Page 40 of Death is Familiar

“Do the names⁠—”

“Ah ah ah…” She placed her finger on my lips. “You and I have a deal. You agreed to play a game of my choosing before you’d be free to roam on your own.”

“If you were feeling so inclined,” I parroted her choice of words back to her, making sure to highlight the condition. Perhaps she would feel differently about playing a game if she realized I was looking to collect information related to the murder of five people. Five familiars, no less.

“Oh, I am so.”

Damn it.

I did the mental math. The amount of effort to get answers from Carmen without the game. The repercussions of just getting up and leaving to ask questions to someone else. How fast I could get the answers I was looking for if it was built into the game. And I was good at games. “What are we playing?”

†

She had to be kidding me.

Downstairs, we stood at the mouth of a caged corridor. Black chain-link walls led twenty feet away to a dead end. It was a lane. For target practice. And suspended near the far end of the lane was a human-shaped target. Though it was made of paper, there were points printed onto the silhouette, which increased in one-point increments towards the center.

Five points for hitting the shoulder.

Eight for the head.

Ten for the heart.

The tallest woman I had ever seen stood next to us holding an ornate platter. On it, were two hunting knives.

This was going to be a walk in the park.

It didn’t matter that I was over two years out of practice. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t allowed a weapon. I was good with knives. Better if the knife was mine. Carmen didn’t stand a chance.

Relief threatened to flood my face. “Best two out of three?”

Carmen flicked a large swathe of hair over her shoulder, and handed her martini to Xander—who had seemingly materialized out of nowhere. “Oh no, darling, this will be very tit-for-tat. Five throws. Five questions.” She grabbed a hold of one of the knives, bouncing it in her hand, judging the weight of it. “But every time I win, you lose a question.”

Carmen’s choice of game had put the odds in my favor. But the phrasing was vague. If I was able to ask a question, it didn’t mean that she would answer honestly, or in full. I needed to clarify the terms so there would be no ‘misunderstandings’.

“Only if for every question I ask, you respond in full. With what you know. No half-hearted ‘maybes’. No dancing around the question.” When Carmen blinked her agreement, I said, “You’re on.”

I felt good about this. Yes, good. I wasn’t being insensitive. Right? After all, I wasn’t gambling with people’s lives. Or playing a game of chance where information on five people who died was being held ransom. I was getting answers. Through skill. It was all but guaranteed.

That is until I picked up the knife.

Fuck.

The weight was off. The handle heavy, too heavy. I ran my thumb over the blade—yep, blunted. The knife was for show… which meant I was effectively throwing a bedazzled butter knife. With the blunt edge, I’d need to use more force to get it to stick to the target. The harder I needed to throw, the less accurate I would be.

“Something wrong?” Carmen purred. The tip of the blade, balancing vertically on the pad of her pointer finger, didn’t go unnoticed. With a practiced flick, she flipped the knife over to rest on the hilt. Then back to the tip.

An impressive party trick… that didn’t bode well for me. Or the victims.

I hoped Todd was having more luck than I was. At least my efforts had gotten us in. So, no matter where this game ended up, I wasn’t entirely useless.

But still, the situation felt gross. I felt gross. A pin prick of bile tinged the back of my throat.

Fuck it, we should have just gotten the warrant. That way they’d need to answer our questions without all this guilt-inducing runaround. People were dead.

Even though I didn’t think the vamps, on the whole, were responsible, they should have known something.

I took a steadying breath and reminded myself why we were doing this. We wanted the vamps to give information willingly, without shutting down. This was just the first phase. The warrants could come after.