Pure Blood_ A Nocturne City Novel - Caitlin Kittredge [52]
“I’m going to be sick.”
“No,” I assured her. “No, you won’t. Just breathe.”
“Gods,” said Sunny, clapping the bandanna over her mouth and nose. “Does it always smell this bad?”
“Not always,” said Pete. “Although last month there was this guy we dragged out of the bay, must have been floating for a good two weeks, and when we pulled him out of the water his stomach—”
“Pete,” I warned in the voice I use to stop fleeing suspects in their tracks and make reticent ex-boyfriends squirm. “Let’s let Sunny work in peace.”
My cousin was as green as a soccer field, but she took a breath and walked closer to the car, kneeling down to trace the ground a few feet from the driver’s side door. “Did you see this?”
I looked at the charred concrete, feeling dumb. “Burn marks?”
“It’s a circle,” said Sunny, and the niggling thing just under my consciousness snapped into place. What I had mistaken for the blast radius was a circle, surrounding the Jaguar far too neatly to have been caused by a bomb.
“Simple,” Sunny said. “Set your circle for an incendiary working but don’t close it. When anyone else crosses your working, poof.” She gestured at the car. “He never had a chance. Can I please get away from this body now?”
Pete helped her up, then stopped. “There’s something shiny under the car.”
I crouched next to him, seeing a small tube about the size of a cheap lipstick or an expensive cigar. Pete slipped on a glove and snagged the object, while I slipped on a glove of my own to receive it.
The tube was unmarred except for some soot and had a twist-off top. “What is it?” Sunny called from outside the tape.
“No clue,” I muttered, unscrewing the two halves. A piece of rolled paper, thick linen or parchment, fell into my palm. I unrolled it to reveal spidery ink cursive: We see with empty eyes.
“Crap,” I said.
Nocturne City General is not the hospital you want to be in if you’re sick or maimed. It looks more like the setting for a Stephen King novel than a real hospital, low asbestos tiles and green linoleum circa the early 1970s, all capped off by flickering fluorescent tubes that fill the air with a constant buzz.
It’s also not the place you want to be if you’re a were—the smell alone will make you faint. Bleach fumes trying to cover up thirty years of sweat and blood and dying, and not doing the job.
Shelby’s room was a semiprivate on the second floor, which some overambitious contractor had tried to cheer up with hot pink paint and a wallpaper border featuring playful kittens.
“Hey,” she said weakly, raising a hand trailing IV lines. “Long time no see.”
I didn’t respond, just tossed the note in its evidence baggie on the blankets next to her and crossed my arms. Shelby read it, her already drawn face going pale. “Where did you get this?”
“The bomber left it for us,” I said. “Thoughtful of him, or her.”
Shelby swallowed and I saw her eyes dart to the call button resting on her nightstand. I reached across her bed, jerked the thing out of the wall in a shower of sparks and tossed it in the trash. “You and I are going to talk, and no one is going to interrupt us.”
The fear in Shelby’s eyes told me everything I needed—the message meant something to her, and that meant she’d lied to me. “Luna, you’ve got the wrong idea.”
And the hits just keep on coming. “No, see, I think I’ve got it exactly right. Vincent Blackburn turns up dead, and a car bomb obliterates your uncle. The bomber leaves a message for us—the same phrase that I’ve heard other blood witches use. ‘An eye for an eye’ comes to mind, Shelby.” I leaned in, so close I could smell the old blood from her wound, and said evenly, “There’s a gang war going on between the blood witches and the casters. How long do you think it will be before the Blackburns start in on your generation?