That made me turn. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him. What the hell did he know about the Devil Claw Killer?
His lips curled in a satisfied smile. “You want Devil Claw,” he said.
“So does every department in the Agency,” I told him. “Why don’t you try your tricks on a real agent and not a mere consultant like me?”
“Because everything else has failed. You think I haven’t tried getting them to re-visit the evidence? There is no evidence. But you — you can find what doesn’t exist. Because someone out there knows who killed Leonie. It’s hidden in their heads. Only you can find it. Do it and I will give you Devil Claw.”
“I’m bored of this. If you had any information on DCK then you’d have traded it for much nicer digs than this shithole. You can try your tricks on someone else because I’m done with you.”
“Freedom is the price for my information, and only you can give me that.”
“You really expect me to believe you know who DCK is?”
“You’re a psychic. You should know.”
I didn’t bother to tell him that it didn’t work like that. It was impossible for me to read him. He was like a black hole, sucking everything inwards, taking, but giving nothing back. “There’s a difference between what I know and real solid proof. You have to give me something. Is he a vampire?”
“Perhaps.”
“Does he live on this world or Otherworld?”
“You ask so much and give so little.”
“He lives here, doesn’t he?” I said triumphantly. I was sure of it. I didn’t know why, but I just sensed that it was true. Or perhaps I just wanted so badly for it to be true. Because Devil Claw needed to be in this world for me to catch him.
“You’ll find out when you free me. I’ll give you enough to catch him. And I know how badly you want to catch him.”
“So it’s a him?”
“Him. Her.” Ronin shrugged. The bastard.
“I don’t believe you know anything.” I turned my back on him, ready to leave.
“I know many things. I know what only a few people in this world know. A secret that you keep,” he said.
“Yeah, what’s that?” I said flippantly.
“I know that he killed your mother.”
Chapter 6
DIANA
My mother. How the hell did he know Madga was my mother? So few people in the world knew that.
“How does it feel?” Steffane Ronin had said to me. “Knowing that the one who murdered your loved one is out there free and there is nothing you can do about it? Not a damn thing.”
The bastard had got me there. It seemed we might have something in common after all. If he really was innocent.
There is only one way that Steffane Ronin could know that DCK killed my mother and that was if the information came from DCK himself. And that meant he must know DCK. He was telling the truth. He had to be! But did that mean he was telling the truth about his innocence?
I thought back to what I had read in the case file. Leonie Ashbeck had been an eighteen year old girl who had lived in the Ronin household for three years, meeting Steffane Ronin for the first time only a few months before she died. Vampires always kept a number of humans in their nests. They called them their sheep; a source of easily available fresh blood, kept under control by their vampire master’s mesmeric influence. Sometimes vampires enthralled their favorites from among the sheep, forming a closer — almost unbreakable — bond with them before eventually turning them into vampires. According to witnesses, Leonie had been neither a sheep to, nor enthralled by, any of the vampires in the house. So why the hell had they kept her?
I felt pity for the poor girl, dead on the cusp of adulthood. A mix-up at the morgue had meant her body had gone astray, leading to a huge investigation in itself. The poor girl had never even got a decent burial. Now it looked like she may not have even got justice. Had she been a prisoner in that vampire nest? Had she wanted to escape? I had been in that situation once myself; an unwilling hostage to a cruel adoptive aunt who used me for my psychic powers, back when I had been stupid and always afraid. I had escaped. Leonie would never escape. I wondered if she had dreamed of being free.
Perhaps I could avenge Leonie and Magda with this one case. For two years I’d been tormenting myself about the sequence of events that led up to Magda’s murder, unable to shake the certainty that I could have changed it if I had just not walked away from her when she had reached out to me. I’d abandoned her when she needed me. I was the reason she died. Madga, the mother I would never know. Never.
And now, finally, maybe I would be able to lay that ghost to rest. Buoyed by a sense of stunned finality, as if this really was going to happen — I really was going to catch DCK and punish him for what he did to Magda — I was unable to say a word to the cowboy as he drove me back to Grimshaws. No way was I going to tell him where I lived. I saw him shooting me curious looks, wondering what my meeting with his boss had been about, but he did not ask and I did not answer.