Slaying Monsters for the Feeble - Annette Marie Page 0,73

This one is my language tutor. Claude’s looked everywhere.”

“They’re all scratched out.” A flutter of satisfaction lightened my middle. “Wherever Uncle Jack has gone to ground, he’s outsmarted Claude.”

Amalia grinned ruefully. “Too bad he’s outsmarting us as well. Where the hell could he be?” She ran her finger down the list. “Look here—Katrine Fredericks. Calgary, Alberta. Look what he wrote!”

Beside the Calgary address were five scrawled words: Confirmed decoy. Kathy is alone.

“My stepmom is in Alberta?” Amalia exclaimed. “And Dad isn’t with her? Aunty Katrine is her sister, so I guess that makes sense. Well, at least I know where to find one of them now.” She shuffled through a few more documents, then picked up a stack of photos. “Ha, look at this. I must be, like, four years old.”

I leaned closer to see the photo of a blond girl staring aggressively into the camera. “Is that your mom with you?”

“Yep.” Amalia smiled at the equally blond woman with a similarly intense stare. “She died when I was eight, and Dad married Kathy a year later. I hated him for that for a long time.”

She flipped to the next photo. “That’s my great uncle. Oh, and this one is a fishing buddy of dad’s, but he died two years ago.”

She turned the picture over. “Deceased – illness” was scrawled across the back in red ink.

“Has Claude checked all of these?” she mused as she shuffled through the stack. “He’s been one busy …”

Trailing off, she stared at a snapshot of her dad beside an older man in camouflage and an orange vest, a rifle in one hand. A large, dead moose with a broad rack of antlers crowning its oblong head lay at their feet. Was it legal to hunt moose?

She checked the reverse side, which featured a single question mark in red ink, and whispered, “No way.”

“Drādah!” Zylas barked.

My head snapped up. Red light lit his body, and he dissolved into crimson power that flashed toward me. The human clothes he’d been wearing dropped to the floor in a lumpy puddle of fabric.

The infernus was still vibrating against my chest when the apartment door swung open. I jerked back, expecting Claude to walk through—but it wasn’t the summoner standing in the threshold.

Zora scowled at me, her sword case hanging over her shoulder and her leather jacket zipped up to her throat. Taye stood behind her, dark eyebrows arched high on his dusky face.

“Zora,” I gasped. “How—how did you … find … us?”

“Taye is a telethesian.”

My knees weakened with dismay. Telethesians were psychics with a supernatural ability to track people, especially mythics. Taye was the perfect partner for scoping the tower and searching out the vampires’ new location. Also perfect for tracking a suspicious contractor and her suspicious friend after they’d ditched a restaurant and run off into the downtown streets.

“So,” Zora drawled, hitching her sword case higher on her shoulder, “what’s going on?”

My mind had gone completely, uselessly blank, and I was painfully aware of Zylas’s abandoned clothes behind me. If Zora noticed them—and recognized them as my “friend’s” outfit …

“Uh …” I mumbled.

“You haven’t been part of this guild for long,” she said coolly, “so maybe you don’t know, but when we team up for jobs, we don’t leave our teammates in the dark.”

I blinked.

“Unless this isn’t related to your summoner investigation?”

“Uh, it is,” I stammered, “but it … it isn’t vampire related, so I didn’t think you—”

“It isn’t?” Taye interrupted in his deep, accented voice. “There are vampire traces everywhere. Plus, Zora, you’re glowing.”

“I’m glowing?” she repeated blankly. “Oh!”

She stuck her hand in her jeans pocket, where a faint red glow shone through the fabric, and withdrew a blood-tracker artifact. I gasped fearfully. Vampires were nearby?

“Hmm.” Zora turned in a slow circle. The faint light brightened as she aimed it toward the kitchen nook with Claude’s desk. She strode closer and the glow increased. Taye, Amalia, and I followed cautiously.

Zora raised it higher, then lowered it toward the floor. The glow intensified as it drew level with the desk’s bottom drawer.

“I don’t think there’s a vampire in there,” she said dryly.

She tugged on the drawer and it slid open. Inside was a metal case similar to a safety deposit box. Kneeling beside her, I lifted it out. The latch flipped easily, no lock or spell sealing it shut. Inside, two heavy-duty steel syringes were nestled in a foam insert. A third slot in the foam was empty. Above them were three vials of clear liquid marred