“My gut tells me it was no more an accident than the construction-site wall collapse.” Robin studied the hulk of the old mill. “There’s a million places to hide in there. We should check it out as well.”
“I think we’re meeting Mirren and the others there at nine tonight, to set up a training schedule. Maybe we can poke around afterward. Now that the psycho vampire’s on the loose again and we know the construction site was sabotaged, people have to be on alert.”
“They should never have not been on alert.” Robin didn’t understand why they thought the war was over just because one particularly evil combatant had been locked up. Except maybe wishful thinking. “It’s not like that Ludlam guy was the only one after them. He was the scapegoat.”
“Yeah, but part of the appeal of Penton was that it could be a kind of utopian society where they didn’t always have to be looking over their shoulders. Most people came here to avoid fighting, not to wage a war—that was forced on them. You can’t really blame them for hoping it was over.” Nik finished his drink, set it aside, and picked up the sketchbook he’d brought with him. “You ready?”
Robin looked up at the sun and gauged the time at noon or a bit later. “Let’s do it.”
She tugged at the fabric of the sweater Nik had bought for her; she had to make a trip to a place with a store, and soon. The warm brown color looked good on her, but it was too big and had a boatneck that kept slipping off her shoulder. The jeans were rolled up at the hem, so she was rocking the homeless waif look big-time.
She still hadn’t seen Hannah, but the Hello Kitty ensemble was off the table—everything in that house had likely burned or had smoke damage.
“Leave the neck down.” Nik held out a hand, and when she grasped it, hoisted her to her feet. “It’s sexy.”
“Sexy-schmexy.” Robin slapped at his hand as he tugged the brown sweater off her shoulder again. “You don’t know sexy. Wasn’t it you who told me—who’s told me on numerous occasions, in fact—that you’ve seen better figures than mine on twelve-year-old boys?”
“Aw, you know I just say it because it annoys you so much.”
True, but it chafed all the same. She was short, wafer-thin, and while not precisely flat-chested, could easily get by with training bras. What she wouldn’t do to have one of those soft, curvy figures men liked so much. Like Glory. Or that damned Melissa Calvert, whose curves Nik had obviously noticed, the jackass. At least Krys was built more like Robin, only about twice as tall.
They walked the length of the block and stood on the sidewalk in front of the burned house. It wasn’t down to ashes, at least—the back rooms of the house weren’t habitable by any stretch of the imagination, but they still had outside walls, and Robin thought one might have part of a ceiling.
“Why don’t you walk it first, before I start touching things?” Nik pulled out his flask and sipped his bourbon straight this time, sans coffee creamer.
Robin nodded and left him to his crutch. She never preached at him; she understood why he drank, and she knew he could stop if he were ever in a situation where he wasn’t in danger of being blindsided by a bunch of memories. She hardly ever saw him drink when they were away from other people.
What Nik needed was a brand-new start in a town filled with vampires. Penton was perfect for him—except for the little sabotage problem.
She walked carefully, not touching anything with her bare skin lest she leave signatures that would throw Nik off. He couldn’t read shifters for the most part but would get flashes that didn’t make a lot of sense. Shifters lived long lives, and part of their ancestors’ DNA lived through them even more strongly than in humans, so he might pick up a shifter memory flash that was centuries old.
The front rooms of the house had a couple of side walls still standing, but the roof overhead had caved, so Robin toed aside stray bits of building materials, charred support beams, and what had probably at one time been pieces of furniture. She tested each step to make sure she didn’t crash through twenty or thirty feet into the daysleep spaces built beneath each house.
A mass of debris to the right was probably the remains of the dining table Nik remembered passing in the smoke.
The thick odor of charred wood, smoke, and ash overwhelmed her senses until she wasn’t sure she’d be able to scent a can of gasoline or another accelerant, even if it were sitting in the middle of the house with flashing lights and a signpost on it.
This house had the same layout as Glory and Mirren’s, so she picked a route to the kitchen, looking for any scent or evidence of an electrical fire. It was too early in the fall to need heat and too late in the summer to need air conditioning, so the kitchen would be the most likely source of electrical malfunction.