When Passion Lies: A Shadow Keepers Novel by J. K. Beck

inconveniences.”
    He paused, and she had a feeling he was debating something. “I need your help, Caris.”
    “I asked you for help once,” she said. “In this very room, in fact.”
    “Caris …”
    “You turned me down flat. Kicked me out. Chose your precious politics over me and left me to find my own damn help.” She saw him flinch. Saw regret color his eyes. “What?” she snapped, unable to keep the rising anger suppressed, the hurt that was flooding back now that he was standing right in front of her. “Are you going to tell me you made the wrong decision? That you regret it all and would do it differently if you could?”
    “No.” The word was soft, but it stung like a slap. “I would do nothing differently. You returned to a city ofvampires with no ability to control the change.
My
vampires. My people. My responsibility. Do I regret the choice I made? No. Do I regret that my choice hurt you? I will regret that to the end of my days.”
    The air between them grew thick. She wanted to rail at him, to scream that he damn well better regret it. That he hadn’t just hurt her, he’d destroyed her and everything she’d believed was true about the two of them. About the world.
    But she couldn’t. Speak of it, and she feared she’d melt, and though she might be willing to tell him that he’d kicked the shit out of her heart, she wasn’t about to show him.
    “It’s dawn,” she said.
    “That means we have the entire day ahead of us to discuss this matter.”
    “Give me a room and we’ll talk later.”
    At first she wasn’t sure he was going to answer. Then he nodded, the movement strangely formal. “Of course,” he said. “And we will talk, Caris. There are things I need to find out, and you’re the one who will help me discover them.”

CHAPTER 8

    Gabriel Casavetes didn’t like the cold—he never had. Ask almost anyone why that was, and the answer was always the same: Hellhounds like to be warm. Their native habitat was pretty damn hot, after all.
    Maybe so, but Gabriel had never been to hell. Not a mythological hell, nor any otherworldly dimension that passed for that particular ill-documented but well-pondered place.
    Closest Gabriel had been was El Paso. Come to think of it, maybe he’d set foot in hell after all.
    Now here he was, smoking and stamping his feet to stay warm while he waited for Everil to come out of the third tavern they’d been in since sundown.
    They’d both spent last night on the mountain, talking with the percipient—who’d seen nothing—and hovering near the forensic guys, urging them to make conclusions based on footprints and trace evidence. But the snow had filled in the footprints, and they hadn’t found any decent trace.
    Which left Gabriel in the irritating position of being an investigator without a lot to investigate.
    “So what’s our next step?” Everil had asked, and Gabriel had to admit that they were going to have to rely on the long-standing tradition of legwork.
    “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Everil had been so giddy he’d practically clapped, and the tiny wings he kept hiddenunder a jacket fluttered unseen but made an odd scraping noise that Gabriel found incredibly distracting. “So what first?”
    “Sleep,” Gabriel had said, and despite Everil’s disappointment, Gabriel had insisted. He wasn’t any use to anyone, much less the dead, if he couldn’t think, so he had caught a few hours of rest and then woke up with a plan.
    He’d thought about heading out on his own, but he couldn’t get his partner’s excited, albeit prissy, face out of his head. So he’d called Everil and outlined their course of action.
    Zermatt wasn’t a town with murders, not of the human or shadower variety. And yet last night a weren snitch had ended up dead and an Alliance big shot had come to town. That suggested that Big Stuff was afoot. And in Gabriel’s experience, Big Stuff tended to not be homegrown.
    “So you think the killer came in from out of