Alone (27 page)

Room 862.

James stepped into the hotel room and
shivered from the cold air racing through the suite. The hotel
manager, a smartly dressed woman in her fifties, approached and
held out her hand.

“
Officers, thank you for coming
so quickly. I’m Michelle Price, the manager. I don’t know how to
explain this other than to assume vandalism.” She gave a shrill,
slightly nervous laugh. “But, I guess it’s your job to figure these
things out.”

“
Of course.”

“
The incident took place in
the bedroom.”

James followed the manager through the
adjoining door. The gap where the window had once been took up the
whole of the front wall. Only a scarily long drop down to the city
below was on the other side.

He walked across the room to the missing
window. The sheer drop on the other side was dizzying, the city
stretching out in front of him. James felt a strange rush of
vertigo and put his hand on the wall, steadying himself. Night had
started to fade to day and the dawning light made the drop even
worse.

Glass crunched beneath foot, but when he
looked down he only saw a few shards. He didn’t need to check the
street below to know the rest of the window would be scattered
across the sidewalk. Whoever broke this window had done so from the
inside.

“
The room next door reported an
explosion,” the manager told him.

He couldn’t see any
signs of explosives;
no powder residue or burn marks on the walls or thick carpeting.
The noise the neighbors heard must have been the force of the glass
bursting outward.

James went back into the living room and
rapped his knuckles against the intact window. The glass was thick,
double glazed, designed to keep out the sound of the nearby airport
and prevent any accidents from happening. The last thing a high
profile hotel needed was people committing suicide from its top
floors.

“
I assume the same glass is used
throughout the hotel?” he asked the manager.

“
Yes, of course. The exact
same.”

James frowned. “This isn’t a case of
someone throwing a chair against a window. Some serious force would
be needed to break this glass. Was the room occupied?”

“
Yes, by a couple, but no
one saw them leave. The woman came back around five last night, the
man an hour or so after.”

“
Have you got their
details?”

“
They checked in as Mr. and Mrs.
Lorenzo. We have credit card details and an address, but nothing
else. We don’t require anything more for American
citizens.”

James checked the rest of
the room. The couple
who had inhabited the place seemed to have disappeared in-situ.
Clothes piled at the bottom of the bed, a half-drunk bottle of coke
stood on the dresser. A small bag sat on the chair.

Michelle folded her arms across her chest.
“When we let ourselves into the room the shower was running. This
whole thing is freaky, if you ask me. All we could think of was
that someone had thrown themselves through the window, but its
protective glass and we didn’t find any bodies on the ground
below.”

James crossed the room, picked up the bag
and looked inside. The bag didn’t contain much—a couple of changes
of clothing and a toiletries bag. These things told him nothing
except a woman owned the luggage. He checked the side pockets and
found what he wanted; identification.

He read the name on the birth certificate
and his stomach dropped.

Serenity Richards.

Richards must have been her maiden name,
but James became certain the owner of the bag was the same woman.
How many people had the name ‘Serenity’?

He bent down and picked up a small sliver
of glass. Something came off on his fingers and, with a sinking
heart, he realized it was blood.

This was more than a case of vandalism.
Someone hadn’t smashed the window and left. Someone had been hurt.
He desperately wished it wasn’t Serenity, but as the minutes
passed, his hopes for her dwindled.

What had she gotten
herself mixed up in?

James
slipped on a pair of latex gloves and
instructed Dawson to do the same. Hotels were impossible for
getting prints—so many people, from the previous guests to the
cleaners, passed through the rooms—but blood samples could be
matched at a later date.

He experienced the same sensation again;
the feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

“
What name did you say they’d
checked in as?” he asked the manager. The chance someone had stolen
Serenity’s things and she’d never even seen this room still
existed.

“
We didn’t get any more than Mrs.
Lorenzo. The husband seemed to handle everything.”

The husband?

A man with her would most likely turn out
to be her actual husband; the man currently wanted for an alleged
rape.

“
Can you give me a description?”
he said, bending to pick up more pieces of blood soaked glass and
bagging them.

The manager frowned. “No, I never thought
to check. I can find out though. They ordered room service and the
porter who made the delivery is on duty tonight. He’s about to
finish his shift.”

“
Lucky him,” Dawson muttered, a
comment shot down by a glance from James.

The reluctant porter was called up and
asked if he remembered what ‘Mrs. Lorenzo’ looked like.

“
Long dark hair, dark eyes,” the
Hispanic man shrugged, embarrassed. “Pretty, I guess. She seemed
nice, though. She tried to tip me even though the tips are already
charged to the room.”

Damn it!

The missing woman must be Serenity.
Whatever had happened in this room, he was sure she’d been
involved.

Where was she now? Had the
husband used fake identification and credit card to pay for the
room and then attacked her? That the husband had somehow weakened
the glass and broken it as a distraction was the only explanation.
They wouldn’t be able to jump through without some kind of safety
harness or rappelling
 
gear.

Breaking the window
would create a
diversion, of course, but from what? The couple checked into the
hotel using fake names so the police wouldn’t have been able to
find them. The husband might have someone else after him; someone
far worse than the police and the broken window was an attempt to
fake their deaths.

James sighed and ran a hand through his
hair. Whichever way he looked at the scenario, things didn’t add
up.

What had taken place in this
room baffled him
but he was also worried for Serenity. Of course, all the
signs might be wrong and this wasn’t the room she stayed in, but
whatever instinct made him become a cop served him well. He hated
to think something terrible had happened to her. He’d known
something was wrong and he hadn’t followed up on what his guts told
him.

If she turned up hurt or dead, he had
failed her.

As soon as Sebastian saw
the police car
parked outside the hotel’s entrance, he knew something was
wrong.

How did he miss the scent of panic in the
air?

With the fresh blood still roaring around
his ears, he’d gone back to the site of his feed in an almost numb,
drunken haze. He found the body just as he’d left it and Sebastian
went about the routine of disposing of the body. The whole time,
he’d been caught up within himself, lost in thoughts of
Serenity.

He should have picked up on her
anguish in the night.
Now, standing in front of the hotel, her fear
tainted the air like pollution.

The vampire
picked up his pace, moving
through the lobby with a speed that made him all but invisible to
the people he passed. Using the stairs would be faster than waiting
for the elevator, and he raced up the flights, taking them two at a
time.

Sebastian reached the hotel room to
find the door standing open, people’s muttered voices drifting out
to him from inside.

What had happened?

Sick with fear, Sebastian
slipped inside the
room, his body shadowing the walls, silent and stealth-like. The
living room showed no sign of disturbance.

Wind lifted his hair, ruffling
his clothes, and he
realized both the voices and cold air came from the
bedroom.

Two police officers had their backs to
him; one crouching down, picking something off the floor. A tall
blonde woman stood behind them, her hand hiding her mouth. The bed
was still rumpled, the sheets hanging off the end, almost on the
floor. But the main thing screaming for attention was the wide,
gaping hole where a large pane of thick glass had once
been.

He
didn’t need to think about what happened:
Madeline had been here and by the look of things, she’d taken
Serenity with her.

Sebastian backed out of the room, his
presence unnoticed. Furious, he lashed out, catching a wall-mounted
fire-extinguisher with his fist, sending it flying across the
corridor, to smash into the opposite wall. The extinguisher fell to
the floor, leaving a deep dent in the plaster.

In the bedroom, James
sp
un
around at the crash
and ran for the corridor. A fire extinguisher rolled on the ground;
a huge hole in the wall above. He bent down beside the extinguisher
and ran his fingers over a dent in the metal. Whoever had thrown
the extinguisher did so with extreme force.

James frowned. He picked up the
extinguisher, testing the weight. The object felt heavy. For
someone to throw it with such force would take some
strength.

Strength enough to break
thick glass?

“
They can’t have gone far,” he
told Dawson
,
referring to whoever had committed this new act of vandalism. “You
take the elevator and I’ll take the stairwell.”

He swung open the door leading to the
stairs and ran down. Part of him knew this chase was futile.
Whoever had thrown the extinguisher might have stopped on any
floor, hiding in any one of the rooms, but James would put money on
them leaving the hotel. Something about the rage that action
contained left him thinking; whoever threw the extinguisher
wouldn’t be hiding.

Gasping for breath, the officer
burst out onto the
ground floor. A porter pushed a trolley full of luggage and
James stopped him.

“
Did anyone run past
you?”

The porter frowned and shook his
head.

“
Shit!”

James
pushed past the trolley and headed
for the front doors.

Damn Madeline!

Sebastian
didn’t know where she would take
Serenity. He only hoped Madeline hadn’t caused her harm.

Standing
outside the hotel, he realized he
didn’t even know which direction to turn.

To
think Serenity was out there somewhere,
probably scared, possibly hurt, cut him deep inside. Rage burned
like an incinerator, charring all other emotions. He clenched his
fists, certain when he got his hands on the other vampire, he would
tear her limb from limb.

For a moment, he allowed himself to
believe such a thing was possible.

How
stupid to leave Serenity alone. If
he’d taken her with him, she would be safe.

He was always making mistakes, so many
mistakes.

“
Serenity!” he roared into
the night.

Where should he start looking? Madeline
liked fine things. She liked to be treated as though she were
someone special; wanted those around her to know she had money and
wasn’t afraid to spend it. He’d only known her in Europe, never in
America, and it had been many, many years since they spent any time
together. She could be anywhere in this huge city—even outside of
it—and he had no idea where to start.

Madeline was
spiteful enough to kill Serenity
just to hurt him. But Madeline was also tenacious and to kill
Serenity without first using her to threaten him would be a waste
to her.

He could only hope
Madeline would bring
Serenity to him, alive.

Above him, the
black sky lightened
to a deep, indigo blue and slowly the stars went out, one by one.
Day was coming and he had no choice but to head back to his
house.

F
ury and frustration filled him. Consumed
with rage, he brought his palm down on the windshield of the car
beside him, shattering the glass. Moving through the car lot, he
smashed windshield after windshield, his rage blinding him. A
variety of car alarms sounded in the night, like howler monkeys
calling their troops in a rainforest.

How could he search for her when he would
be bound to his house like a prisoner? At least Madeline would be
forced to do the same thing—find a place of refuge during the
day—and leave Serenity in peace.