Free Charming by Elliott James Page B

mattresses up there, and lots of clothes with bloodstains on them. Stanislav checked a few of the tenants, and they had puncture holes in easy-to-conceal places and their eyes weren’t dilating normally.”
    Uh-huh. One of the signs that someone has been mentally mind-mucked by a vampire is that their pupils are slightly enlarged and don’t dilate as rapidly as usual. I have no idea why. Something about the way the mental command to enter a trance state actually travels from one pair of eyes to the other, through the optic nerves and up the brain stem. The vampires had probably been feeding regularly off the tenants in the apartment building while conditioning them to ignore any unusual sounds coming through the ceiling. It would be like living above a takeout restaurant.
    I resumed walking. “What about the cell phone? Did you get anywhere with that?”
    There was a pause, not a long one, but noticeable. “We handed it over to a friend,” Sig said. Her tone implied that she wasn’t going to tell me the friend’s name and that I shouldn’t ask. “He’s going to get back to us later.”
    I wondered if it was the black guy with the van or yet another someone else. It was nice that she was protecting
someone’s
privacy.
    “We were hoping you might be able to point us in a new direction,” she added as I entered my kitchen. “We didn’t really have time to talk, and if your sense of smell is as developed as you say it is, I thought that maybe you might have…”
    Sig trailed off as I reached into a drawer to the side of my sink and pulled out Steve Ellison’s wallet. Cahill’s hand had flipped his coat aside and moved to the butt of the gun I’d spotted earlier. I flipped open the wallet to show Steve Ellison’s driver’s license and handed it to Sig.
    She examined it wordlessly. Then Sig looked up at me, her bright blue eyes narrowing as if she were sighting a gun. “You didn’t take this off of him in the alley. There’s no way I missed that.”
    “No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
    Sig worked it out. “You lifted it off of him in the bar,” she said accusingly. “You
wanted
him to come back after you when there weren’t any bystanders around.”
    “I thought he was a lone rogue,” I admitted.
    She shook her head grimly. “I knew you wouldn’t have just turned a heat seeker loose on the streets. It’s why I went back to see what you were up to. Things just weren’t adding up.”
    “I’m glad they didn’t,” I said, a little uneasily. I got that she was supposed to be some kind of psychic and that Valkyries were traditionally good judges of warriors and all that, but it still made me uncomfortable to hear her talking about me as if she knew me.
    “You mind if I see that?” Cahill asked Sig, and she handed him the wallet while I went back to my meal preparations.
    Breakfast was salvageable. The pound or so of fried potatoes were a bit black around the edges, but they’re good that way. The sausage gravy boiling away in a big skillet had evaporated a little, but there was still plenty of it after I stirred the layer that had skimmed over on the top. The tray brimming with biscuits had a minute to go on the timer (they were two cans worth of Pillsbury home-style, not made from scratch or anything), and I’d shoveled the bacon and eggs onto platters and covered them before answering the door. The waffles were colder than I like, but I could reheat them without ruining their texture too much.
    My kitchen is old-fashioned and doesn’t have a counter where people can sit—hell, it doesn’t have a dishwasher or a trash compacter—but the upper half of the dining table is visible from the adjoining room. Dvornik and Cahill sat where they could watch me as I got the biscuits out of the oven. I didn’t take it personally.
    Sig stayed up and set out some plates and coffee cups and silverware (it was real silver) while Cahill made a few pointed comments to her about werewolves apparently not