Page 5 of First Blood
I looked up and found Laurie pressed back against the wall of the alley, his eyes huge and his mouth hanging open. Bruises had started to bloom on the pale skin of his neck, in stark, finger-shaped patterns.
His gaze flicked down for a second and then back up, and he met my eyes unflinchingly. “Is he…dying?”
“Yeah,” I said. No point in sugar-coating it.
“Good,” he spat, and then the bravado faded and he swallowed hard, swaying a little on his feet. “He said he was going to kill me,” he said, his voice gone wobbly and faint. “He said no one would notice.”
Well, there went the very last glimmer of my fucks to give about the life ending at my feet.
I stepped forward and gave his shoulder a shove with the tip of my boot, rolling the bastard over onto his back. He groaned and coughed up a glob of blood.
His face was a little rearranged, but he looked familiar. I tried to picture him as he’d been in that brief glimpse I’d had before I dragged him out of the car.
Well, shit. He was familiar after all. And Fenwick wouldn’t be happy. I’d glimpsed him briefly a week ago in the entourage of a sorcerer who’d been visiting from up north, here to talk to Fenwick about some kind of nearby border dispute. One of the parties was a vampire, and Fenwick, as the oldest vamp in the state, often acted as kind of a default mediator when others were involved.
And I’d basically killed one of the visiting VIP’s human hangers-on.
I could call 911 and deal with the fallout, or I could deal with it myself more directly. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I leaned down and grabbed him by the head, breaking his neck in an instantaneous twist. The sick crunch of it echoed in the silent alley, followed immediately by the sound of retching.
I straightened and let go, wiping my hands on the sides of my black jeans. Nothing like black denim to hide bloodstains.
I turned to Laurie. He’d slumped against the wall, one shoulder pressed into the bricks as he turned a little to the side and spat a mouthful of bile.
“I’m sorry,” I said, the words coming out rough, partly because it’d been so long since I said them I hardly remembered how anymore. “I need to get rid of the body, and it’s a lot easier when it’s…a body that’s not moving.”
Laurie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grimaced, and tipped his head up to look at me, his curls hanging limp around his temples and sticking to his damp skin. “Don’t apologize,” he rasped, and then cleared his throat. “I’d never heard the sound of…it took me by surprise. But I don’t care that you killed him. I’m glad you killed him. He would’ve killed me.”
A tiny flicker of warmth I hadn’t known I could feel anymore bloomed in my chest. He didn’t sound afraid, and he didn’t sound disgusted. He soundedfierce. Like he would’ve been more than willing to break that fucker’s neck himself if he’d had the strength in his hands to do it.
He hadn’t, though, and he was about two minutes away from collapsing, if I had to guess. I’d deal with that next, but first things first.
“Go home,” I told him. “Can you make it on your own?”
Laurie stared at me. “You mean unlike last time? You — that was you who took me home the other night, right? What were you doing here tonight?”
“Good questions, wrong moment.” Wrong both because we didn’t have the time and because Ineededtime to figure out how to answer them. “Can you get home on your own or not?” His apartment building was actually closer to where we were than to his street corner — just a couple of blocks. I really, really didn’t want to have him wander off into the freezing dark alone, but I didn’t have a choice.
He swallowed. I could see it and hear it, and the bob of his slender throat drew my eye like a blazing fire on a pitch-black night. The bruises shifted with the motion, and I wanted to kill the corpse at my feet all over again. More slowly this time, and with feeling.
“Yeah, I can make it. Yeah.” He swallowed again. “What are you…will I…see you? Later?”
Did he want to? No point in asking, since the answer to his question would be the same either way. I wasn’t going to rest easy until I checked on him. I hated it, but it was the simple truth.
“I’ll be along within an hour. Put some ice on your neck. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve cleaned this up.”
Laurie nodded, looked like he wanted to say something else, and then shook his head, clearly changing his mind. He pushed off the wall and headed down the alley, only swaying a little on his feet. I watched until he’d turned the corner and disappeared, and then listened until his footsteps faded away. Which, with my excellent hearing, took a while. By the time I couldn’t hear him anymore, he was probably almost home.
I turned back to the body. Fuck, but I hated clean-up, especially in snow. Snow made hiding a blood trail nearly impossible. Lucky for me, it wasn’t going to be solely my problem. I took out my phone and hit the first preset.
“What the fuck now?” Esther, Fenwick’s main gladhander and right-hand woman, was so smooth dealing with anyone outside our organization that no one would ever have guessed what a tactless, brusque steamroller of a person she was behind closed doors.
I liked her a lot.
“Dead body,” I said. “One of the group that was here last week. A bodyguard, I think. Aren’t they all supposed to be gone?”
There was a short silence. “Dead like you found him, or dead like you made him dead?”
I grunted at her. “What do you think?”
