Allegiance(55)
A crash sounded from behind them, followed by an “I’m okay” from the back of the house. “Nik Dimitrou, the Ranger half of Penton’s new dynamic duo,” Robin explained. “He’s got some experience in fire dynamics and accelerants.”
She had no idea what the hell that meant, but it sounded good. Cage had needed to know about the Touch so Nik could find out if he could read vampires. Nik could tell Mark Calvert about the Touch if he wanted; that was his secret to tell.
“Good—I hope he can find something,” Mark said. “Probably the same jackass that sabotaged the job site.”
“Or maybe a different jackass.” Nik came out the front door, shoved the notebook at Robin, and introduced himself to Mark. “I’m driving to the Chow House to get a late lunch. Want to go with me?”
“‘Driving’ is the magic word.” Mark struggled to his feet. “Can you make a stop by the power station down the hill from the old Baptist church? I want to make sure the power’s been cut to this building and the one adjacent. I was planning to walk, but that was”—he held up the cane—“insanely ambitious.”
“Let’s go, then. Robin, I would invite you, but I know you have a book you’re anxious to dig into.” Nik looked pointedly at the sketch pad.
Got it. Look at sketch pad. Don’t tell Mark. “Yep, a great new romance novel. It has a whole platoon of lusty Army Rangers in it.”
Nik laughed. “Whatever it says, it’s all true. Mark, hang out here and I’ll pick you up.”
They watched Nik walk down the block to the white SUV parked in front of Mirren’s comm-house. “Ah, so that’s how you met Mel last night; you guys are staying with Glory and Mirren. I’m across the street with Aidan and Krys.”
As Robin recalled from the dossiers, he was the feeder for both of them and another vampire—but not for his wife. And asking for a divorce. Curiouser and curiouser.
Only Nik’s untimely arrival prevented her from asking Mark outright why Melissa didn’t feed from him instead of from Glory. But as she said her goodbyes and watched them drive off, she put that on her growing list of Rude Questions to Ask. Amazing what info people would give up if one just had the balls to ask.
In the meantime, she had pictures to look at. There were lots of smoky gray scenes. One of Cage standing outside the kitchen door, pointing through the inferno, Fen just ahead of him. Several sketches of a young dark-haired girl that must be Hannah, holding onto a plug-ugly bloodhound. Barnabas is a bloodhound? Good Lord. A vampire with a bloodhound. Oh well, probably no more bizarre than eagle-shifters named Wren and Robin.
A couple of drawings showed a pretty blonde Robin didn’t know, but from Nik’s description of running toward the fire, it must be the vampire named Shawn something-or-other.
Robin stopped at the next drawing, confused. She’d been waiting for an image of a person who didn’t belong in the house, or of the black jaguar Nik had seen from Touching the job site. This drawing wasn’t of a feline, but of a canine of some sort. Not quite big enough for a wolf, but the shape of its head didn’t quite look like a dog. Could be an ugly mixed-breed, though.
In its mouth, it carried a bottle of liquid.
It was the accelerant. Had to be. The fire would break the glass, the accelerant would feed the fire and help it spread, and the broken glass would look like any other fire debris.
But the dog. What had Nik said? Maybe another person had set the fire. Could the dog be another shifter?
She stashed the drawings under the edge of a piece of Sheetrock laying on the porch and walked back into the house, picking her way to the room that had been Cage’s—not that he’d spent more than a few hours there at the most.
The floor had burned through, and she could see metal about a foot beneath the subflooring. Kneeling, she tapped on it; it sounded solid. It hadn’t occurred to her that the underground vampire nap rooms were steel-lined, but that had to be what this was. Which explained why the floor didn’t collapse; it got as far as the top of the oversized fireproof vampire coffins and had nowhere to go.
Robin shuddered. She’d last about an hour in one of those before going berserk.
For the next hour she crawled the floor, inch by sooty inch, using her sharp vision to examine every solid thing that remained in the ash. Rough splinters of wood pierced her fingers, but she ignored the welling up of blood. No fangs around to take notice, and her shifter DNA would heal her quickly.
Anything she couldn’t immediately disqualify as important, she shoved in the pockets of her oversized jeans. Then she took her haul back to Mirren’s house, to her room, where she could study them without interruption.