Archangel's Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(97)

Grinning, Naasir jumped onto a rooftop with a feral grace that was magnetic. But not as compelling to her eyes as Janvier’s fluid leap up. She made the motion for “Go” and they headed onward. The two would take Naasir’s lower skyroad, while she’d go in on the ground, and their aerial backup would drop down from above the cloud layer on their signal.

She tugged down the ball cap under which she’d hidden her hair after dirtying up her face, made sure her battered and patched sunglasses were on her nose, and slouched forward with her hands in the pockets of her raggedy black coat. A young vampire at the Tower had dug up the ankle-length piece out of God knew where.

On her feet were sneakers as ragged. She hated being without her boots, but they were the thing that most often gave people’s true motives away, especially hunters and military types. It was something Saki had taught her soon after her admittance into the Guild.

Shoes and wristwatches, that’s where folks slip up.

So she slouched along, just another street person looking for a place to get out of the cold, pitiful and not the least bit intimidating. When she reached the first warehouse, she made as if to see if she could get around the back and, when that proved impossible, tried the door, muttering nonsense under her breath for effect.

The door was wrenched open from within, the muscle-bound vampire on the other side dressed in a navy suit sans tie, his complexion so white it was eerie. “Git!” He shoved at her shoulder with bruising force, while another body moved in the shadows behind him. “Out! Pestilent vermin.”

Allowing herself to stumble and fall to the concrete frontage swept clean of snow, she held out hands clad in holey gloves. “S-sorry. Sorry. Didn’t know it was occupied.”

The door slammed shut.

Pushing up to her feet, hands over her ears as she rocked, she tried the same thing at the next warehouse, this time more furtively, giving the appearance that she was afraid of being caught again. No response this time, and she picked up not even a hint of sound.

Going with her gut, she said, “First warehouse,” into the tiny microphone attached to the collar of her coat. “Two vampire guards that I saw, armed with guns and possibly knives.” Retrieving her gun from a coat pocket, the silencer already on, she held it in one hand; the coat’s sleeves were long enough to conceal the weapon. “I didn’t hear or see anything to suggest a bigger contingent, but there could be more toward the back.”

Naasir’s voice came through the receiver in her ear. “I will listen.” A minute later. “I hear male laughter, movement, but it is small. No more than two or three.”

Another voice followed Naasir’s. “Giorgio,” Dmitri said, “is not at his home or at any of his known haunts. His cattle are accounted for except for the one named Brooke. She left with him around three a.m.”

Ashwini’s blood ran hot. There was a good chance the bastard was inside the warehouse and he probably had Brooke with him. Not only had she tarnished his name, but her actions had drawn Tower attention; it may have been enough to make Giorgio break pattern and attack a woman who could be linked back to him.

“Give us a minute,” she said to Dmitri and Illium both, then she signaled to Janvier and Naasir.

Quiet as ghosts, the two men whispered across the roof to jump down behind the target warehouse, while she shuffled her way back to the front. Hesitating and mumbling to give them enough time to get in position, she surreptitiously undid her coat to expose the thin T-shirt she wore underneath before knocking on the door.





36


It was pulled open by the same vampire who’d shoved her to the ground.

“You still here?” he snarled. “I told you to git!” Fangs glinted in the sunlight. “Or do you want me to get nasty?”

A vicious guard dog, she decided, one who’d do anything for money. “I was just wondering,” she said, imitating the jerky, scratchy movements of a junkie. No one to worry about. No one important. No one who’d be missed. “Do you have, like, a dollar?” A jerk that made her coat half fall off her shoulder, drawing his attention to her body. “For coffee?”

His eyes gleamed red, dropping to her breasts. “I think we can work out a deal.”

He was reaching to maul her breasts when there was a shout from inside the warehouse. As he turned, Ashwini shot him straight through the temple. He dropped to the floor with a bone-cracking slam, but didn’t die, his shoulders and legs twitching and bloody froth gathering at the corners of his mouth.

Before she put in another bullet at the precise point in his spine that would paralyze him long enough to get this done, she looked inside to find Naasir and Janvier only a few feet away. It appeared the guards had been playing poker around a table close to the entrance. Naasir had ripped out the throat of a second guard with unusual care. The male was seriously damaged, but would survive to face Tower justice. Janvier, on the other hand, had a sweating vampire on his knees, one of his kukris held to the dark-skinned male’s throat.

Since they needed only one conscious and able to talk, she put the bullet in the first vampire’s spine, then contacted Illium. “We have this under control,” she said, stepping over the guard’s body to head to Janvier. “I think your squadron should clear the second warehouse before joining us.”

“Consider it done.”