Vampire's Companion (14 page)

She wanted to ask what happened. Obviously he’d awakened before she had. Did they fight?

Israel’s lack of a greeting took on unwelcome significance. The small amount of food she’d eaten turned leaden with the clenching of her stomach.

Her chest went tight. Her eyes stung.

He regretted last night.

She forced herself to look for the colors around him. Willed herself to accept this truth about herself, that she could see them and that they meant something.

It took several attempts, as if having denied the ability for so long, a mental barrier needed to be knocked down. When it fell, he was surrounded in bitter green struck through with painful, angry red.

She ducked her head, managing to eat a little more food before putting her fork down and standing. “I’m going to Chloe’s house. With any luck she’ll be there and I can question her.”

Israel’s fork clattered to the table. “I’ll go with you since I’m the one who was invited to return.”

Terach stood. “We’ll all go so the girl can be found tonight.”

It was said with such surety that Cia’s mouth went dry.

He could compel the truth. She believed that with absolute certainty.

Would she stop him from doing it?

Maybe it wouldn’t come to that.

Coward.

She wiped damp palms on her jeans, silently acknowledging that she’d rather he just act, leaving her on the moral high ground.

The tense, uncomfortable silence at the kitchen table shrouded the trip to Chloe’s house. Once again Sonya answered the door, the alcohol on her breath assaulting Cia.

She’d dressed in the hopes Israel would show up. Tonight it was tight jeans and a thin top that didn’t hide the way her breasts heaved and her nipples hardened for him.

Cia stiffened. She gritted her teeth when Israel moved forward, close enough to stroke Sonya with his body heat.

“What about you and me grabbing a drink while they talk to Chloe?” he said, voice low, rough, like the sandpaper rub of promised sex. “She’s here, right?”

“She’s upstairs in her room.”

“Invite us in?”

An appraising glance turned into slinky satisfaction when Sonya saw Terach’s proprietary hand on Cia’s back. “Of course. Come in.”

They entered.

“Shall we?” Israel said, gesturing toward the TV room, hand brushing against Sonya’s hip.

Ache speared into Cia and spread. Was he doing this to get information? Or unconsciously forcing her to experience how painful sharing could be?

Had he just gotten caught up in the moment last night? Confusion crowded in. It hadn’t seemed that way. And then there’d been the allusions to doing it during the day…

Deal with this later.

He and Sonya walked away, close enough to be a couple.

Cia’s throat tightened but the words found their way out anyway. “He regrets last night.”

Terach forced her to face him. “Not for the reason you think. He wants you. He wants us. Don’t doubt it.”

She laughed, but it was a harsh, raw sound.

Terach’s lips covered hers as if he could kiss away the pain and uncertainty and disbelief.

The impulse to resist fled at the caress of his tongue along the seam of her mouth and with the desire for comfort and reassurance. She opened for him, allowed herself to be momentarily distracted.

“I’ll make it right, Cia. I promise.”

She wanted to believe him. But…

Put it away for now. Concentrate on why we’re here.

Chloe sat cross-legged on her bed, earbuds attached to the laptop where her attention was focused, the music loud enough to reach them in the doorway.

Her head jerked up when they neared, some primal instinct making her aware of their presence.

She closed the laptop and tugged the earbuds off. Glared. “I don’t know anything. Now get out of my room.”

They stopped at the end of the bed.

She pulled the computer onto her lap. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“The sooner you actually talk to us, the sooner we’ll leave,” Cia said, consciously willing away mental shields.

Chloe’s aura was a gray-brown that gave the impression of a barrenness stretched and unrelieved by materialistic attempts to fill it, of empty desolation.

Chloe remained silent. Her stare became a competition lasting for several minutes, finally ending in, “Whatever.”

“We’re here about Kadence,” Cia said.

“Duh. Like I need you to tell me that. I’m so over being friends with her.”

A pulse went through Chloe’s aura, a thin darkening but not the black of an outright lie.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t help us find her.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

Truth.

“What about where she might be?”

“No.” Black washed over gray-brown, obliterating it for the blink of an eye.

“What’s in the packages?”

The abrupt change of topic worked. Cia didn’t need to read Chloe’s aura, she saw the flash of guilt and telltale anger at getting caught doing something wrong in Chloe’s eyes.

Chloe made a quick recovery. Shrugged. “Whatever I want. That’s what’s in the packages.”

“Drugs?”

“I can’t believe Mom let you come up here.”

“What’s in the packages you and Kadence get?”

“Mom!” Chloe shouted. “Mom!”

“Cia?” Terach asked, as quiet as Chloe’s continued yelling for her mother was loud.

And Cia found there was only one answer she could give him. “Yes.”

He moved abruptly, jerking Chloe’s gaze to him.

In a heartbeat he’d captured her mind. “You will cooperate. You want us to find Kadence. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Cia shivered. A part of her wanted to run screaming from the room.

“You will now answer Cia’s questions,” he said, and she was ridiculously grateful to have some modicum of control returned to her.

“What’s in the packages?” she asked.

“Different stuff.”

“Drugs?”

“Once or twice. Mostly it’s what we ask for, or hint that’d we’d like.”

“From?”

Chloe rolled her eyes. “The lonely uglies.”

“Lonely uglies?”

“Total pathetic losers.” She made a gagging sound. “They think we’ll actually put out for them one day if they give us things.”

“Where do you meet them?”

“Chat rooms. Facebook. Wherever. They’re so easy to catch it’s not even a challenge. You just throw out a line. They hook themselves.”

“And then?”

“Send them a couple of pictures, flashing a little skin. Tell them some sob story about being desperate to leave home. Make them feel like they could be your knight in shining armor. Your prince.” She snorted. “As if.”

Chloe flipped her hand over, palm up, and wriggled her fingers. “Or with some of them, just make nice and they send gifts.”

“To your father’s address?”

“Yeah.”

“Are the guys local?”

“They’re not supposed to be, just in case they show up, not that we give them our real names. We tell them that we have to use a friend’s house to get mail because our mean parents open everything and will even steal stuff that’s meant for us.”

Their selfish callousness repulsed Cia. But their dangerous behavior didn’t shock her, not after the Armstrong case and the hours she’d spent online.

“Where do you think Kadence is?”

“With a loser named Andy, not that she admitted to hooking up with him. I saw him in her neighborhood a couple of weeks ago and totally freaked. She said I was imagining things. But I recognized him. I mean, he’s gross-looking. We’d even laughed about how his face looked like he’d gotten locked outside in an acid rain. And then he sent her a gift and we saw the address. Total freak-out because he’s so close.”

“Do you have the address?”

“Yeah. It’s in the notebook.”

Cia felt a rush of excitement. Terach said, “Get it. Give it to Cia.”

Without protest, Chloe went to a backpack on the floor next to her desk. She pulled out a doodle-covered spiral notebook and returned, handing it to Cia.

Huge dollar signs decorated the front along with multiple appearances of
Chloe wins again!
or some variation of the same.

Cia flipped it open and was repulsed all over again. The girls did more than just score gifts. They assigned values, keeping a tally of who had acquired the most, and apparently declaring a winner at various intervals. Worse, they’d included pictures of some of their victims, poking fun with cruel comments at the men and teens they’d caught in their trolling.

She paged through the notebook and found the name Andy, along with a Ventura address.

Looking over her shoulder, Terach asked, “Ready?”

“More than ready.”

Cia tucked the damning evidence under her arm. She’d hand it off to Detective Lawson after they checked out Andy’s address.

Chloe plugged in her earbuds and opened her laptop, her attention directed there as if she was unaware of them standing next to the bed, unaware of their ever having entered the room.

Cia’s skin chilled and her pulse sped. She was in the hallway before she found her voice. “What does she remember?”

“We arrived. We asked her questions about Kadence. She gave us nothing. Beyond that, and it took no application of will, she considers us unimportant, not worth bothering about. She believes she misplaced the notebook but isn’t concerned about it—her natural inclination—given Kadence’s absence and the need to find a new companion to play the game with.”

They headed downstairs. The thrill and anticipation of success diminished with each step. Doubt crowded in. Uncertainty.

Should she have done more? Asked Terach to compel Chloe to return the gifts and stop the behavior?

She was still without an answer when they stepped into the TV room. The sight of Israel with his back against the bar, held there by the press of Sonya’s body drove the questions from Cia’s mind. Her throat closed, choking off breath until her eyes met his and found panic there, not guilt.

“Let’s go,” Terach said, terse.

“Stay,” Sonya countered with a seductive purr directed at Israel. “I’ll drive you home in the morning. Or later tonight if you insist.”

“Duty calls,” Israel said, peeling Sonya away from him.

He completely ignored Terach, though the message in his eyes for Cia clearly said,
You owe me
. And was reinforced when he reached her and muttered, “I’m not going to take one for the team next time,” before stalking toward the front door.

Next time.

She clutched the words, hungry for the promise they implied. But only the same tense, uncomfortable silence waited for her in the car.

Give them time to work it out themselves.

She dug her fingernails into the steering wheel to keep from saying anything.

Andy’s house was a doublewide mobile home at the end of a dirt road. Loud music masked the sound of their driving up.

She parked behind the dented, rusted Ford in the driveway, blocking it. If Kadence was here and she and Andy bolted into the woods, it should be easy enough to catch them. Even a sighting would be enough to give Detective Lawson a call and let him handle the search.

Adrenaline surged through Cia, reminding her of those early days as a uniformed cop when every traffic stop did the same. They got out of the car and she retrieved the holstered off-duty weapon, along with cuffs from the go bag.

Terach’s hand settled on her shoulder, forcing a moment of eye contact. “Allow me to cut through the bullshit?”

She could waste time rationalizing. Or she could just accept.

“Yes.”

Israel reached the door first. He hit the bell, but the sound of it was lost in the din of screaming guitars.

Pounding got results. Andy answered.

It could only be him given Chloe’s comment about acid rain. His face was heavily pitted, scarred from what must have been a horrendous battle with acne.

She put him at closer to twenty than sixteen, but couldn’t get an accurate read given the childlike expression of happiness at having strangers show up. He was high, by the look of his pupils, probably hallucinogens.

“Where’s Kadence?” Terach asked, enthralling Andy, though Cia doubted it was necessary.

Andy’s eyebrows drew together. “You mean Candy? She’s in the bedroom.”

“Is there anyone else here?”

“No. You guys are the first to show.”

“Are you expecting others?”

Andy’s eyebrows met again, turning the pits on his forehead into craters. “No.”

“May we enter?”

She shivered despite the thrill of near success.

Invite me in.

Ask us in.

All variations of the same theme. All implying that access was forbidden unless an invitation was made.

“Sure,” Andy said. “Come on in.”

But instead of entering, Terach stepped to the side and indicated a spot on the ground that wouldn’t block the door if they needed to leave in a hurry. “Lie down there.”

Without protest Andy stretched out on the dirt, body moving in time to the music. He lifted his hands, thumbs stretched away from the remaining fingers and touching to frame the sky above him.

“Beautiful,” he said in whispered awe.

“Remain here until I release you.”

Terach’s attention left Andy.

Cia’s lingered. “You’re sure he’ll stay?”

A husky masculine laugh preceded the press of Terach’s body against her back, his hardened cock sending a ricochet of answering desire through her.

“Cuff him if it’ll make you feel better, though the sight of you doing it might give me ideas.”

Heat coiled in her stomach. He might just be the man she’d play those kinds of games with someday.

A glance at Israel’s closed expression and her heart fluttered.
They
might be the men she’d trust that much.
If
Israel really wanted this.
If
whatever was going on between he and Terach got resolved.

Which meant putting this behind them.

They entered the house, the music louder with each step toward the bedroom.

Kadence was on the bed wearing only a bra and cut-offs. She rocked, head down and arms crossed over her chest.