had led him to exactly where he’d known she would be: 1822 Secaro Street, Alazne Morello’s house, an address and a name he’d found in J. T. Chronopolous’s files. The golden woman’s scent seeped through the walls of the house, and he wanted her.
The other strong scent, the one reeking of testosterone, had enraged him every step of the way. It would be good to have Conroy Farrel dead.
But first the woman.
Monk walked through the gardens surrounding the small house at the end of the block and stepped up onto the front porch. The rotten smell immediately became even more disgustingly intense, like overripe fruit left in the hot sun for far too long.
He spied the smoldering brazier, the apparent cause of the reeking stench infusing the whole street, and reached for the door, intending to make quick work of his prey—but the smoke thickened and caused him to pause.
Odd.
Unexpected.
Maddening.
In less than a second, he ran through the series of thoughts, all of them inadequate until he reached the last one: maddening. He understood maddening. He felt it often, the bone-deep anger that pushed him beyond his ability to reason.
But this wasn’t reasonable.
This place … this place … he looked to either end of the porch, still trying to ignore the smoking brazier. There was something about this place, something impenetrable, something disturbing, something besides the smoke threatening to gag him.
He brought his arm up and buried his nose in the crook of his elbow, reaching for the door with his other hand.
Sickening.
More than sickening, the smoke burned his nostrils and made his eyes water. The smell of it made his skin crawl and curled around inside his stomach, tightening it into knots.
He kicked the brazier off the porch, but even in the wet loam of the gardens, the coals smoldered, and now the smell was at his back as well as lingering around the door in wisps of the nauseating, gut-churning smoke.
He coughed and gagged, and backed down off the porch, stumbling away from the assault on his senses.
The woman who lived here, the one from J. T. Chronopolous’s past, was a bruja, a self-proclaimed witch. Alazne Morello called herself a sorceress. Monk had dismissed the claim out of hand, but he sensed a woman’s presence in this place, a fierce, disturbing presence.
There was power beyond the merely human in the world, and he had it in spades, hard-won and paid for in blood and pain. This Latina in Denver did not have that kind of power. No one did, except the men who had come out of Souk’s and Patterson’s laboratories. Men who had paid a price no woman could have borne.
And yet he barely made it to the sidewalk before the churning, cramping agony in his gut had him retching out the contents of his stomach.
The pain was brutal, like a beast clawing at him from the inside, something he thought he’d left behind in Bangkok. The bitch, to have done this to him. He would come back for her someday and make her pay.
Rising from his crouched position, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and started back toward the house. But the smell hit him again, cloying and rich, and so thick he could barely breathe.
He tried another route to get inside, skirting the property from a distance and coming around from the back. But the smoke, the insidious smoke curled around the whole damn place. He didn’t know how. He’d dumped the brazier, but the smell and the smoke were everywhere, wisps of it winding through the gardens and hanging from the eaves of the house.
He tried approaching the back door off a small stone patio but was turned back once more by the nauseous cramping induced by the smoke. Standing at the edge of the garden, he used the tail of his shirt to wipe the sweat from his face, mindless of the viscera and blood splattered on it.
There was another way.
He turned his face into the wind, felt it rising from the west and bringing rain in its wake. Soon it would be upon them, and the smoke and smell would dissipate. He would have them then, Farrel for slaughter and the woman … perhaps the woman for something else, something he hadn’t experienced since before Bangkok. She was Farrel’s, reason enough to want to take her like a man, but even more, this woman, unlike the ones he’d killed, teased his lust to life.