Chapter Fifteen

Cyrus made his way to the reception area, where the family members were gathered. Each was dressed for war, with bullet proof vests and weapons strapped on. He accepted a vest from Temple, and once that was secure, Rage gave him a knife sheath and several deadly-looking blades.

Temple handed him the tablet with the view from the alley cameras. No one said anything while he watched the footage. There wasn’t any activity aside from the vampires going from the club to the restaurant before the third shift started. But he didn’t think he was wrong. He scrolled back through the first shift, and then to the previous day.

“Just these two cameras, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, why?” Rage asked.

“I need to see the front of the alley. The camera is a foot or so back from the entrance, and I think the bomber knew that.”

“What’s at the entrance to the alley that this guy could use to get into the restaurant?” Ven asked.

“It’s the bathroom,” Cyrus said. “Both bathrooms have windows, but the men’s faces this side.”

“Ah, shit,” Temple said. “But the windows lock from the inside.”

“They’re just slide locks,” Ven said.

“Why the hell are there windows in the bathrooms? They’d let in natural light which would burn the vampire patrons,” Rage said.

Cyrus had asked a similar question when he’d seen the interior of the bathrooms. “They were in the original building. The plans called for them to be bricked over on the outside and covered with wall board on the inside, but it was decided instead to cover them with light-filtering film.” The same window treatment had been done on the ones at the front of the restaurant.

“Well, we’re sure as hell bricking them up during the rebuild,” Ven said. He folded his arms over his chest. “I am so fucking tired of the church. We’re not hurting them; we’re just trying to live our lives.”

Cyrus agreed wholeheartedly. Talk about holding a grudge. The leader of the church was a fanatic in the worst sense of the word, and he’d nearly cost Cyrus his life, not to mention the lives of the vampires working at the time.

Temple snapped his fingers suddenly. “Hey! The office across the street has cameras that face the opposite side. I bet we can see the alley from there.”

Cyrus handed the tablet back to Temple and turned to Brone. “When are they going to start on the cleanup?”

“We still have to let the human arson investigators finish their report, which will take a few days. We’re ready to start as soon as that’s done,” Brone said.

There hadn’t been any structural damage to the restaurant. It was an older building that had sat empty after Mishka bought it and the surrounding properties to protect the coven from the church moving into them.

“My impression is that the bomb maker didn’t really know what he was doing, and it wasn’t big enough to do the damage that they might have hoped for. They brought the ceiling down, but the actual structure is undamaged,” Brone said. “I’m not a bomb guy though.”

“I am,” Rage said. “And he’s right. If they wanted to take out a building that old and well-built, they would have had to set off a much larger bomb. Either the guy didn’t know what he was doing, or the point was to delay us, maybe cause panic. Hard to say with those whackadoodles.”

Cyrus looked at the male who was several hundred years old.

“Whackadoodles?”

Rage grinned. “Angie’s vernacular is rubbing off on me.”

Cyrus chuckled.

“Bingo, as the humans like to say,” Temple said. He held the tablet in a way that everyone could see the footage from the building across the street. They watched the fast-forwarded footage for the twenty-four hours before the blast, and just as Cyrus suspected, someone ducked down the alley and climbed into the bathroom window. They zoomed in as much as they could, but the images were too grainy to get any decent details about the person.

“You were right,” Brone said. “Well done.”

“I’m just glad there was a camera view available.”

“We’ll need to get them upgraded,” Vex said. “The alley is vulnerable, and we’ll have people walking back and forth during the night hours, and that means we need to add security there as well.”

Cyrus nodded in agreement. “I think the church looks harder for vulnerabilities than the coven does. Their minds are warped toward evil.” It was inconceivable to him that a vampire hate group had so callously bombed the restaurant. They’d clearly been paying attention to the shifts, and that they tried to use Cyrus’s people’s scent against them made him furious.

The group left the reception area and headed out the front of the club so they could scout the alley. For the safety of everyone, the club had been closed until the restaurant was cleared by the arson investigators. The family cleared the sidewalk of gawkers who had pressed as close to the police tape as they could to take pictures. It infuriated Cyrus that they treated an event like this as if it was something to gawk at, and not a place where people had nearly died.

Biting back the snarl and the desire to flash his fangs at the onlookers, he opened his senses and covered every inch of the opening of the alley, finding the faux tiger scent right underneath the window. Which was ten feet in the air. He put his hands on his hips and stared up at it, then glanced down one side of the alley and the other. No ladder in sight. How the hell did a human get up there?

He got a push from his cat, no matter how oddly it felt in his subconscious right now, and without giving it any further thought, he planted his feet firmly on the ground and leaped for the window ledge. He reached it. Easily. Bracing the toes of his boots on the brick and holding himself aloft with one hand on the windowsill, he saw that the window had been pried open and didn’t close all the way anymore. Pulling the window open all the way, he saw a piece of frayed rope. He hefted himself over the edge so he could look down the interior wall and there, on the polished marble wall was a single dark smudge in the shape of a foot.

“Fucker,” Cyrus said. He shoved the window shut and gave it an experimental tug, glad when it didn’t budge.

Releasing his hold, he jumped down, landing solidly, and faced the family. Their expressions were varying forms of shock, brows high, mouths open, eyes wide.

“What?” he asked.

“You just jumped like ten feet effortlessly,” Temple said. “How the hell did you do that?”

He thought to the nudge from his cat. “I guess from my cat.”

“Could you jump that high before?” Ven asked, his head tilting.

“I never tried. But I don’t think so.”

“That’s very handy,” Rage said. “Next time I need something off a high shelf I’ll call you.”

Cyrus snorted with a grin. “Happy to help.”

An hour later they were tapped into the video cameras on the street, watching for vehicles that were stopped near the restaurant. He was not surprised that the coven had wired the whole street for their own protection. According to Ven, they couldn’t depend on the human police force to put in the time when it came to them. They weren’t necessarily against vampires, but it had been proven time and again that they also didn’t go out of their way to help. They’d do their jobs, but the coven had never witnessed a human police officer going above and beyond. Which explained their daytime guards, cameras by the hundreds, and a security team that would rival a military.

“There,” Brone said, “pause it.”

They were in the War Room – aptly named because it felt like they were going to war with the church – and using one of the flat screens as a huge monitor. A dark sedan, with blacked-out license plates, had parked three blocks from the restaurant, turned off the engine, and sat for hours the day before the bombing. Right at the overlap between the first and second shifts, a man wearing coveralls with a cap pulled low on his head hustled to the alley, used a grappling hook to climb the wall to the window, and left behind a long rope. He disappeared back to his vehicle and then sat through the second shift, until the change over into third. Then he left, returning the following day during the first shift and sitting low in the vehicle.

“Fucker,” Cyrus said. “I wish we could see his facial features more clearly for recognition software. Or that his damn plates weren’t blacked out. How the hell did people miss that suspicious looking vehicle?”

“It’s far enough away,” Vex said, shrugging. “But vampires I think are more paranoid about that kind of thing than others would be, so tigers coming to work at the restaurant wouldn’t necessarily think anything of a vehicle sitting all day.”

“Pause,” Brone said. He rose to his feet and moved close to the screen. “What’s that?”

He pointed to the windshield of the sedan. There were several years’ worth of inspection stickers, and an oddly-shaped, bright orange sticker.

“Is that a pineapple?” Cyrus asked. He joined Brone.

“It’s a sticker for something,” Brone squinted. “I can’t tell what though.”

Cyrus suddenly realized he’d seen that sticker recently. He pulled his phone from his back pocket and called Aeryn. “Hey,” he said. “Got a minute for your favorite cousin?”