Page 35 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker #1)

K ate Morton was dead, and my brain seemed to flip off the moment it acknowledged that fact.

A loud noise made me full-body flinch.

A shot?

Or was it shouting?

Kate’s body moved with the momentum of the impact, falling forward onto the sand.

But where was her fucking head?

What was . . . what . . . was . . .

I was being jerked down and away suddenly, arms around my waist, and I fought, instinct telling me that I was in danger, even if I didn’t understand what the hell was happening.

Then a deep burr that was becoming familiar sounded in my ear. “I’ve got you. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

As though in counterpoint to the words, hands started moving over my body, not in a sexual way but a clinical one, patting every inch of me, looking for injury.

There was blood, I realized.

Blood . . . everywhere.

I lifted shaking fingers to my cheek, pressing them just under my eye and then pulling them back to find them coated with something greasy and gray and?—

“Oh god,” I whispered. “I?—”

“I know,” Davin’s voice agreed, a little breathy and close to my ear. “I know. If you need to be sick, you be sick.”

“But Kate?—”

“I’m sorry Flynn. She’s dead.”

That was when the sirens started. I hadn’t thought the sound of police sirens would be a relief at any point in my life. They were always bad, weren’t they? They meant a speeding ticket, or someone hurt, or something else awful happening.

But the awful thing had already happened here.

Someone had murdered Kate right in front of me, because she’d rethought the last few weeks of Charles’s life and realized someone unexpected had done something suspicious.

A woman.

A woman she was sure had killed him.

The nearest siren cut off suddenly, and then there were cops.

They started by forcing us to our knees and demanding that we disarm, which was—well, Davin was unimpressed, and Twist was even less impressed, squeezing her way out of my pocket, then dropping onto the pavement and hissing at the shouting cops.

She looked up at me, her little fangs bared. “Do you want me to eat them, Father?”

“Nope,” I said, ignoring the cops, who were still demanding to know if I was armed. “Please don’t eat the cops, Twist. I get why you want to, but it would just make this worse.”

One of the cops snorted and grabbed my arm, which Twist decided was a step too far. She yowled at him, lunging, and he reared back.

“Sir, you’re going to have to control that creature, or I’ll have it taken by animal control and put down.”

“Are you seriously threatening a kitten right now?” came the unimpressed and oh-so-welcome voice of Detective Tobias Cain.

I almost collapsed in relief. “It’s the person who killed Charles,” I said, immediately turning to him as I picked up Twist and held her against my chest. I knew I shouldn’t tell him.

Vampires didn’t want humans in their business, but dammit, this was important for him as much as it was for me.

“That was Kate Morton. She was his assistant; the one who was in San Diego when the murder happened. She came to see me tonight. Said she’d remembered something suspicious.

Something about a woman. But before she could tell me—” I looked over at where her body lay, blood soaking out into the sand.

“Christ, Knight, you can’t get out of the middle of this one, can you? Any idea who she was talking about?”

I brought a hand up to my face, as though to scrub it, or rub my eyes, or?—

Then I remembered that my whole face was covered with gore and dropped my hand, desperately holding back a gag.

Instead of asking anything else, Cain scowled a moment, looking around the scene. Then he turned to Davin. “Is there a public restroom around here? I don’t think wet wipes are going to fix this.”

“My office,” I said instead, motioning toward the building. “I have a bathroom in there if it’s...can I? I can shower.”

Cain nodded, but motioned to the whole length of my body. “We’re going to ask you to bag the clothes, but I doubt you’re ever going to want to see them again anyway.”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

Too bad, because it had been one of my favorite shirts.

Was I a bad person for even having that thought in the moment?

Kate was dead. Murdered, right in front of me, her brains and blood spattered everywhere, including my fucking face.

That was when Davin’s prediction came true, and I turned and vomited right there in the parking lot.

An hour later I was clean, at least physically, and wrapped in gray sweats, a plain black T-shirt, and a heavy blanket. I sat on my sofa with Twist curled in my lap, right next to Davin.

Cain was across from us in a chair, and Detective Miller was conspicuously absent. Uniformed cops were coming and going from the shop, mostly to answer to Cain or give him information as they “processed the scene.”

It seemed like an impersonal way to say that a woman had been brutally murdered just outside my shop.

Me? I couldn’t stop staring at Cain.

He was wearing a giant, almost Mr. T-esque gold cross around his neck.

Garlic. Cross. What was next, was he going to start spritzing everyone he met with a spray bottle of holy water? Like they were misbehaving cats rather than potential vampires.

An inappropriate laugh bubbled up in me at the notion, but I managed to hold it down.

Unfortunately for him, a spray bottle of holy water would do better at warding off cats than vampires. My mother was probably older than Christianity; why would a cross or other religious relic have any effect on her?

“I swear, she didn’t name any names,” I told Cain for probably the third time.

Not because he’d asked again, but because I was wracking my brain trying to remember anything she’d said that would be useful.

“She didn’t say if it was a friend of my mother or an enemy.

She didn’t say precisely how someone had made her suspicious.

Just that she hadn’t wanted to be. Hadn’t wanted to believe it.

Then”—my eyes glazed over, reliving the moment in my mind where Kate’s head had just disappeared in a spray of gray and red and the whole world had seemed to go abstract and wrong, like one of Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings.

“If that’s all she said, that’s all she said, Flynn. You can’t make the conversation any deeper than it was.” Cain was using his most soothing voice, the one I’d heard him use on relatives of victims before. He was worried about me.

Worried about me , when he had apparently decided vampires were real and he was surrounded by them.

Who had given it away, I wondered?

Carmen? No, probably not. Not unless Cain was a big fan of old Spanish silent films, and he’d somehow recognized her from them.

Gerald seemed the type to flash a little fang if some uppity human pissed him off enough.

Or maybe it had just been the sobbing maid and her stories of how Charles had only met with people at night, like an evil plaid-tuxedo-wearing West Hollywood drug kingpin.

“It’s like an Agatha Christie novel, the second victim planning to name the killer right before getting offed themself, isn’t it?

” Davin was the one asking the question, and I had to admit he wasn’t wrong.

It was like she’d been following some script that required her to almost give me the info, but not.

Cain, meanwhile, shook his head. “It’s not that surprising.

Human nature. They don’t like to give major revelations on the phone, because it’s only half a conversation.

So much of human conversation is non-verbal, and phone conversations are only verbal.

It’s off-putting, so people avoid having important talks that way.

But then she was acting erratic and suspicious, so the killer knew she had figured something out, so they tracked her down and killed her. ”

“A woman,” I said. “That’s all I know for sure. She said it was a woman.”

Cain looked me straight in the eye when he asked the scariest question ever. “You’re certain she didn’t mean your mother?”

I didn’t even know why, but the truth came out of me. “No.”

Both Davin and Cain looked stunned, but from her spot in my lap, Twist gave a little nod. “Grandmother is a dangerous predator. If she had wished him dead, she could have managed it easily.”

“No,” I corrected the cat, making Cain lift a brow at me, so I refocused on him and answered the questions I was sure he had.

“I mean, I don’t know she didn’t mean my mother.

I’m sure my mother didn’t do it. I really am.

But I’m not sure Kate knew who the killer was.

I only know that she thought she did, and now she’s dead.

But I also talked to Kate about the murder before now, so I knew a little about her.

If my mother had gone to her and told her she killed Charles because he was plotting against her, I don’t think Kate would have told a soul about it.

The whole thing would have just gone away for her. ”

Cain looked a little horrified, but Davin nodded. “True. I doubt Fiona would have even needed to speak to her on the matter. She’d have just dropped it all if she’d thought your mam did it.” He waved Cain off. “So really, he is sure she didn’t think it was the—Ms. Knight.”

Cain’s eyes narrowed on Davin at the near slip, and I sighed at that.

Part of me wanted to just tell him everything. Literally, everything: vampires, the Senate, and even Mother’s job and its connection to the murder.

But even if he believed me, that didn’t serve Tobias Cain in any way. In fact, knowing more about vampires was only bad for him.

So I pulled Twist up against my chest and leaned forward on the couch, meeting Cain’s eye steadily. “Honestly, detective, I don’t think this helps you. If anything, I think that was the end of it. Any chance the Avalon PD is going to catch Charles’s killer died with Kate.”

“But you’re going to keep investigating?” It was a question, but he clearly meant it more as an accusation.

That my mother had ordered me to look into the murder was on the tip of my tongue, when suddenly, my brain reorganized itself in a different order.

I didn’t want it to be her .

Kate wouldn’t have given a damn if my mother had been the one who killed her boss. Not after how she’d declared undying loyalty, and I’d believed every word of it.

How many other people could she wish weren’t involved in the situation? I’d looked into Kate’s family, and they were all still human, so it wasn’t one of them.

No, there was literally only one person it could be.

I blinked and shook my head, only to find everyone looking at me suspiciously.

“I’m not going to keep investigating,” I answered honestly. My part in the case was over, regardless of why that was true. “Hell, I’ve barely been investigating as it is.”

“Really?” Cain asked, dubious. “Then the CCTV footage of you going to an abandoned building that used to be a club called Broken Dreams was just a coincidence?”

I winced, desperately hoping the cops had gone there before my encounter with the attackers and not after. I didn’t need to be explaining a dead body torn to bits by my two pound kitten.

I took the chance. “But you didn’t find anything more there than I did, did you?”

He made a sour face at that, so I was probably in the clear for it.

“Charles used to own the place, a long time ago. Since Whisper was in that message, I thought maybe he was meeting them there. But it’s not like clandestine meetings with possible gang leaders leave magical videos behind.

” I lifted a brow at him. “It looked like a few people had been there, but that was all I got out of it. You?”

He sighed, letting his head fall forward, but eventually nodding. “Yeah. You know if it was actually Whisper, there’s almost no chance we’re ever going to find the murderer, right?”

“I do, and if I’m being honest with you, even if I were planning on continuing to investigate, Whisper is the last person in the world I want to run into. If they did it? They’re gonna get away with it. I got nothing there.”

His sigh this time was epic, but I couldn’t blame him.

Instead of arguing with me, though, he just nodded and pushed up out of his chair, turning toward the door, so I figured—hoped—the interview was over.

“I can’t say I’m sorry to hear it, Flynn.

You’ve got to stop this. You’re not a cop, and it’s not your job to fall into messes like this.

You’re not getting paid, and you could get hurt. ”

“Yeah yeah,” I said, flicking my hand toward the door. “Tell me something I don’t know. I literally vomited on your scene. I’m not a big badass. Oh. One more thing, Detective Cain? Lose the cross. It isn’t your style, and doesn’t do anything.”

Cain’s whole face fell. When Davin added, “and the garlic doesn’t do a damn thing either,” his shoulders dropped to match. He walked out looking more defeated than he’d seemed upon finding out that I had no useful information and a second murder for him.

Poor guy.