"Imora thea mi savur," Ash whispered under his breath in Atlantean.
God save me from love.
Susan leaned back against the wall as she sorted through files on Jimmy's computer. "Dammit, Jim. I'm just a reporter, not a mind reader," she said, feigning a Bones McCoy quote from Star Trek. "Couldn't you have at least left me an obvious crumb to follow? Is one loaf of bread too much to ask?"
Sick to her stomach, she decided to take a break and clicked on the photos folder.
A bittersweet pain lacerated her chest as she flipped through pictures of him and Angie at a party last year. God, what she wouldn't give to hear Angie tell her she was five by five again. To hear Jimmy's raspy voice teasing her about being too uptight all the time.
"You okay?"
Startled, she jumped at Ravyn's deep voice as he entered the room with that silent cat walk of his. "You scared me..." She paused to watch him come closer. Honestly, he was the best-looking thing she'd ever seen in her life. He had his hair pulled back in a ponytail and even though his shirt was untucked, it didn't disguise the fact that he was ripped with sinewy muscles. Distracting herself from that thought, she indicated the laptop with her chin. "I was just spying on Jimmy's pictures."
He handed her the coffee he'd gone upstairs to get for her. "Maybe you should close the file." He sat down beside her so that he could look at the screen, too.
"No, it's okay. I just found this one set of pictures from Jimmy's Halloween party at his precinct last year. He went as Frankenstein and Angie was-"
"Bride of Frankenstein?"
"No... she went as a Holy Cow." Susan smiled at the memory. "She was always a bit offbeat that way."
Ravyn laughed as she showed him the picture of Angie in a cow suit with a halo suspended above her head and a giant wooden cross around her neck. He'd only seen her a couple of times in the shelter while they'd held him, but the woman had seemed decent enough.
But his smile died when Susan flipped to the next picture and he saw the people in it.
It couldn't be. Surely he was mistaken...
Susan flipped to another.
"Wait! Go back."
Susan frowned. "Why?"
He set his own coffee aside and frowned as he examined the picture of a tall blond woman who was dressed as a classic campy Hollywood vampire, complete with all-too-real-looking fangs, standing with her arm around Angie. "I know her."
Susan gave him a less than pleased glare. "For the record, Puss in Boots, I hope you're not speaking biblically. Because if you are-"
"No," he said, interrupting her tirade, even though a part of him was flattered that she felt that way. "She's a Daimon... or was. I killed her."
Susan scoffed at him. "Not her you didn't."
Ravyn looked again and studied the woman's sharp patrician features. In the back of his mind, he could still see her dressed in a black pair of slacks and a red blouse as he found her standing over her victims. The sight had sickened him as she had wiped the blood from her mouth and laughed about it.
"It was her, I'm sure of it."
Still Susan had doubt in those blue eyes. "How would you know? Do you memorize the face of every Daimon you snuff out?"
He gave her a droll stare. "No, but I remember her."
" 'Cause she's a bimbo?"
He shook his head. "Because she didn't run from me. She actually dared me to kill her. She said that she had a get out of jail free card and that unless I wanted every Dark-Hunter in Seattle to die, I'd leave her alone."
Susan was unamused by that. "So naturally you just had to kill her."
If a dry stare could mutilate, she'd be in several pieces on the floor.
"She'd just taken the life of a pregnant woman and her small child outside of a Laundromat. I had to kill her to release those two souls or both of their souls would have died. "