When a vamp burned, there was nothing left. If there was, the brief passage of morning sunlight between the buildings would finish it. No one would even know a body had been there. No police would be called for a trash burn in an alley. Regardless, he'd still gotten the girl on her feet, taking her away from the scene before he tucked the money into her thin hand. He'd brushed off her offer to give him a blow job for another ten.
It probably would have been a mercy to take her head at the same time, end her suffering. He'd lived among the street people long enough to know who was too far gone to be helped. It was easy to recognize them, particularly when he was one himself.
Morena Wilson hadn't been one of Trey's students. She'd been his annual kill. The careful ones, they scoped out their annual kill months in advance, just as Gideon had studied Trey to set him up. All predators used similar skills, no matter the face they wore. He suspected that was why inner city cops sometimes felt more at ease with criminals than they did with their own families. They understood the codes that governed their lives, kept them separate from the worlds they protected or preyed upon, respectively. Another fact of life Gideon accepted, as well as the understanding that such lines could easily get blurred as a result, so that a man had no idea what he was anymore.
In order to remain physically and mentally at their peak, all vampires had to take at least one human life every year. An annual kill couldn't be scum of the earth, or someone terminally ill. It had to be a healthy person, a decent human being, in order not to contaminate the vamp's blood with weakness or evil. But the Vampire Council allowed a vamp to take as many as twelve lives a year, including their annual kill, to keep the higher bloodlust craving in some of them managed. Real sporting of them. Gideon's lip curled.
Rules for murder.
He wondered who Jacob's annual kill had been. It had been more than a year since Jacob had become one of them, thanks to Lady Lyssa. He couldn't think of Jacob, who'd never raise a hand to an innocent, definitely not a woman or child, who . . . Hell, he couldn't take it further than that.
Gideon dug his fingers into the shower wall. Maybe that was what he needed to do. Take his brother out. End his own life at the same time, like one of those crazy domestic violence cases, news at eleven.
But Jacob was a father now. Gideon had a nephew. If Gideon was going to take out the father, he'd have to take out the child. Kane, with the kittenish fangs and still, watchful eyes, but a sweet laughing mouth. Jacob's smile. Their mother's smile.
He'd have to take out the boy's mother as well, the enigmatic, jade-eyed Lady Lyssa. One unforgettable night, she'd shared her body with Gideon and his brother both, to give his heart a night of peace. Subsequently damning him to this quagmire of indecision, a new and even more challenging level of his own personal hell.
Yeah, as if he could kill them. He had no illusion about the differences between Trey Beauchamp, mild-mannered vamp teacher, and his brother, a former vampire hunter himself and a natural-born warrior, and Lady Elyssa Amaterasu Yamato Wentworth, Queen of the Far East Clan.
Gideon slid down the side of the shower, planting his bare ass on his sopping clothes, and folded his arms over his head, letting the frigid water pound down on him. As he shivered, he told himself it was the cold. Not the tearing sobs he wouldn't permit past his raw throat.
If only he hadn't met Morena Wilson before she died. She'd been on shift in the ER the night he'd come in with a ripped forearm that needed twenty stitches. She'd been careful around him, as women often were, sensing he wasn't entirely sane or safe. But her touch had been gentle and firm, her eyes kind.
She'd already been marked for death, and Gideon hadn't known a damn thing about it.
They'd used her nursing school graduation picture in the obits, and for that moment, it had been Laura's face there, smiling at him. She'd loved him so much. So fragile, so in need of his protection, and he'd failed her.
He took that obit as a sign. He'd lost his way, and it was time to get back on track. Since he had no idea where the road was anymore, he'd decided to kill the one most likely to take him back to it. Trey, someone who hadn't done a damn thing to offend the Vampire Council's sensibilities. Underscoring that Gideon was enforcing human laws, not goddamn vampire ones.