When Passion Lies: A Shadow Keepers Novel (11 page)

And that was how Gabriel had found himself standing still in the cold outside the oddly named Lone Star Tavern, wondering what the hell was going on in there.

He took another drag on his cigarette and considered going inside. He decided against it, though. Let Everil try his luck. The junior detective was certainly eager enough.

Gabriel stood for another ninety-seven seconds, then dropped his cigarette, crushed the butt into the snow with the toe of his boot, and marched toward the tavern entrance. Everil deserved a chance, sure, but Gabriel was freezing his ass off.

Like all the bars on the Bahnhofstrasse, the tavern was dark and woody, managing to be both atmospheric and inviting. Give the human tourists a sense of being somewhere different, a glimspe of something more than just the urge to drink and ski and fuck that had lured them to this tiny tourist town in the first place.

From behind the bar, Tex looked up, then waved Gabriel over. “Usual?” the expatriate asked in his broken German.

For form—because he so rarely got to do it in this sleepy town—Gabriel flashed his badge.

“Well, look at that,” Tex said, switching to his native English. “Little Gabe’s all grown up. How come you never told me you were a cop? And both of us from the same great state.”

“You running anything illegal through the pub?”

“Shit, no.”

“Then you didn’t need to know, did you?”

From Tex’s expression, he was less than thrilled with that explanation, but he knew better than to push it. “You’re not the only one playing cop in here tonight.”

“Didn’t think I was.” He slid onto one of the stools, then tapped the counter. When his usual appeared, he took a long swallow, then glanced around, looking for Everil. “Where’d he go?”

“Thought he went to the john, but I’m thinking now he slipped out the back. Probably wanted to see the scene of the crime.”

Gabriel cocked his head. “What crime?”

“Some guy got stabbed back there last night. I was gonna call the cops, honest, but he begged me not to.”

Gabriel was only half listening. While unusual in Zermatt, human crimes weren’t his jurisdiction. “Stabbed?”

“Punctured, really. Two jabs in his neck. Like some idiot got him with a barbecue fork.”

That
caught Gabriel’s attention. And explained Everil’s disappearance. “The other cop who was in here, did you tell him about this?”

Tex squinted at Gabriel. “You’re both cops. Why don’t you ask him?”

“He’s my partner, and I will. Why don’t you tell me now?”

“Partner, huh?” Tex shrugged. “He’s an odd one. Freaky aura.” Tex was as human as they came, and
Gabriel doubted he could see an aura if one reached out and slapped him.

“That a fact? And what’s my aura like?”

Tex snorted. “Gabe, if I told you how weird the shit floating around you is, we probably wouldn’t be friends anymore.”

“Are we friends now?”

“I keep hoping.”

Gabriel took another sip to hide his smile. He’d worked hard not to make any friends in Zermatt, but if he had, Tex would’ve been high on the list.

“So you told Everil about the attack in the alley. What else?”

“Not much. Just the vic’s name, is all.”

“You know the vic?”

“Sure. Jenson Graham. Tourist, but he comes here at least twice a year. Big skier.”

“Medics take him to the hospital?”

“Yeah, he was bleeding pretty bad.”

“Any idea who stabbed him?” Gabriel asked, hoping to get lucky.

“That I couldn’t say. Although if I had to guess, I’d go with the chick’s boyfriend.”

“What chick?”

“Although come to think of it, she didn’t much look like she was with a guy.”

“Tell me,” Gabriel said, propping his elbows on the bar.

“Not much to tell. Jenson was hitting on her, you know.”

“What did she look like?”

“Short dark hair. Green eyes. Attitude. I saw her.
Didn’t pay much attention.” A pause. “Okay, that’s not exactly true. Girl was hot. But it was a busy night.”

“Anything else?”

Tex shrugged. “Don’t really know what you’re looking for.”

Unfortunately, neither did Gabriel. “You seen her around before?”

“Can’t say that I have. Her, I woulda remembered.”

“She pay with a credit card?”

Tex considered. “Cash. And just the one drink.”

“Anybody else new come through last night?”

“Hell, yeah. We’re as tourist friendly as they come, Gabe. You know that.”

Gabriel did know it. But he’d been hoping that he was on a lucky streak. “Thanks.” He slid off the bar stool.

“That’s it?” Tex sounded disappointed, as if he’d expected Gabriel to rough him up for information and was bummed that he hadn’t.
Humans
.

Gabriel slid the half-empty drink away from him. “Put it on my tab.” He was gone before Tex could point out that he didn’t have a tab.

Everil wasn’t hard to find. He was on his hands and knees in the alley and looked up as Gabriel approached. “There was a stabbing here,” he said, his black eyes wide. “A human did it, though. Tex in there said the kid was attacked with a barbecue fork.”

Gabriel waited a few seconds for the punch line, and when it didn’t come, he realized his partner was serious. “Ah, Ev? I think the attacker was probably a vampire. Two pointy teeth.” He made fangs from his fingers to demonstrate.

Everil’s eyes got even wider. “Oh! Right!” He stood,
then lifted his nose to the air, sniffing. “Yeah,” he said. “I shoulda picked up on it before. Vampire. Definitely vampire.”

“I didn’t realize the fae had such a keen sense of smell.”

Everil stood up straighter, then puffed his chest out. “Hello? Half weren.”

“Yeah?” Gabriel peered closely at his partner, but he didn’t see the signs. Must’ve been a recessive gene. “I talked to Tex. Medics took the vic away. Let’s go check the hospital. Even if they didn’t admit him, they should have an address.”

As it turned out, he was still there, sitting in a crowded emergency center awaiting discharge.

Gabriel flashed his badge, the one that said he worked for Interpol, and a nurse took them into a private room. Graham shifted, antsy. “So, should I be calling my embassy? I mean, I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the victim, right?”

“As far as we know,” Gabriel said. “We’re interested in who did this to you.”

“Oh. Right. It was a fight, you know. Some guys. Locals. We’ve, you know, had run-ins before.”

“Locals?” Gabriel met Everil’s eyes. He doubted locals blew Reinholt away.

“Yeah. I—we don’t get along. I guess I finally rubbed them the wrong way and they decided to, you know. Mess me up a little.”

“Names?”

Graham told them, and Everil typed them into his PDA. A few seconds later, he nodded. “Got ’em. They’re locals, all right.”

He passed the PDA to Gabriel, who skimmed the file.
Vampires, yeah, but your basic troublemakers. Not the kind likely to go after something big, and Gabriel’s current operating theory was that this murder was related to something big.

“So they’re locals,” Gabriel said. “Tell me about the girl. You ever seen her before?”

“Girl?”

“The one you were hitting on in the bar. Green eyes. Short dark hair. A looker.”

“Oh. Her. Right.” Graham shifted in his seat again. “She in trouble?”

“Might be. You might be, too, if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

Again with the shifting. “Ah, hell. Okay, look. She was a bitch, right? I mean, yeah, I, uh, hit on her. But she turned me down cold. But then when I was in the alley and these guys got all danger zone with me, she’s the one who got them the hell out of there.” He shrugged. “So, you know, I guess I owe her.”

“And the men in the alley, they just decided that the neck seemed like the best place to stab you?”

More shifting, and he didn’t quite meet Gabriel’s eyes. “Weird, huh?”

Gabriel raised his brows. He’d seen this before. Humans who liked to get down and dirty with the vampire crowd. “So she saved you from a vampire. Was she talking to any other vamps? Talking to anyone else in the bar?”

“What?” The tourist’s eyes were wide and overly innocent, as if he was trying just a little too hard. “Vampire? I mean, wow. That’s crazy. You guys are—”

“We’re not your average cops is who we are. And unless you want to be high priority on my office’s radar—and
you don’t—you tell me everything you can about the girl.”

“You’re not going to, you know …” He trailed off, then made a knife motion across his throat.

“Not today.” It wasn’t common for humans to know about shadowers, but it wasn’t unheard of. As long as Graham stayed out of dark alleys with hungry vampires, he’d be fine.

“There’s not much to tell. I mean, she’s a vamp, too. I could tell. Once you learn about ’em, you can pick them out. She sure as hell didn’t want me to know, though. I called her a vamp and she about bit my head off.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t my head I wanted her to bite, but she wasn’t interested.”

“What was she interested in?” Gabriel asked.

“Don’t know. Probably a dude. She was scoping the place out.”

And there was the meat of it. “She find anyone?”

“Beats me. She told me to scram. I scrammed.”

Gabriel stood. “Okay, Mr. Graham. I think that about wraps it up.” He got the guy’s address and phone number, just in case, and told him he could leave as soon as the hospital released him. “Just one more thing,” he added, before he and Everil headed out. “Did you happen to get her name?”

“I didn’t,” Graham said. “But she told it to the vamps who had me pinned. I swear they just about peed their pants.”

“Is that a fact? So what was it?”

“Caris. She just said that it was Caris.”

“Caris!”
Everil said when they were under the emergency center’s awning. “You were right. This is big.”

Gabriel frowned. Everil wasn’t exaggerating.

“She’s Gunnolf’s woman,” Everil continued. “And she used to be with Tiberius.”

“I know,” Gabriel said, barely managing to speak without a groan. “We’re walking straight into a political shitstorm.”

Everil nodded enthusiastically.

“Calm down, partner,” Gabriel said. “We play this one close to the vest. We go making accusations or applying for an arrest warrant before we’ve built a case, and we could both experience some serious consequences.”

“Right. Consequences. Right.”

“There’s gonna be eyes on this case. Dragos was there for a meeting, Reinholt was set up to be a weren snitch. And Caris is in groin-deep with the werens.”

Everil shook his head. “Not anymore. She was Gunnolf’s woman. I don’t think she’s tight with Lihter.”

“Probably not,” Gabriel conceded. “But from my perspective, it’s anyone’s guess who she’s cozied up to now. And Lihter could just as easily be pulling her strings as anyone.”

He caught himself, realized he was already putting theories together.

Shit
. He hadn’t transferred to Zermatt so he could get pulled into a Big Fucking Case. The last one he’d handled had ended when an innocent girl fried.

And that was something he didn’t relish repeating.

But want it or not, he was stuck. He hadn’t found the case. The case had found him.

The next time he came to Memphis, Bael Slater hoped it was the American version. Pyramids were fine and dandy, but the dry desert air irritated him, and when you got right down to it, what was the point of Memphis if you couldn’t see Graceland?