Laws of the Blood 2: Partners by Susan Sizemore

the empty street, knowing that she was up on a mountainside. She was calling to him, but she was already dead—dumped like a slab of meat—her soul torn in two, drained out of her, eaten. . . . Then he was there, in a clearing in the deep woods. He could smell the pine. The wet cold froze his bare skin. Then reality shifted again, and he was yanked backward, back to the sidewalk outside the hotel, then back into his bed. He sat up as she called out for help—to him. She looked him in the eyes from miles away and begged him for help. Her eyes were green. One moment they’d been alive with terror and impossible hope, looking into his. The next there’d been nothing in them, they’d been like bits of green glass.
    When he woke up, he knew he’d dreamed it all. The memory chilled him, tore at him, pulled him out ofthoughts of his past and awareness of the present. He’d been asleep through the horror. He knew damn well he’d been asleep, that he’d seen the desperate woman in a dream, that there was nothing he could have actually done to help her. But he knew he’d failed her, all the same. He could still hear her screaming over the sound of thunder.
    He gulped down the coffee. Burned his mouth, too, and the stuff boiled relentlessly down into his empty stomach. It felt like he’d swallowed hot coals for a minute, but the agony finally got his head back into the real world.
    When he could breathe again, Haven threw the cup away, but Santini caught it before it hit the hotel room wall. “Want some more?” he asked, grinning.
    Santini had that manic look in his eyes all of a sudden. The one that told Haven he was bored and restless and ready for anything. They’d been cooped up in the cheap hotel near the airport for two days while Haven did some research. Once upon a time, he’d been the impulsive type. Sometimes he still went off like a madman. He felt like doing that now, after doing nothing but reading for hours on end. He wanted to find the woman in the dream—and he knew that was crazy.
    “Walls closing in?” he asked the biker.
    “Got a job for me?” Santini asked back, eager as a rabid hunting dog on a scent.
    “Known body count is six, four unidentified. Go find out who they were.”
    “Seattle’s got a big homeless population,” Santinisaid. He rubbed his bearded jaw. His grin widened. “Want me to go undercover?”
    Sometimes Haven wondered why they bothered talking at all; they always thought along the same lines. He answered with a brief nod.
    Santini started toward the door but turned back when he got there. “What are you going to do?”
    “Go hunting,” Haven answered. He didn’t try to explain that he wasn’t going to be able to do anything else until he found out about a woman who didn’t exist and a murder that hadn’t happened. “Up in the mountains,” he added. That was where the imaginary woman hadn’t died.
    “Which mountains?”
    Santini was right, the city was surrounded by a glut of mountain ranges; a good part of the state was vertical real estate. Haven shrugged. “I’ll know the place when I find it.”
    Santini looked at him strangely. Santini always looked at everybody strangely, but he didn’t say anything else before he left.

Chapter 6
     
    “ S ORCERY ,” CHAR SAID , tapping her fingertips on the painted iron railing. The word left a bad taste in her mouth that a sip of cream-laced SBC couldn’t wash out.
    She didn’t want to think about last night. She didn’t want to think at all, actually. In fact, she found being in this house surprisingly comforting. Melancholy, too, but the familiar street, view, shape of the rooms, didn’t conjure up quite as much bitter sorrow as they had last night.
    “Conjure,” she mumbled, and cradled the warm cup between her palms. “Rituals.”
    She’d found coffee in the freezer but had had to make a quick trip out for groceries before she could settle down to a late breakfast. After she’d eaten, she took her