I didn't realize I'd said it out loud until Hunter answered. "For information, perhaps. Maybe they thought she had knowledge of the keys."
I frowned. "Mom didn't know much about the gray fields and, despite spending a night with an Aedh, she knew even less about them. Killing her for information about either makes no sense."
"But neither does your mother's death. It was brutal and deliberate, as if it were some kind of message."
A message no one could understand. I rubbed my eyes for a moment, then said, "What is the problem you want me to investigate?"
"A number of murders have occurred, and the only link we can find, besides the manner of their death, is Dark Earth, a vampire establishment in Brunswick."
I frowned. I knew Brunswick fairly well since Tao, Ilianna, and I had lived there for a few years during our university years, and I certainly couldn't recall a place called Dark Earth. "I gather it's new?"
"No, old," she said crisply. "But it's one that only vampires know about."
"Ah, an underground club." There'd been talk about such clubs existing over the years, but no evidence had ever been uncovered and the vamps certainly weren't forthcoming with any information.
"Figuratively and physically," Hunter said. "If it sat at street level, humanity would be aware of its existence and that could be dangerous for everyone."
Which only made me wonder what the hell went on in the place—although I had a bad feeling that I was going to get a firsthand answer to that one.
"In the last week," she continued, "there have been five deaths. All were low-level vampires, as Dark Earth caters to a particular type of clientele."
A type she clearly wasn't going to tell me about right now—and that only made me more nervous about going to the damn club. "That doesn't explain why you want me to investigate rather than the Directorate."
"The Directorate is brilliant at what it does, but it is too large an organization to guarantee the utter discretion this investigation requires."
"In other words, I'm to shut my mouth about what I find and report only to you?"
"That goes without saying." She paused, and her expression intensified. Trepidation shivered down my spine. "And if you breathe a word of this to that reporter you talked to this morning, he will discover a whole lot more about the dark edges of this world than he might wish to."