about their victims. It doesn't stop them from killing over and over. It's what they are."
"I've gazed him," I said quietly. "He's trying to rise above the killer inside him."
Elaine's brows knit into a frown at those words, and she gave me a slow and reluctant nod. "Aren't we all," she murmured. "I'm still not comfortable with the notion of him near my clients. And we need to get moving."
"Go ahead," Thomas said.
I didn't look at my brother, but I said, "You need to eat."
"Maybe later," Thomas said. "I can't leave the women and children unguarded."
I grabbed a pad of cheap paper with the hotel's logo and found a pencil in one of my pockets. I wrote a number on it and passed it to Thomas. "Call Murphy. You won't be able to protect anyone if you're too weak, and you might kill one of them if you lose control of the hunger."
Thomas's jaw tightened with frustration, but he took the offered piece of paper from my hand only a little more roughly than necessary.
Elaine studied him as she walked to the door with me. Then she said to him, "You're different from most of them, aren't you?"
"Probably just more deluded," Thomas replied. "Good luck, Harry."
"Yeah," I said, feeling awkward. "Look. After this is done… we have to talk."
"There's nothing to talk about," my brother said.
We left and I closed the door behind us.
We took the Blue Beetle back to the Amber Inn and went to Elaine's room. The lights were off. The room was empty.
There was a terrible sewer smell in the air.
"Dammit," Elaine whispered. She suddenly sagged and leaned against the doorway.
I stepped past her and turned on the light in the bathroom.
Anna Ash's corpse stood in the shower, body stiff, leaning away from the showerhead, but held in place by the electrical cord of a hair dryer, tied in a knot about the showerhead and another around her neck. There hadn't been room enough for her to suspend herself with her feet off the floor. Ugly, purple-black ligature marks showed on her neck around the cord.
It was obviously a suicide.
It obviously wasn't.
We were too late.
* * *
CHAPTER
Twenty-Five
" W e've got to call the cops on this one," I said quietly to Elaine.
"No," she replied. "They'll want to question us. It will take hours.”
"They'll want to question us a lot longer if someone else finds the body and they have to come looking for us."
"And while we're cooperating with the authorities, what happens to Abby, Helen, and Priscilla?" She stared at me. "For that matter, what happens to Mouse?"
That was a thought I'd been trying to avoid. If Mouse was alive and capable, there was no way he'd let any of the women be harmed. If someone had killed Anna when Mouse was near, it could have happened only over his dead body.
But there was no sign of him.
That could mean a lot of things. At worst it meant that he had been utterly disintegrated by whatever had come for the women. Not only was that assumption depressing as hell, it also didn't get me anywhere. A bad guy who could simply disintegrate anything that got in the way sure wouldn't be pussyfooting around the way these White Court yahoos had been.
Mouse wasn't here. There was no mess, no sign of a struggle, and believe you me, that dog can put up a struggle, as the vets found out when they misfiled his paperwork. They tried to neuter him instead of vaccinating him and getting his shoulder X-rayed where he'd bounced off of a moving minivan. I was lucky they were willing to let me pay the property damage and leave it at that.
It had to mean something else. Maybe my dog had left with the others, and Anna had remained behind, or gone back for something she forgot.
Or maybe Mouse had played on everyone's expectation that he was just a dog. He'd shown me that he was capable of that kind of subterfuge before, and it had been one of the first things that tipped me off to his distinctly superior-to-canine intellect. What if Mouse had played along and stayed close to the others?
Why would he do that, though?
Because Mouse knew I could find him. Unless the bad guys carried him off to the Nevernever itself, or put him behind a set of wards specifically designed to block such magic, my tracking spell could find him anywhere.
That was the path to take, even if Mouse didn't know