Pressing his fist to his mouth to control the gorge that rose in him, Janvier forced himself to walk to the private room with the blood-soaked sheets he’d glimpsed on the surveillance feeds. At first, he couldn’t see Lacey. It was the glint of light off the ring on her finger that alerted him to the fact she was on the floor on the far side of the bed, her outflung hand the only part of her he could see.

When he came around, he wished he hadn’t. The sweet, giggling woman who’d blushed at him while proudly calling herself Rupert’s had been disemboweled. From the state of Rupert’s face, it appeared the bloodlust-ridden vampire had torn into her stomach with his fangs, then used his hands to pull out the ropes of her intestines. Her jaw was broken, her tongue ripped out.

It made no sense. None.

Until Janvier stepped on something that felt slippery beneath his boot. Frowning, he bent down and found it to be a tiny plastic ziplock bag. There was nothing inside, but he knew what tests would reveal. “Umber.”

•   •   •

Ashwini met up with Ransom at Guild Academy a half hour after Janvier left the apartment. Her fellow hunter had responded to her message about a meeting earlier than she’d expected, and now the two of them sat on the lowest row of the tiered seating that overlooked the outdoor training ground. Ransom’s leg, his cast covered with signatures, including her own, was perched on a piece of wood she’d found to ensure the cast was protected from the snow, his crutches beside him.

The training ground in front of them was a mess of dirty snow and crushed ice from the early morning session that had already occurred. The Guild never cleaned up this yard, never put up shields against the wind or the rain. Sessions occurred no matter what the weather. “I remember getting my ass kicked by Bracken one winter while hail pelted down on my head and face.” She winced at the memory. “Damn, but that hurt.”

“That’s nothing,” Ransom said. “One year, we had a category three storm hit—full-on rain, gale-force winds, flying debris—and he made my group come out here and complete our session.”

“Please. I once had to fight Bracken in a flood. The water was up to my thighs.”

Ransom snorted. “Dude, there was that time cats fell from the sky, claws out.”

They looked at each other and began to laugh. It was a ritual among all hunters who’d graduated from the Academy in the past twenty years, the attempt to one-up each other with Bracken training stories. The outdoor sessions were mandatory for every trainee, but the all-weather stuff was reserved for the final year—because vampires were tougher, more resistant to the weather.

“A hunter who melts at the sight of a little snow—” Ashwini began.

“—is a hunter who’ll soon be lying in a nice, quiet grave,” Ransom finished, and then, in a hysterical imitation of the weathered Academy trainer, added, “Is that what you want, princess? Is it? I didn’t think so. Now, move!”

They laughed again.

“If he came out here now,” Ransom said, “and told me I had detention and had to do a hundred rounds of the yard on my crutches, I’d say ‘yes, sir’ and start moving.”

“Me, too,” Ashwini admitted. “I think he’s one of the few people on the planet I’m actually scared of.”

“Only idiots aren’t scared of Bracken.”

“Saki seems to handle him fine.”

“They’re having sex on a regular basis. An option unavailable to us.” Ransom drank some of the coffee he’d brought out in a carry cup. “So, Felicity Johnson.”

“Were you able to find out anything about her? We know she was a club girl who disappeared after hooking up with a rich sugar daddy.”

Ransom took a doughnut from the box of four she’d managed to sneak past the other hunters who were here early—to prep for sessions they were teaching. Biting into it, he chewed and swallowed before answering. “That part is right,” he said. “A few of the working girls I know said Felicity used to be one of them for a couple of months, starting about a year back.”

That fit with when she’d dropped off the grid in terms of more vanilla jobs. “Pimp?”

“No, but the girls said she was vulnerable to male attention, that something in her made her crave their approval.” Taking another sip of his coffee, he continued. “She avoided the pimps because she wasn’t going into the life long-term—she got out fast once she realized the johns might permanently hurt her if she wasn’t careful. Word is she worked under the table cleaning, and was down to her final cents at times, but she didn’t come back to the streets.”

“She knew if she got into it too deep,” Ashwini said, starting to see more of their victim, “she’d be stuck at the low end forever.”

A nod from Ransom. “Working girls have a hard life and it shows. No way to glide into a new, better life if the old one is stamped onto your face and body. The thing is, none of the women I talked to had anything bad to say about Felicity—she got out, but she never forgot her friends.

“She helped out with free babysitting for one of the women two or three times, and when she hooked up with her rich lover, she lent another woman a little money so she could pay for a plane ticket out of town for a family emergency.”

A good person, a loyal one, too. “When’s the last time any of them had contact with her?”