InsistentHunger (17 page)

“We might have another problem,” Brady said. The tone more
than the words caught Paige attention. “There was a vampire last night.”

“Lots of them,” Paige agreed, not understanding Brady’s
concerns.

Brady shook his head. “No, not there. Here. I could…” Brady
tilted his head to the side as though struggling for words.

“Hear, smell, see—” Paige prompted him.

Brady’s head tilted the opposite direction. “Smell maybe. I
knew he was here. Male. Something about him made me want to avoid him.”

Paige blew out a breath. There had been the man on the
street, but she was too good of a cop to jump to conclusions. It made more
sense for a vampire to stay hidden. However, a male vampire raised a new
question. “Do you think our rapist could be a vampire?” Paige asked.

Brady blew out a breath. “I don’t know. If you’re right and
I’m creating a cloud of lust, why would he need to hurt them?”

Paige closed her eyes. The simple answer was that some
people just liked to hurt others, but Brady always had been a little too slow
to understand that kind of sadism. But he was right that any demon who had
Brady’s ability to inspire lust wouldn’t have victims that fought the way these
had.

“Maybe it’s a different kind of vampire,” Paige said slowly.
She hated feeling ignorant and right now all she had was a huge pile of it.
Right now she needed to do a little digging into this case and into vampires
and into Hunter and she couldn’t do that with Brady close enough for her to
smell his musk. Her body would launch another revolt against her common sense sooner
or later.

“My father has a farm about fifteen miles out on Pipe Road.
Before he leased out most of his land, he had a permanent farmhand who lived in
an apartment over the storage barn.” Shoving aside her many fears, Paige
grabbed a piece of mail from her side table and started to sketch out a map.
“It’ll be dusty, but my father doesn’t stir from the house much, and even when
he does, he’s drunk more often than not. Hell, you could eat a chicken in front
of him and I’m pretty sure he would chalk it up to some hallucination.”

“Your father?” Brady echoed in confusion.

“His farm. You need to go to his farm. The storage barn is
the smaller one, farther south than the main barn. You could stay in the main
barn too since he got rid of the last of the animals when I left for college,
but the apartment in the storage barn has a bed and table and some books. The
neighbors all have livestock, and if you limit yourself to a couple of animals,
they’ll blame foxes or wild dogs or something.”

“So I should run away.” Brady’s voice was utterly flat.

“So you should retreat during the day,” Paige said. “You
should get strong and push a few limits. You said you didn’t know if the sun
felt so wrong because you were young. Well, how wrong does it feel? Can you
stay out in it? Are you weaker in the light? Does feeding make the light easier
to bear? Brady, there’s a lot of stuff that we’re not going to be able to
research. We don’t know who’s full of shit and who knows the truth. So I’m not
telling you to run away. I’m telling you to make a better tactical choice.” She
held her rough map out for him.

He looked at the paper without taking it. “So you think I
should do this from twenty miles away?”

“Yes. I think it’s the safest thing for you.” Paige didn’t
insult Brady’s intelligence by laying out all the reasons. Hunter suspected
Brady was here. A strange vampire had found him here. There were too many
questions and too many dangers.

“And what about you?”

Paige swallowed and looked up at Brady’s sincere expression.
Whatever else was going on, he was still her partner. “Can you promise me that
you aren’t taking my life force when we have sex?”

Brady’s eyes darted away. Yeah, that’s what Paige thought.

“And I’m telling you that if you stay here, we’re going to
have sex,” Paige warned. Even if Brady drained her life with every orgasm,
Paige would not be able to say no for long.

“We are?” Brady looked so adorably confused that Paige could
feel her defenses weakening already.

“No, we aren’t,” Paige said firmly. “Brady, go to the farm.”

Now Brady looked really confused. “And what if Hunter comes
here? What if the other vampire comes here?”

“Then he can look through my empty house. Make sure you take
that bloody shirt and then either one of them can look through to his heart’s
content.”

“But where will you be?” Brady took the scribbled map, even
if he looked unhappy while doing it.

Paige pulled her quilt closer. “I’m going to work. We’re
missing something, Brady, and I’m not going to confront anyone until I figure
out what we’re missing. I mean, how the hell does a nest get started around
here? I’d think someone would notice a bunch of people dying. Wouldn’t they?
You’re the only case of a missing person around here.”

“The immigrants,” Brady said softly. Paige had come to the
same conclusion. Either their rapist was a vampire or the rapist was using the
same hunting grounds as the vampire. “But the vampires didn’t all look
Hispanic,” Brady protested.

“And you look Hispanic when you aren’t,” Paige pointed out.
“Looks aren’t everything.”

“That’s true.”

“So I’m going to go to work and poke around. You’re going to
go to my father’s farm and do some testing.”

“But I’ll come back at sunset.” Brady sounded uneasy as he
waited for her answer to that.

Paige nodded. It’d be stupid for her to be in the house
alone if bad guys had targeted it. “I’ll drive out to Pipe Road…the fruit stand
at the corner of Rural 72. Be there after sundown.”

“You’ll meet me.” Brady still sounded unsure.

“Yeah, I will,” Paige promised. She was uncomfortable about
being in an enclosed space with him, but she wouldn’t turn her back on him.
Maybe he was Brady Ross, her partner. Maybe he was Brady Ross, a demon. Either
way, he cared about her and she couldn’t turn her back on that. Brady nodded at
her and turned to leave.

“Brady!”

He turned to look at her. “Yeah?”

“Do you need the car?”

He studied her for a second before shaking his head. “No, I
can get there no problem.” He gave her a sheepish grin. “I can actually run
about as fast as you drive, so I’ll be fine.”

Paige’s brain went off-line for a moment as she thought
about the power it would take to run that fast. Before she could recover, Brady
turned and headed out of the room.

The second he left, she could feel the gathering heat in her
belly start to dissipate. Pulling her quilt off the bed, she wrapped it around
her waist and headed for the computer. A quick poke to the space bar woke it
up. The screen was still on Wikipedia’s entry for Strigoi. Great, she was
trying to understand the dark forces of hell using Wikipedia. The sheer
stupidity of the whole situation suddenly hit her and Paige felt like she’d
been run over by a truck.

Using the search bar, she decided pretty quick Brady wasn’t
a succubus, since that was a woman. He definitely wasn’t a woman. Incubus,
however, might be possible. They laid on women, usually when they were asleep.
Well, Paige hadn’t slept through the sex. She’d have to be dead to sleep
through sex that good. Most of the time, her sex was mediocre at best. An
incubus often wanted to father a child. Paige’s stomach dropped. Shit. Part of
her wanted to blame the lack of birth control on Brady; her lust had driven her
past her ability to think. However, when she’d put her mind to it, she’d turned
him away. She had her share of the blame if she turned up pregnant.

At least if she got pregnant, Wikipedia claimed her child
would be cunning and beautiful. It wouldn’t be human, but hey, no child was
perfect. Paige’s stomach churned unhappily as she thought about getting an
early pregnancy kit.

The best thing she could say about her Wikipedia was that it
admitted when it didn’t have the answer. Some people said exorcism or
excommunication or the sign of the cross could drive incubi away. Others said
that words had no effect on the demon. The suggestion that she look for a
breathing hole in the top of his head because he might be a Boto with the power
to turn into a river dolphin during the day—that just made her roll her eyes.

This whole thing was seriously screwed up. However, as far
as she could tell, an incubus didn’t kill women, just slept with them. And
there wasn’t anything to suggest that incubi needed to drain energy from
victims. That still sounded more like a vampire.

Paige stared at the screen and wondered how you searched for
life-sucking demons that existed in real life. After a second of staring at the
screen, Paige turned the power off to the screen and headed for the kitchen.
Hopefully some breakfast would make things clearer, because right now she was
feeling pretty much overwhelmed.

She stopped at her bedside table. Hating the fact she didn’t
feel safe in her own home, Paige pulled out the drawer and opened the gun safe.
Until she solved this mess, she couldn’t afford to make any more dumb mistakes.

Chapter Twelve

Paige went through McDonald’s and got the biggest cup of
coffee they offered before heading in to work. She parked, and for a long time,
she just stared out the window.

How could she go into a room full of cops—all of whom wanted
to stop the bad guys—and not tell them about this dangerous new gang that had
moved into town? How could she let them continue to chase a rapist who might
just be the walking undead? How could she not tell them that their friend and
colleague had been tied down and inhabited by a demon or turned into a demon or
something?

On the other hand, how could she get them to believe that
demons were real? Sadly, if she asked Brady to do a show and tell, he just
might. However, Paige didn’t think these people wanted to know this particular
truth.

John had a wife and two-year-old little girl who broke
anything she stood near too long. Veronica had three kids and two ex-husbands
who paid child support when they felt like it. Would they want to come to work
knowing vampires existed? Would they want to leave their kids at home knowing
that monsters lurked in the shadows? And that was a little melodramatic for
Paige to even think it.

Obviously the world turned just fine without people knowing.
If she told them the truth, they’d send her in for psychiatric evaluation, and
Paige was pretty sure she wouldn’t pass at this point. She questioned her own
sanity.

Sitting in her car with her hands wrapped around a giant
coffee, she realized that for the first time in her life she had no idea what
to do and she absolutely hated the feeling. It reminded her too much of what it
felt like to be young and helpless. She didn’t do helpless and she hadn’t been
young for a very long time. She took a gulp of coffee to brace her and got out
of the car.

The cure to most forms of helplessness was more information.
If these guys targeted Brady because of the case, because he’d seen something
or someone, she was going to figure out the connection. The rapes were all in
the same part of town as both vampire houses, so the theory wasn’t looking too
bad right now.

The captain had said that the blue sedan had been at both
two of the rapes and Brady’s disappearance. Paige stood next to her car and
frowned. Brady had followed her and Hunter without a car. He hadn’t wanted the
car this morning. There wasn’t a single car she could remember at either
vampire house. Okay, clearly she had some gaps she had to fill.

Locking her car door, she headed into the station.

“Silver,” one of the uniforms from night shift offered
respectfully as he headed out while she headed in. Veronica gave her a smile
from across the room where detectives where handing out the canvass
assignments.

“Silver, you ignored all my calls last night.” Alex came out
of the hall that led to the time clock and locker rooms.

“Yes, I did,” Paige agreed. Shouldering him out of the way,
she headed to clock in and then change. She needed to make it fast or Veronica
would corner her in the locker room, and as much Paige loved the woman, she
didn’t want to deal with her today.

“I was worried about you,” Alex called after her.

“I’m fine,” Paige said as she slid her name badge through
the time clock and pressed her thumb to the reader. “I needed some sleep.”

“That’s funny, because you don’t look like you slept at
all.” Ignoring Alex, she headed into the locker room and made a beeline for her
locker. Alex liked to gossip, so maybe someone would distract him from going
and getting Veronica and sending her in. She loved her friends and coworkers,
but sometimes they drove her a little insane.

Luckily, she managed to get into uniform and out the locker
room door before Veronica could trap her. The station was quieter than normal.
The raunchy jokes and dark humor that always showed up when a bad case hit was
completely missing. At the same time, no one was complaining about bills or the
ex-wife or the kids. The room was muffled with the slide of chairs and the
clicking of keyboards and the soft sound of the police radio drowning out the
voices.

Paige looked around. She was twenty minutes late and the
detectives had already handed out the assignments to the people working on the
rape case. Even if she’d been on time, she wouldn’t have been allowed to work
the neighborhoods.

What she really needed was an excuse to access the
computers. The databases would have all the reports. Maybe something had
happened at one of the vampire houses. Hell, maybe there was a really good
suspect that the detectives had given up on because he was dead. At this point,
death would just make a suspect look guiltier in her book. However, uniformed
officers didn’t normally use the station search programs.

A young uniformed officer was laughing as he walked in from
the garage and his partner caught him by the arm and gave him a solid yank, his
head nodding in Paige’s direction. The kid fell silent. Those two would be on
the computers. They were traffic. Traffic always entered their own tickets into
the system, ever since the fancy portable interfaces had been hacked by the
Hawksworth boy. True, they weren’t supposed to be in the search programs, but
she was willing to bet she could find some time to snoop around if she could
just find an excuse to do the entry.