I STARED at my computer screen for a few seconds, processing what I’d found, before I lifted my voice. “I think I know who that little girl was.”
Dess immediately stood up and came over from where she’d been all but inhaling a chocolate bar from our stash of food. My setup in the foreclosed retail building where we were hiding out while we regrouped wasn’t anything to brag about, but I did have a chair, if wobbly, and a built-in counter, which was more than I’d had at my disposal in the warehouse before. I’d set my laptop where the cash register probably used to sit as I worked away.
“What?” Dess said, setting her hand on the back of my chair. “I didn’t even know you were looking for her.”
I savored the faint brush of her fingertips more than was probably healthy, but then, I’d never claimed I was a model of mental stability. “I wasn’t actually trying to, but it wasn’t even that hard once I started poking around in the right direction.” I grimaced as I mentally compiled everything I had to share.
Dess was peering at the photo on my screen which showed a girl in profile, her blond hair tucked behind her visible ear, her slim frame clothed in a private school uniform. “That’s her,” she said, sucking in her breath. “Or at least it looks a hell of a lot like her, and the uniform looks the same too. How did you find her? What do you mean about looking in the right direction?”
I motioned to my computer. “Well, what I was trying to find was the Blood Hunter’s true identity. You seeing that girl made me think about the other girl, the one that was so important to him.”
“His daughter,” Dess filled in, her eyebrows rising. “But she’s dead—and that was almost thirty years ago.”
“Yes,” I said. “But thanks to the records the Maliks kept with their creepy parchment posters, we know the year and month the Blood Hunter’s daughter went missing. We know that she was going to school in or near DC, or they wouldn’t have had easy access to her. Once I put those pieces together, it wasn’t hard to scan the databases of attendance records and see when a girl of the right age had suddenly stopped coming to school.”
Julius came over from where he’d been reloading all our guns so they’d be ready if it came down to another shootout. Talon and Garrison looked over too.
“Did you get the Blood Hunter’s real name?” our commander asked.
I shook my head with an apologetic twist of my mouth. “He kept that under wraps. The name for parental contact was a woman who I managed to link to a shell corporation that’s also turned up in other threads of my investigation, but I haven’t been able to follow that chain any further to its source. I’m sure she was an employee, just a placeholder to keep his own identity secret. There are no other records about her either. But that did confirm to me that the girl I found was his daughter. Her name was listed as Brittany Banks.”
“Brittany,” Dess repeated quietly, as if honoring the tortured blond girl we’d seen in one of the photographs the Blood Hunter had arranged for us to find.
“But is that her real name?” Garrison demanded.
“I’m guessing it was a fake last name,” I said. “But I think the first name was correct. It’d be hard for a little kid to adjust to being called one name at home and another at school, and he wouldn’t have wanted to raise suspicions if she got confused. At the time, it was an incredibly popular girls name so it wouldn’t have seemed very identifiable.”
Garrison huffed. “So basically you got nothing.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” My stomach knotted a little as I thought about how much else I had to reveal. “I got something I didn’t expect at all. When I was running all possible searches to try to find out any other information out about the Blood Hunter’s family, I stumbled on a girl named Brittany—different last name—who’s going to a private school in DC. A private school with a uniform just like the one you described. A girl who matched your description too. And Brittany isn’t a very common name anymore.”
Dess’s brow knit. “What are you saying?”
I dragged in a breath. “Well, I didn’t know what to think at first, but it was a lead I had to chase. I dug into her records as much as I could, and just like the first Brittany, the woman listed as her guardian is essentially a ghost, the bare minimum of records under that name, one of them linking her to another shell corporation. Probably another of the Blood Hunter’s employees, providing a front for him like the first woman did.”
“A front because… the Blood Hunter has another daughter?”
“Sort of.” I waved toward the photograph. “I compared facial structure and other factors between their photographs as well as I could. They look superficially similar, but they’re too different in the ways that indicate genetics to share a parent. I think he obtained her by the same methods he uses to gather all the women he sells. It’d be easier than waiting out an entire pregnancy, and he wouldn’t have known for sure how a kid he fathered naturally would look or even that it’d be a girl.”
“So he stole her,” Talon said solemnly.
I nodded. “He found a girl who reminded him of his former daughter in looks and either kidnapped her or bought her from desperate birth parents. She’s been registered at the school for four years, so he’s had her at least that long. I’m not sure why he’d have taken that step recently instead of decades ago. Maybe once he saw that you were fully grown, Dess, and he knew it wouldn’t be much longer before he sent you after your father, he felt at peace enough to want to start over. But it looks like that’s what he’s doing. He picked out a kid with similar looks, gave her the same name… She’s his replacement kid.”
Dess winced. “And he’s already involving her in his businesses somehow. That woman was going to bring her to the office. I don’t know how much they’ve told her, but she’s being exposed to it, with everything going on around her…”
“He’s grooming his heir,” Julius put in. “That’s another reason he might have decided to go for it now. He isn’t getting any younger—if he had a six-year-old almost thirty years ago, he’s got to be in his late fifties at least. He’d have realized that he needed to start raising another kid ASAP if he wanted to hand over the reins to someone he’d sculpted from that young an age.”
“Just like he had me molded to be what he wanted,” Dess said, hugging herself. Her eyes looked tormented as she took in the girl’s picture again. “Is there anything we can do for her?”
I shook my head. “Not right now. There’s no way to prove any wrongdoing to get Child Services or anyone else involved.”
She exhaled through her teeth. I stood from my chair, touching her arm, about to pull her into my arms. I wanted to be closer—close enough to soothe the rage that only seemed to grow the longer it went unchecked in her eyes. I wanted to hold her and show her that she wasn’t alone in her fury.
But I couldn’t do more than offer that brief touch before Talon’s head snapped around. He’d been standing closest to the shop’s grimy windows, and he eased closer now, peering past the smudges.
“A couple of police cruisers just pulled up a couple of stores down. The cops are getting out. It looks like they’re checking all the buildings in the area.”
Shit. My pulse stuttered, and I leapt back to my computer. “Are they coming straight here?”
“No. The Blood Hunter mustn’t have been able to tip them off to exactly where we are. Maybe he figured out the neighborhood, or maybe they’re patrolling for other reasons.”
“But either way it isn’t good,” Garrison added, snatching up as many bags of supplies as he could lift into his arms. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Hold on,” I said quickly. “I think I can divert them, and then we won’t risk a chase. Let me just…”
My hands whipped over the keyboard. There. I sent a falsified signal to all the police scanners nearby—an alert of gunshots fired reported at a location several blocks away. A second later, the thump of footsteps reached my ears.
“They’re running back to their cars,” Talon reported, and tipped his head to me. “You pulled it off.”
“For now.” I rubbed my hand over my face. We kept getting found, kept having to flee at a moment’s notice, and I could only use that trick one or two more times before calling wolf stopped being effective. Next time I might not be fast enough, or close enough to my computer—next time they might barge right into the building we were hiding out in, no chance to deflect them.
I glanced at Dess again as she went to grab her brother from the back room where we’d left him. A pang ran through my chest. That short interlude we’d had together back at the guest house felt centuries ago. When would we finally be able to relax again and enjoy the closeness we both got so much out of?
I might have managed to get at least some of the mercenaries off our backs with our attack on the office building yesterday. Interfering with the general could have put a wrench in the Blood Hunter’s military efforts as well. If only I could find a longer-term solution to keeping the police at a distance too…
An idea clicked into place in my head, so brilliant and also bonkers that I could already imagine what the others’ reaction would be. I said it anyway.
“I think I have a way to make sure the cops won’t be on our tail for at least a day or two so we can properly regroup. But I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”
“Why do I feel like I am so dead?” Dess whispered through the headset that I’d given her.
“There’s no need for theatrics,” I teased. “We’re just… diverting all the resources of the police department.”
Okay, that was a bit of an overstatement… but only a bit. I intended that when we were done here, no amount of anonymous tips would be able to convince the police to look for us anywhere other than where I’d pointed them.
But I needed help on the ground to accomplish that, and Dess had been the ideal accomplice. She could move faster than Julius or Talon, she was highly skilled at stealthy maneuvers, and she was smaller, so she could hide in more places than either of them. It was a no-brainer.
I wasn’t sure she’d be thanking me for giving her the honor, though.
“All you have to do is plant three more bombs, and we’re home free,” I reminded her.
“Right. Three more bombs on top of the dozen or so I’ve already placed, positioned perfectly so they won’t actually hurt anyone but will make a commotion to draw attention, and leave traces of the blood you ever so helpfully donated. Piece of cake. I should do this every day.”
The corners of my mouth quirked up. I loved a lot of things about Dess, and right now I was particularly loving the sarcastic side of her that’d come out.
“And I trust that you’d pull it off perfectly every time,” I assured her with a grin.
She sighed, and then the connection went quiet as she must have come up on her next target location. I’d plotted out a map of key spots all in the same general neighborhood where it’d look as if the terrible criminals the police had been tracking based on their new DNA results were attempting to wreak havoc on a rival gang that operated there. Both the investigation and the clashes with that gang should keep a whole lot of officers very busy for at least a little while.
The tips the Blood Hunter had been giving them hadn’t gotten them anywhere. They had to be wondering how many of those were calling wolf too. There wouldn’t be the manpower to follow up on anything unverified while they had so much obvious evidence to sort through and leads to pursue.
I hunkered down in the middle seat of the van, monitoring police activity on my laptop. A minute later, Dess tuned back in. “Okay, it’s done.”
“Only two more now!” I told her cheerfully.
She snorted, sounding not even a little out of breath as she loped through the back alleys to the next target. “Lucky me. When I get back, you are going to owe me so much chocolate.”
“I can think of other ways of repaying you,” I said slyly, and her laugh electrified me.
“I’m sure you can,” she said. “Here we go. Give me a second.”
It took more like thirty, but I wasn’t going to complain when that was plenty speedy all on its own. A buoyant warmth filled my chest, and it occurred to me that despite the stress of the past few days and our current predicament—not to mention the crazy stunt we were about to pull—I felt happy.
Even when our lives were going to hell, I was delighted to be working with this woman, fighting alongside her, making up plans and carrying them out. It was just as much of a thrill as making love to her. Even if we were on the run forever, it would be worth it as long as Dess was here with me.
Dess’s voice carried to me again. “One more to go. You’re going to pick me up, right? Or do I have to run back through this entire hellhole?”
I chuckled. “We’ll come get you.” I thumped the back of the driver’s seat, and Talon started the engine. “Berkley and King Street,” I said to both him and Dess.
Ten minutes later, the woman I loved was scrambling into the van next to me. She slammed the door and flopped back in the seat with a sound that was half exhilaration, half exasperation.
“Wasn’t that fun?” I said, and she whacked my arm in protest. But a smile curled her lips as we drove away from the scene of our soon-to-be crime.
I checked my laptop once more, confirmed we were well away from the routes the police would take, and gave the command to detonate.
The bombs went off in the distance like the crackle of popping corn. Sirens split the air moments later. I glanced across at Dess, and she grinned back at me, her eyes gleaming despite her earlier grumbling. “We did it,” she said.
“Hell, yes, we did.” And Hell itself would have been a worthwhile trip with her at my side.
I did hope it didn’t come to that, though.
