Valkyrie

Chapter 11

Mischa hadn't gone down without a fight. His apartment was a mess. Broken glass. Shredded couch cushions. Books scattered around. Blood was sprayed over the walls and had soaked into the carpet in crusty, dark patches. The smell of it was thick and harsh in my nose. Like raw meat and hot metal. It was so thick it overpowered any other scents that may have been in the room except the unmistakable scent of wolf shifter. There were holes in the walls. I didn't know how Mischa had survived long enough for Whistler to find him but he had gotten extremely lucky. He should have been dead. Good thing his father and uncle were the overprotective type or he likely would have been. Too bad for whoever had done this that he also had an overprotective Valkyrie with homicidal tendencies that considered him family.

I stuffed my anger down for the time being. There would be plenty of time to let it out to play later. For now, I'd let it smolder. Let it fuel me. I could go for a long time on nothing but spite and rage and I had enough of it shored up to keep me going for another three hundred years.

"Did anyone talk to the neighbors?" I asked. They had to have heard something. The furniture was tossed around and overturned, things shattered and broken, unidentifiable flotsam and jetsam scattered everywhere. The sizeable flatscreen TV had been yanked off of the wall and was lying on its face in the middle of the floor. Mischa lived on the third floor of a four-story building with occupied units on all sides of his. There was no way that no one heard anything.

"Yes," Spike said as he followed me through the apartment. He'd been blessedly silent on the drive. If it had been Whistler, we wouldn't have made it unscathed because he wouldn't have been able to keep his big meat hole shut and let me forget about Trey and concentrate on work. I was not going to mourn losing something that was never mine to begin with no matter how much I wanted him to be. "They all claim they heard nothing."

"How is that possible? This much shit tossed around would have made some pretty loud noise. Not to mention a gun going off enough times to empty a magazine. This is a nice complex. People tend to notice those kinds of things in a place like this." Spike gave me a nod. "Someone must have fucked with their heads," I murmured as I moved through the apartment.

Vampires could do that. Witches. Any of the divine. That would mean I had a shifter and someone else to hunt down. My hands curled into fists in my pockets since they didn't have any throats to wrap around.

The living room and kitchen area were the only parts of the apartment that were trashed. The rest was neat and tidy with no sign of violence so that meant he had either been ambushed when he opened the door or he had invited in whoever it was and they waited for him to shut the door before they attacked him. There was no sign of forced entry so he had to have known his attacker or attackers and let them in. If he invited them in, that meant he knew them. Mischa wasn't a dumb kid. He was smart and careful. He wouldn't have let a stranger into his apartment.

I opened the door to Mischa's bedroom and flicked on the overhead light. Queen-sized bed with the dark green sheet and comforter tossed to the side like someone had just gotten up and hadn't gotten around to making the bed yet. Furniture undisturbed. No blood. Nothing broken. Nothing that looked like it had been disturbed in the tidy room. I moved in further, toward the bed, when I stepped on something that crinkled under my boot. I bent down and picked up a discarded condom wrapper, showing it to Spike before tossing it to the nightstand next to another one. Busy boy.

"Did Mischa have someone he was dating steadily?" It had to be a recent discard. They apartment was too neat and clean for it to have been there for long.

"Not to my knowledge," Spike said from the doorway with a small shake of his head. Mischa was young and a good-looking kid with his father's sky-blue eyes and his mother's dark hair and fine bone structure. He was probably playing the field and doing very well. I couldn't blame him. I'd been young once, too. Not anymore. Now I was old and destined to be alone for the rest of my life. I shook my head at myself and pushed the thoughts away, snapping at my mind to stop being so pathetic.