Into the Tiger's Hour

Chapter Fifteen

The room was hot and crowded, even with the windows open and some of the inhabitants not being alive to generate body heat. A dozen or more people shuffled at the edges of the dining room table--long, oval and with a centerpiece of dangling Chinese Lanterns in a cream vase--wearing similar expressions of dismay, anger and hopelessness.

Double doors stood open, leading into the morning room, and it was there that a city map was spread across the low pine table, already covered with ink. A cluster of markers stood in a rough clay cup, painted bright blue with a childish hand, and one was in Slate McCormick's hand as he turned to snarl at Nathan Talbot, pointing the marker's green tip at the other vampire. Nathan's white silk shirt was stained in several places by green, blue and purple ink from Slate's emphatic jabs with whatever was in hand, and his fangs were prominent, exposed by irritation.

Hearth Home often hosted gatherings for the city's "freaks," as Mariel Dunne had so charmingly dubbed their assorted lot of willworkers, fae, shifters and vampires. But the air of cheerful welcome and light-hearted fun was nowhere to be found as the hall clock chimed the hour.

Nine P.M. on a Monday night, and Iris had been missing for over forty hours.

It had been a flurry of phone calls that had first alerted those who'd agreed, years ago, to help Jonas in guarding his adopted daughter. Text messages vibrated cell phones across the city, spreading the word, and the initial search on Sunday morning had been irritated, not frantic.

By Sunday afternoon, the mood had changed.

And it had been Ax, not Betre, that called Jonas to tell him that his daughter was missing.

He sat at the dining room table with his head in his hands, ignoring the soft whispers of the aubergine-haired beauty beside him, the loud voices that were rising from the morning room, the persistent echo of Andrew Wiggin's soft sobbing. Jonas hadn't spoken more than ten words since arriving in the city; he'd only grabbed the keys to Tyler's Kawasaki, jumped on it and gone on his own frenetic, aimless search.

By the time Monday morning had dawned with no trace of Iris to be found, it had been decided that a more methodical search had to be undertaken. And Jonas had gone himself to the police station, pushed his way past any number of officers and broken into Landsman's office. The homicide detective wasn't qualified for missing persons cases, but he was an old friend. A personal friend, as Slate called it, and the APB had gone out that Iris Foster was missing.

Now, on Monday night, those with the loudest voices were making the plans and those with the most to lose were lost in misery.

Some were missing from the fae's home. Ax was wandering the National Forest with Fish, the only shifter in the city who had ever been willing to do something for the sake of it needing to be done. Kitty, Thomas and Jack were prowling the Waterfront, changing their usual hunting patterns to seek out the kind of scum that would've hurt a terrified seventeen year old girl. If the vampires happened to find someone and they happened to lose all self control and devour them, well... It wouldn't be counted a loss and no one would look strangely at them for doing so.

Against Mariel's increasingly vehement protests, Briar Dallas had slipped quietly from the house and gone to the graveyards, the warehouses, the run-down Victorian brownstones in the University District. Had gone to speak with the dead to see if they could tell her anything that the living could not. Mariel sat on the front porch now, cell phone in hand, cigarette in the other, and snarled profanity at anyone who came within four feet of her.

No one expected Spider to leave her bookstore to join in the search. She coordinated, utilizing the benefit of modern technology to relay information from person to person, to scan the news reports, to search for hints or rumors amongst her extensive contact network. And she was the only one who everyone could speak to without resorting to yelling, so it was to Spider that everyone reported.