Free Cause of Death: Unnatural (The Cause of Death Series) by Eliza Ford

grateful smile
she gave to Will. "If you think of anything else you can tell us..."
    "Yeah," said Will. "I know
where to find you."

 

 
 
 
 
 
    Em had the spoonful of pasta halfway to her lips when
Jarek materialized suddenly next to her on the sofa.
    "Ugh," she said, juggling the bowl
on her lap and clutching at the glass of red wine which had been balancing on
the cloth arm of the sofa and was now tottering precariously. "What was
wrong with the door?"
    A few trails of black smoke pulled themselves
into Jarek's figure. He had dropped the visiting English medical examiner form
and returned to his favourite muscles-and-black-silk persona. Em was glad. That
weedy British thing had been getting on her nerves. So not
her type.
    Jarek peered dubiously into her dinner and
raised an eyebrow.
    " It's pasta
sauce," said Em. "Made with tomatoes. You
should try it sometime."
    Jarek snorted.
    He stretched his legs out and rested them on
the coffee table next to hers. His shoulders shuffled back into the cushions of
the sofa. When he turned to look at her their eyes were level. Em held his gaze
and felt him push out a subtle but demanding wave of dark energy toward her.
    Em considered him. She allowed his mind to
flow right up to the gates of her own then carefully strengthened her defences
against him. Slowly and gently Jarek intensified his mental thrust until the
weight of his existence swelled and swirled darkly against the edges of her
mind. His eyes stared into hers and threatened to pull her into the deepening
dark energy that pulsated between them.
    She thought about how inviting that seemed -
how exhilarating it would be to let herself fall.
    She smiled, blinked, and with that Jarek's
carefully constructed advance disintegrated and vanished, like a flurry of
dandelion seeds in the breeze.
    Jarek snarled. He unfolded himself from the
sofa angrily and flopped down in an easy chair on the other side of the coffee
table. Em's smile widened into a grin. He could be such a boy sometimes, and
how easy it was to provoke him.
    "It isn't funny, Emilia," Jarek
said eventually. "Your father sent me here to bring Alina home to face her
doom. You too if I decided you'd been aiding her. I'd have dragged you both off
without a thought if it was anyone but you. You told me to wait, Emilia."
He leant forward in his seat and rested his elbows on his knees, feet wide
apart, shoulders square and strong. "I've played your silly game, lover,
and I'm tired of it. This embarrasses the Family, it embarrasses your father,
and it embarrasses me the longer you drag this out. My patience is nearly at an
end."
    Em sighed. She'd known this was coming.
    After letting go of her hold on Will's mind
she'd slipped into Jarek's - a skill she'd realized she had hundreds of years
ago. Jarek couldn't enter her mind without her invitation, but she could penetrate
his in a heartbeat, sometimes without him even knowing. It infuriated him, and
she'd spent some very enjoyable centuries exploiting her talent and his
weakness shamelessly. Perhaps now hadn't been a good time to remind him of that
weakness, but she'd asked him, in his mind, to visit the warehouse location
that Will had given her. She and Nick had to follow protocol and find the
warehouse the hard way, the human way, but Em wanted to know now, and she'd
sent Jarek on an errand. No wonder he'd come back in a foul mood. He didn't
take orders meekly.
    "I told you, Jarek, there's something
bigger happening here. Alina's part of it, somehow. You don't want to go running back to his lordship with the wrong fish on the
hook, do you?"
    He said nothing.
    "What was at the warehouse? Who was
there?"
    "Nothing," said Jarek, petulantly. "No one. Oh, there was a mess alright. Someone had been
there recently, but there was no one there at all."
    "No one?" said Em. "Not even
Alina?"
    "No one," said Jarek, sighing
suddenly and leaning back in the chair again. "In fact, there wasn't even
the scent of anyone, other