SILVER: Acheron (A River of Pain) (The SILVER Series) by Keira Michelle Telford Page B

stars on the rooftop of his apartment building.
    It could be anywhere—anywhere but here.
    Suddenly sleepy, and too tired to fight it, Silver says nothing when Luka lifts her chin to face him. Giving her no warning, he brushes his lips against hers, so gently—testing her reaction.
    She doesn’t move. She doesn’t pull back.
    Her lips part, just a little.
    An invitation.
    Accepted.
    He presses his lips fully against hers.
    Just a peck, at first.
    “Goodnight,” she mumbles after the peck is withdrawn.
    Only, it doesn’t withdraw completely. Still able to feel the warmth of his breath against her skin, she isn’t completely surprised when his lips begin to reengage her. Instead of the friendly pucker of before, though, his lips start to softly caress hers. His head tilted to the side, the tip of his cold nose pressed against her cheek, he gently pinches her sensitive lower lip between his …
    Yet, it lasts only a moment.
    “Goodnight,” he whispers back to her.
    Yearning for the wrong kind of companionship, Silver tries to ignore her body’s cravings until sleep comes.
    And it does, eventually.
     
    *************************
     
    At the sound of his pager, Luka wakes up alone in the boathouse.
    Silver is gone, but she’s left behind his jacket, tucked carefully around him still. Rising to his feet, Luka’s joints creak and groan in protest to the hours of discomfort they’ve endured, and he feels damp right through to his bones. Reaching for his pager, he discovers the reason why he also feels about ten pounds lighter: his weapons, handcuffs and ammunition are conspicuously absent.          
    “Wench …” he mutters, with a smile on his face.
    Something else is missing, too—the Police Division printouts he stashed in his pocket, with details of the next Dodger on Maydevine’s list.
    Already back in Mid Town, Silver’s wasted no time in beginning the hunt. After stopping back at the theatre with groceries to make breakfast, and selling the bluff that she’d arisen early for just that purpose, she made sandwiches for herself and Alice. Rather begrudgingly, and after much conversation on the matter, she conceded that Alice may accompany her this day.
    After all, what excuse did she have to deny the request? With a fresh tag and colored contact lenses, Alice was no more or less of a person than anyone else in the District. Besides which, she might be helpful. Another pair of eyes, another pair of hands.
    First, though, they must narrow down the search field. While opportunistically raiding a burnt out building for charcoal for her makeshift barbeque, Silver begins to put her plan together. Finding a whitewashed wall left untouched by the fire, she scratches out a crude charcoal drawn diagram of the Fringe District, using jagged dotted lines to represent the divisions between Towns.
    Pulling a crumpled piece of Omega watermarked paper from her back pocket, she begins to mark locations on her ‘map’. Along with a portion of the file containing the Dodger’s photograph and stats, Luka ‘gave’ her a printout of all the locations where the Dodger’s tag had been recorded making purchases within the last few weeks.
    Butcher shops, mostly. What little money he had, it seemed, he threw away on flesh. Either Chimeran or human, or both. Pay for a fight or pay for a fuck, and drop the rest in a bottle in the spirit of celebration or commiseration—whichever is most fitting.
    In any case, he’d be stumbling home in the end, and that’s the most important part of it all. Silver marks the butcher shops and draws a small circle around them; no rat scurries far from the sewer it festers in.
    All the purchases were made in Mid Town, and none was more than a mile away from another. Virtually on her doorstep, she thinks, and one location in particular jumps out at her. Butting up against the sewage-ridden sand dunes of the eastern coastline is a butcher shop she and Alex used to have a particularly good