Circle of Death (Damask Circle 2)

“But you don’t?” Doyle asked.

Russ shook his head. “I’m not magic-sensitive like you, but the air felt … electric.” He shrugged. “Whatever happened, it still wasn’t enough to protect them.”

Doyle grimaced. The only thing that really stopped a manarei was a silver bullet to the brain. But the manarei weren’t just powerful killers. They were hunters beyond compare, and they could assume the shape of anyone they killed. Which made them damn hard to track down.

“Storm witch,” Camille muttered. “Damn it, I wish I knew why these women are being hunted.”

“There has to be some sort of connection between all four,” Russell said.

“Obviously,” Camille snapped. “But what is the question.”

Doyle reached for the folder. “We’re obviously missing something.”

“Yeah, a motive.” Russell’s voice was dry. “And the name of the person pulling the manarei’s strings.”

Doyle grinned. “I meant specifically with this murder, moron. What do we know about this Helen Smith?”

“Not a lot. She was placed into the foster care system at the age of six when her adoptive parents were killed in a crash. She was eleven when she was sent to a government-run facility for troubled teenagers.”

“No relatives?” Doyle asked.

Russell shook his head. “None listed, though I dare say she has some somewhere.”

“Anything else?”

“Not much. She moved around a lot, from what I can gather. She’d just taken a job as a chef at a local vegetarian restaurant. Shared the house with a girlfriend, one Kirby Brown. It was Kirby who found her, apparently.”

“You get a chance to talk to this woman?” Camille asked, voice sharp.

“No. The cops have her under protection at a local motel.”

Camille made a sound of disgust. Her dislike for the police stemmed from her brief stint on the force. She never talked about it much, but Doyle had gathered over the years that it wasn’t so much the rules she disliked as the unwillingness of those in charge to see beyond the material aspects of a case in order to solve it.

But the police force’s loss was the Damask Circle’s gain. Camille had been quickly pulled from the ranks of general investigators and now helped Seline Whiteshore run the huge organization. That Seline had sent her here with them spoke of the seriousness with which she viewed this situation.

“They do their best, given the limited resources and expertise they have.” Though Russell’s voice was mild, there was a flash of annoyance in his brown eyes. He’d been a cop himself before he’d crossed the line between the living and the dead, and even now, he readily defended them.

“What do we know about this Kirby Brown?” Doyle asked, before Russ and Camille could get into yet another argument on the merits of the police.

“Very little. She paints houses for a living and portraits for fun, and she has apparently known Helen most of her life.”

“Photo?”

“Yeah, in the back of the folder. I took it from one of the bedrooms.”

He shuffled through to find it. The two women could have passed for sisters. They had the same build and the same dusky-brown

hair, only Kirby’s was highlighted with streaks of pale gold. Their eyes differed, too. Helen Smith had the eyes of a storm witch—a smoldering, ethereal gray. Kirby’s were a vibrant green. Even though it was only a photo, those eyes seemed to cut right through him and touch something deep in his soul.

Frowning, he slid the picture across to Camille. “What if it was a mistake? What if the manarei went after the wrong woman?”

“Aside from the fact she’s not on the list?”

“We don’t know how accurate your list actually is,” he replied.

“Oh, that’s a brave comment,” Russell murmured.

Camille cast them both a withering look. “That list is all we’ve got, so you’d better hope it’s at least partially accurate. And Helen Smith was on it.”