Witch Hunt(61)

I don’t have much pride, but what little I had was licking its wounds.
With nothing else to do, I drifted over to Thandy. Her face crumpled when she saw me.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Blood poured out of a wound on her temple, rapidly soaking through a dishtowel pressed against it. She must have been hurt when the union     came in. The fact that it wasn’t clotting made me think that she wasn’t exactly human. “I only cooperated because of Erin.”
“Hold up,” I said. “What about Erin?”
“Gregor told me to tell everyone you were dating. He wanted them to think that you’d been beating her. He wanted you to have nowhere to hide.”
Hadn’t Eduardo said something about Erin, too? Something about the bounty?
“Thandy, was Erin human?” I asked.
The manager shook her head. “She was Gray, like me. We both got recruited into the Needles last year. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
So Thandy wasn’t a full succubus—she was a half-demon, a Gray. It explained why she was bleeding so profusely. And if Erin had been a half-succubus, too, then that would explain why I had been unable to resist her sexual allure. It hadn’t been chemistry. It had been thrall.
I was an OPA agent. I should have known better.
Damn.
One of the IRD agents grabbed Thandy’s arm. “Do you have any other questions, Agent Hawke? We need to get her to a healing witch soon.”
“No, go ahead,” I said, backing away.
I watched him take Thandy upstairs with a sinking feeling in my gut. Erin hadn’t gone home with me because she wanted me. She’d probably wanted to feed, and I’d been throwing myself at her feet like a giant dipshit for months.
The other IRD agent touched my sleeve. “You need to see the EMT?” he asked, squinting closely at my face through his spectacles. “You look pretty bad.”
Just my shriveled pride shattering into a million pieces. Don’t mind me. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
I couldn’t deal with the investigation anymore. I headed upstairs to the bar, snagging a bottle of wine out of the rack on my way up the stairs. I know I’d sworn to stop drinking, but it wasn’t hard liquor—a little wine never hurt anybody.
Sinking into one of the leather chairs on the first floor, I uncorked the bottle and took a swig. It tasted a little peppery, kind of woody. A lot like bitter self-hatred.
Isobel took the chair next to me and reached for the bottle. “I could use some of that.” Her bloody face had been cleaned and someone had given her an OPA-branded jacket that was way too big on her. She looked absolutely terrible.
I handed the wine to her. “That was pretty badass. The dead thing.”
She smiled shyly around the mouth of the bottle as she sipped. “It was a new trick. It’s kind of interesting how inspiring total panic can be.”
Inspirational was a word for it.
“I saw security footage. You left the Glock in my apartment. Did you kill Erin?”
Isobel blushed. “No, I’d been snooping in your apartment the day before, while you were at work. I guess I forgot it there. It was an accident.”
Snooping? Just like she’d been snooping at Suzy’s place?
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked.
“Isobel Stonecrow is a friend of mine,” Fritz said, wiping the blood off of his hands with a monogrammed handkerchief as he sauntered over.
Friend, he’d said. Right. The kind of friend that you fondled after saving her life.
“We met a couple of months ago because he needed to speak to his late grandfather,” Isobel said. She flashed a smile at him. “He wasn’t fooled by the drums and animal skins either.”
“I saw right through all of your pretense.” Fritz smiled back at her. “She proved trustworthy with my grandfather’s spirit. When I realized that my department had been infiltrated by the Needles, I needed someone outside the organization I could trust, and Belle was that woman. She’s been investigating the Needles and all of my agents for the last several weeks.”
I remembered how she’d told me that nobody called her Izzy, and now I knew why. She preferred the OPA agents wrapped around her pinkie finger to use a different diminutive.
“Ergo the snooping,” she said.
Fritz was speaking to me, but he could barely take his eyes off Isobel. “I believed you were trustworthy, Cèsar, but I had to be sure. Agent Takeuchi was high on my list of suspects. You’ve been close with her, and you had previous connections with the Silver Needles.”#p#分页标题#e#
“Was that why you assigned Isobel’s investigation to me?” I asked.
He nodded. “The Needles had identified Belle as my ally and a threat. I wanted to see how you handled the investigation. Unfortunately, we had that little problem with Erin Karwell first. Speaking of which…”