Page 73 of Fire Dancer
“Is she…?”
“Her body was found out near Clarkdale.”
Pippa whimpered, burying her face in her hands. A moment later, she was rocking, crying, and murmuring that awful word in an endless loop. “No. No. No…”
I was a pebble. A blade of grass. An inanimate, unfeeling object at Pippa’s feet.
When my knees finally unlocked, I sank down beside Pippa and wrapped my arms around her.
“No… Please…” She rocked, and I moved with her, unable to speak, act, or think.
Around us, the darkness was a blanket, providing more comfort than I could.
“What happened?” she whispered through her tears.
My voice cracked as I relayed what Kyle had said, using the same clinical terms. No sense in putting a flowery frame around a picture no one wanted to see.
The body had been found about thirty minutes west. Her throat had been slit, her blood completely drained. The police were calling it a secondary scene, which was probably right. But if they were counting on tracking a trail of blood…good luck. Not with vampires involved.
Pippa hunched over her knees, still rocking. “Why?”
I didn’t know, but I swore I would find out.
“Was it whatshisname? Jananovich?”
“Same old, same old,” I said grimly. “No evidence. But it makes sense.”
And, ugh. Bad word choice. Nothing about a young person’s death made sense.
“I mean, my gut says—”
Pippa stood suddenly, wiping her tears. “Mygut says we hunt him down and kill him, right now. As slowly and as painfully as he deserves.”
The glimmer in her eyes said she meant it, but I had the feeling she wasn’t thinking through the practicalities. Jananovich was a vampire, and they were notoriously hard to kill. Plus, there was no clemency for killing murderers. And judging by the shitty way the universe worked, Pippa would be the one who got caught.
I looked at her silently until her shoulders slumped.
“Well, we can’t sit around and do nothing,” she said.
“We won’t. But we have to think. We need the why, the how, the when.”
Easier said than done. I huffed in frustration, making my breath swirl in the cold night air.
I looked at my car, then the sky. Experience told me I needed a clear mind to think, and that wouldn’t happen tonight. Maybe it was time to go. Not that either of us would get a wink of sleep.
Pippa must have read my mind, because she laced her fingers through mine.
“Don’t go. Not yet.”
I didn’t have it in me to say no. She needed the company, and I did too.
We held each other for a long, long time. Long enough for the stars to turn a couple of degrees, until Orion keeled over like a drunk and Scorpio scuttled halfway beyond the horizon.
“Better get you inside,” I finally murmured. “It’s freezing out here.”
She managed a little smile. “I run warm, remember?”
My lips quirked. Pippa had the internal furnace of a pyromancer — or a dragon, like her mother. Way back when, we’d driven her dad’s car up a mountainside for a stolen hourof sloppy teenage sex, and it had been me shivering in the cold afterward, not her.