than she’d ever seen them. “She ran out of Central Park, naked and screaming, collapsed on the street.”
“Jesus.” Ashwini thought of the bitter cold, the ice. “Hypothermia?”
“A hint of frostbite—I picked her up almost as soon as she was spotted.”
Which meant she’d been dropped off somewhere nearby, abandoned close enough to traffic to get herself help and attention. Not, Ashwini thought, for her good, but because the sadistic monster behind this wanted it to be front-page news. It was eight now, so the victim had run out during the busy time when people were leaving work or heading out to dinner.
“The tracks circled back to another street entrance,” Janvier said, answering the question she’d been about to ask.
“Of course they did,” she muttered. “Security cameras?”
“I alerted the Tower and Guild teams to go through any feeds they could find,” Janvier said. “So far, nothing.”
Ashwini girded her stomach. “How bad?”
Illium had parted his lips to answer when the door was pulled open from the inside and a tall, thin vampire with sandy brown hair, and aristocratic features in a pale-skinned face stepped out. He was wearing green scrubs, held a chart in one hand. “She’s lost over half the blood in her body,” he said, shoving a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on its ends. “However, that doesn’t explain her appearance. I’ve never seen its like and I’ve been a physician for lifetimes.”
Ashwini could feel the vampire’s age pressing against her skin, knew he had to be at least seven hundred years old. “Is there anything you can tell us?”
“Nothing useful.”
Another doctor stepped out then, a mortal woman, her hair a silver cap vivid against the deep brown of her skin. “The poor girl.” Pressing the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger, she met each of their intent looks in turn. “One of you can go in, but we had to sedate her to get her to stop screaming, so I’m not sure how much sense you’ll get out of her.”
Janvier and Illium stayed outside while Ashwini went in. Closing the door behind her with a quiet snick and steeling herself for what she might see, she faced the bed. They’d put the victim in a private room with a sprawling view of the field of fallen stars that was the night-draped city. The woman on the bed, however, wasn’t concerned with the scenery.
She lay flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling with dull brown eyes that were sharply slanted. Paired with the knife-edge cheekbones that now pushed painfully against her skin, those eyes would’ve given her a feline kind of beauty once, stunning and sensual. Her only flaw, for those who would see it that way, was the birthmark that covered the left side of her face and part of her neck, the color dark as port wine.
Once again, the killer had chosen a woman who may well have been vulnerable, a target wounded by the world until she’d been willing to overlook the danger signs in hope of love and safety.
Her face had shrunken in on itself, the majority of her skin a papery white that appeared leathery from a distance; Ashwini was certain that was an illusion, that it would prove as thin and brittle as Felicity’s. The woman’s fingernails were cracked and broken, her frame emaciated, and her black hair so thin, it felt as if a touch would turn it to dust.
A bandage covered her throat, the flesh below no doubt torn and ripped.
When Ashwini gently lifted the sheet, she saw bruises and bite marks on every inch of skin exposed by the thin hospital gown. That, however, was where the resemblance to Felicity ended. Where Felicity had been a mummified husk, this woman still had some blood in her body, some flesh on her bones. As if she’d escaped before the process was complete.
Ashwini was certain she’d been released on purpose.
Replacing the sheet, careful not to nudge the IV lines that dripped into the woman, she said, “I’m Ash. My job is to find out who did this to you. Help me.”
No response.
Not about to give up, she grabbed a chair from the corner and took a seat beside the bed. Then she started talking about Felicity, about what they’d found so far. “This,” she said at the end, “what the bastard’s done to you, what he did to Felicity, it isn’t right and it needs to be stopped.”
Nothing.
Ashwini wasn’t even sure the victim had blinked the entire time she’d been talking. Accepting that perhaps the woman simply couldn’t reply, that she’d been broken on too deep a level, Ashwini rose to her feet and put the chair back where it had been. However, when she would’ve left the room, something made her turn back.
No change, not even a whisper, and yet . . .
She returned to the bed, stared at the hand that lay so fragile and emaciated inches from her. It hadn’t been visible when she’d replaced the sheet. “Speak to me,” Ashwini whispered, but the woman continued to stare up at the ceiling.
Yet her hand, it lay in front of Ashwini like an invitation.
Throat working and skin hot, she flexed and unflexed her own hand. Her instincts screamed that she had permission, that the woman trapped in that shell of a body was crying out to her on a frequency no one else could hear. Still, she hesitated. This wouldn’t be like with old and wise Keir, or with the young and teary-eyed teenager who’d discovered Felicity’s body.