Archangel's Prophecy (Guild Hunter #11)(94)

Lucy.

Elena’s blood buzzed. “Can you tell me about Lucy?”

Jenessa nodded. “We met on the street. We even shared a small apartment for a while after she first came to the Quarter. But . . . Lucy liked drugs.” Her fingers clenched around the empty mug. “My stepbrother banned me from taking drugs when my skin started to attract customers with money, and after he was gone, I’d seen how bad it could get, and I stayed clean.”

“But Lucy did drugs? Cocaine?”

Jenessa nodded, her hair a glossy shade of purplish black Holly would appreciate. “There was this one vampire who’d give her coke if she’d do stuff with him and his friend.” She shuddered. “Both creeps. Both into sick stuff. I never went with them—my stepbrother got knifed in a fight when I was nineteen, and I had a few regulars who agreed to pay me twenty-five extra a month so I wouldn’t have to work the streets and risk having my skin torn up.”

A hard swallow. “I didn’t know how to do anything else.”

Jenessa had ducked her head through the entire latter part of her statement, shame thick in the words. Elena wanted to reach across and hug her, but after knowing Aodhan, she made no assumptions about touch. “You survived and your piece of shit stepbrother is dead. Makes you the smarter one I’d say.”

Jenessa raised her head a fraction, looking at Elena through her bangs until she seemed to decide Elena meant it. “You want more coffee?” she asked with a hopeful smile that was a fragile construct.

“Sure.” Elena saw Jenessa pull herself back together again as she poured. “You remember the name of the creeps who gave Lucy coke?”

“Nish and Terry,” Jenessa said with a shudder. “Vamps. They liked to put things inside Lucy’s body and record her being humiliated then put the videos online. It makes me sick that those videos are out there in the world.”

Nishant Kumar and Terence Lee.

Elena’s heartbeat rocketed, a sick feeling in her gut. “Did Nish and Terry pass Lucy on to Simon Blakely?”





40




“Lucy met him at Nish’s.” Sadness in her voice. “He treated her nicer than Nish and Terry.”

Bastard had been playing games, the good-guy rescuer who got off on girls the other two had fundamentally damaged. “You liked him.”

“Yes, he seemed okay. After hanging with us at a local diner a few times, he invited us to visit his apartment. I was careful not to go too much because I didn’t want him starting to think he was my pimp, but his roommate, Eric, always had free coke for Lucy, so she went all the time.”

Jenessa tightened the belt of her robe compulsively. “I didn’t like her doing that, but I thought at least she was safer than she’d be with those sickos Nish and Terry. After a while, she and Simon hooked up and she moved in with him—he liked to have sex when she was high, but it was all normal, nothing weird, and Lucy liked being high, so . . . She let Eric do honey feeds from her sometimes, too, to thank him for the coke.”

“Eric try to get it on with you when you visited her?”

“Eric?” A giggle. “No, he only liked guys. Mostly the big biker types with the beards and the chest hair and the leather.”

That was a piece of information no one else had shared. It fitted in neatly with his wounds: hand cut off for offering Lucy drugs, but genitals left intact because he’d never abused her sexually. “You okay talking about the night Lucy’s father came and got her?”

“Yes.” Jenessa’s hand shook as she topped up her coffee, but she walked into the past despite her fear. “It was cold that night, and I didn’t have enough money to use the heating at my place.” A haunted look beyond the balcony doors. “It’ll be exactly one year in a week.”

A shiver ran over Elena’s skin, a hitch of memory she couldn’t capture.

“So you came over to Simon and Eric’s to hang out, get warm,” she said past her frustration.

A jerky nod. “Even though Simon was a vampire, he usually had food in his apartment, and he didn’t mind if I took it. Once in a while he even put my favorite cookies in there.”

Drugs for one, Elena realized, food for the other. Simon Blakely and his friend had been a slick operation. Lining up Jenessa for when they were tired of Lucy? Sex with a damaged young woman for Blakely; honey feeds for Acosta.

“When I got there,” Jenessa said, “Eric had just had a honey feed from a boy who passed me on the stairs as I was coming up. Eric was wasted, told me Lucy and Simon were in the bedroom. I didn’t bother them, just made myself microwave ramen then sat on the couch and watched a comedy show on TV.”

“And Eric?”

“He sacked out on his mattress on the floor, kind of half watching, half sleeping like he did a lot after a honey feed. I’d almost finished my noodles when the front door smashed open, and this man came in yelling for Lucy. I thought for sure he’d hurt me, but he grabbed Eric around the throat and said, ‘Where the fuck is my daughter?’”

Jenessa had unconsciously mimicked the intruder’s deep growl.

“What happened next?”

“Eric had a baggie of coke on the coffee table, and I could tell it made the other man furious. His face went all red. The door to the bedroom opened right then and Lucy stumbled out dressed in just her panties and a tank top.”