but the tinted windows made an ID impossible from this distance. His night vision was good, but the IED that cost him his left leg nearly took his sight in that eye. The charm he kept on a key ring in his pocket helped, but magic could only do so much.
Parker stepped onto the asphalt beside him and watched the taillights until they burned out. “What?”
“That car look familiar to you?”
“I’ve seen it around. Hard to miss a Ferrari.” The sentinel hooked his hands on his hips. “Pretty sure it belongs to a local vampire.”
“Find out who.” A tightness in his gut told him the car or the vampire or both were important, and that same instinct was what saved his life overseas. “I’ve seen it before, but I can’t put my finger on where.”
He preferred motorcycles, but fast cars did it for him too. A sleek beauty like that would have earned a passing glance. Too bad he hadn’t had time for a closer inspection. Maybe next time.
And there would be a next time.
His recollection of where he had spied a fob to match that spendy car guaranteed it.
“I’ll ask Abernathy for the plate number, and we’ll run it.” Parker made a note. “You’re staying out at the old Whitaker place, right?”
Tension shot through Boaz’s shoulders, curving them in an instinctive hunch as if he’d been caught misbehaving instead of engaging in Society-appropriate conduct for a man engaged to the Whitaker matron.
Then again, he had the next best thing to a girlfriend back in Savannah who would be less than thrilled to learn of his travel accommodations, let alone his recent and secret engagement.
Goddess, he was tired.
Dragging a hand down his face, he wished he could hop on his bike, drive home, and pretend none of this had happened. That he could find another way to save his sister, his family, that didn’t cost him the first woman to make him think, to make him feel.
I am so sorry.
“Yeah,” he rasped. “That’s where I’ll be.” He hesitated. “I would prefer a call to a drop-in.”
Parker, who had known him a long time, shook his head. “Her father know you’re staying with them?”
Boaz ran a finger along the inside of the collar of his tee. “Yeah.”
That was the polite answer, the one that didn’t expose how Addie ran the household and not her father.
And he was about as thrilled with the prospect of Boaz for a son-in-law as learning Godzilla was rampaging through their small town.
His tone or expression must have set Parker’s detective instincts tingling. “You’re getting serious?”
The other man laughed at what he must consider a witty one-liner, but Boaz played dumb and took the words at face value.
“Everybody’s gotta settle down some time.” He clasped Parker on the shoulder. “I’m going back for another look.”
“Make it quick.” He shook his head, still chuckling, and checked his watch. “The cleaners are getting antsy.”
Leaving the pitted strip of asphalt, Boaz trudged back into the woods to do what he did best.
The victim had been identified as Angelo Willis of Clan Willis, whose newly turned lover, Ron, had met his end at the railroad museum earlier in the night.
Boaz had expected to find Ron’s murder had been a punishment for the younger vampire stepping out on his lover, but this killed that line of inquiry stone dead.
Ron hadn’t had it easy, but Angelo, the poor bastard, had suffered more.
Wrists opened from palm to elbow, throat slit, and femoral arteries gaping, he had been hung naked between two pines and left to bleed out. Beneath him, the pine straw glistened black in the moonlight, and the size of the puddle made it clear the vampire hadn’t fed since news of Ron’s true death had reached him.
Chin pointed skyward, he stared up at the treetops. Or, he would have, had his phone not covered his eyes. Like all the others, music played from the device, but the song wasn’t the same. Another dead end.
“He’s still alive, well, undead,” Honeywell murmured from right behind him. “We need to cut him down.”
Jessica “Honey” Honeywell was the reason Boaz was out in the middle of nowhere debating that very thing. He had dropped in to say hello to a friend, Mark Chambers, on his way out of town when his old flame waylaid him with a link to his case. Now he had more questions with no answers than when he arrived to meet with Addie.
How dead was too dead when you were already undead?