Blood Truth

by J. R. Ward

  Instead of where he was with his sire. Nowhere.

  He was just hitting send on the second text when Tohrment came in the Audience House’s front door. The Brother brushed snowflakes out of his black hair with its telltale white stripe in the front and then he unzipped his leather jacket. The weapons underneath gleamed in the mellow light of the foyer and made Boone more determined.

  “Hey, son,” Tohrment said as he entered the dining room. “What’s doing?”

  Boone cleared his throat and remembered his 1), 2), 3), and 4). “I was hoping to catch you for a minute—”

  “No, you’re not going out into the field.” The Brother took off his jacket. “I know you’re convinced you’re going to go stir-crazy with nothing to do, but I told you what needed to happen before you’re released to go back on schedule. You’re going to have to go talk with Mary and get a mental health clearance from her. Then you’re going to take a couple of nights off until the Fade Ceremony. After that, we’ll reassess.”

  Boone dropped his voice because he didn’t want to be overtly insubordinate. “There’s nothing in the handbook that requires—”

  “There doesn’t have to be.” Tohrment turned his back to his Brothers and likewise got quiet. “I already made one mistake with you. I’m not making another.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You should never have been out in the field last night. You were distracted for good reason because of where your sire was, and I knew that, but it slipped through the cracks.”

  “I took down a slayer just fine.”

  Tohrment leaned in, his navy blue eyes nearly black. “You could have gotten killed because you forgot your vest. If you’d been stabbed in the heart and bled out, or had been mortally wounded by a bullet, it would have been on my conscience for the rest of my life—and no offense, that particular car trunk is full enough already without my trying to squeeze in baggage with your name on it.”

  Boone opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.

  But damn it, what could he argue now?

  “You don’t understand,” Boone muttered. “I’m going to lose my mind if I have to sit in that house and stew about—”

  “You can help me.”

  Boone glanced over at Butch. “With the death at Pyre?”

  “Yeah. Bring me over to your cousins, and then we’ll go check the club out.” The Brother held his palm up to Tohr. “He’ll be with me the whole time. I’ll take care of him and accept all responsibility for his welfare.”

  When Tohr looked like he was going to argue, the other Brother kept talking. “Come on, man, it’s not out in the field. We’re not going to be looking for the enemy, and before you throw out a line about the risk of us tripping over something we might have to do something about, unless you put him on house arrest, he’s liable to meet a lesser or shadow anywhere in the city—just like anybody else. I’ll make sure nothing happens to him, and have some pity on the kid. You wouldn’t want to be locked up with nothing to do under his circumstances, either.”

  “I won’t take any chances,” Boone rushed in. “I’ll do whatever he tells me to.”

  “It’s also a good opportunity to share basic investigation protocols.” Butch shrugged. “It’s a skill the trainees should have in case they get called in to respond to a crime. Like how not to disturb a scene. What to watch out for. How to document. There’s a legitimate training benefit.”

  Tohr crossed his arms over his chest and cursed. And that was when Boone knew he was going to be allowed to help.

  At just that moment, his phone went off with a text. Checking what had been sent, he turned the screen to face the Brothers.

  “This is from my third cousin. He’ll see us later tonight.”

  “Then let’s go to Pyre first.” Butch took out his phone and dialed something, then held the unit out to Boone. “Here’s the call that came in last night. Listen to it, and you can try that number again while I drive. I’ve already left a message once and no one’s gotten back to me.”

  Boone glanced at Tohr as he took what was being offered to him. Putting the Samsung to his ear, he offered a conciliatory smile to the Brother.

  Tohr pointed a finger in Boone’s face. “You get yourself killed doing this and I’m going to strangle you again even though you’re already dead. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Boone said as the recording kicked in. “Crystal clear—”

  All at once, the world receded, his senses and awareness supplanted by the sound of a female’s desperate voice.

  . . . Hello? Hello . . . I need help—oh, God, she’s dead. She’s . . . dead just like the other one . . .

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later, Butch pulled his best friend’s R8 V10 Performance Plus into a parallel parking spot downtown. The car was murdered, everything blacked out, and it was sleek as a space shuttle, capable of reaching Millennium Falcon speeds in spite of the fact that it weighed as much as Rhage. The thing was also a dinosaur in the best sense of the word, a throwback to the big-engined cars of the past that sounded like pro wrestlers and sucked gas like a sprinter used oxygen.

  In other words, it was right up V’s alley.

  And by “parallel park,” Butch meant “really-frickin’-close to a plowed mound of snow big enough to ski down.” Ah, winter in Caldwell, New York. Where that white stuff metastasized like it had learned the trick of singularity and was trying to take over the world.

  You know, the weather version of AI.

  “I didn’t know these cars were good in the snow,” Boone murmured as the trainee eyed that mini-Killington like he wasn’t sure whether he was going to get his car door open.

  “Just dematerialize out on my side.”

  “Good deal. Thank you.”

  Butch got out and held things open. “And as for the R8, Audi quattro works year-round. All you need are good treads. No clearance on that front air dam, though. Two inches, tops, is all we’ve got to work with.”

  Of all the trainees, Butch had always liked Boone the best. Maybe it was because the kid was the kind of stand-up, no-fuss, steady-Freddy type that tended to form the backbone of any good team. After all, Butch had always wanted to be that guy himself—and failed spectacularly when he was a human. But finally, after a good three decades of trying to drink away his emotions, he was getting to that goal. All it had taken was the female of his dreams, a jump-started transition into a whole different species, and free rein to express himself sartorially.

  But there was another reason he cared about the kid after last night. He couldn’t help but take an interest because he knew all too well what it was like to lose a family member in a bad way.

  Boone re-formed on the outside of the R8 and looked around at the abandoned buildings with their broken windows. “Is it safe to leave V’s car here? What if it gets stolen.”

  “Full coverage on the insurance.” Butch shut the door. “But more to the point—everyone’s going to assume it’s a drug dealer’s whip. Guaranteed it’ll be right here when we get back.”

  Butch hit the lock, and the pair of them fell in side by side at a walk. “You can’t trust anyone on the street, but you can always put your faith in how the street behaves.”

  With the cracked sidewalks so not an option because of the piles of snow, they proceeded down the middle of the plowed street. Even though the only going concerns in this part of the city were the drug dealers on the corners and the prostitutes on the straightaways, there was enough through traffic so that the snowpack evened out the potholed asphalt underneath.

  “Can I ask you something?” Boone said into the cold.

  “Anything.”

  “That voice recording. The one that was from the call-in line—was V able to trace the phone number it came in on? I mean, he’s the one who’s so good at that stuff, right?”

  “He thinks it was a burner. And if that’s true, we’re not going to find anything out about who owns it or used it unless they answe
r the damn thing and are willing to talk.”

  “And she didn’t leave a name.” Boone laughed in a hard burst. “Okay, that’s a stupid thing to say, I guess. Because I didn’t hear a name on the message.”

  “Tell me what you did hear.”

  “She was scared. She was really scared.”

  “What else?” As Boone recited the message word for word, Butch nodded. “Yup, you got all that right. But what about the background?”

  “Like when the call came in?”

  “No, of the call itself.” Butch glanced over. “What did you hear.”

  The trainee frowned. “Nothing—” Those dark brows lifted. “Ohhhh. So she didn’t call from the club. If she had, we would have heard the music and the crowd around her.”

  “Exactly. And V told me that he had no service on the lower level of that old factory—so it’s a good guess that whoever called in also didn’t have a signal down there.”

  “She must have phoned from outside the building, then.”

  “Or maybe she wasn’t there at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Butch looked both ways as they crossed the street even though there were no cars around. “Confirmation bias is a dangerous thing when you investigate a case, especially in the beginning. The truth needs space and airtime to reveal itself. The only way to make sure that happens is to let your brain and your senses record every nuance while at the same time you resist your rational side’s desire to come to any hard-and-fast conclusions. There is a solution to the whodunit out there. I promise you that. But you have to earn the right to that revelation, and the way we do that is by sacrificing our assumptions at the altar of OMG-I-know-what-happened.”

  “But you have to decide some things, though, right? Like who to talk to? And what to ask them?”

  “The truth will tell you who you need to interview and what you need to ask and where you have to go. You don’t decide a thing.” Butch shook his head. “I’ll say it again. You’ve got to watch for confirmation bias. It sneaks in and causes you to deliberately or subconsciously deny the existence of facts which do not support a given conclusion that you’ve pulled out of your ass. Truth is absolute, but it’s like the existence of God. You don’t know you’ve got it until you do.”

  “Have you ever failed to solve a case?”

  “I had a ninety-two percent success rate. Which, considering how much I was drinking while I was a detective for the CPD, is a miracle.”

  “Wow. You must be really good at what you’re doing.”

  Butch thought of the last image he’d had of his fifteen-year-old sister, Janie, waving at him as she had been driven off to her death in that car full of teenage boys.

  He shook his head. “Nah, I just refused to quit. Even if it killed me, and it nearly did, I wasn’t going to stop what I was doing until I nailed every one of my victims’ killers.” He looked back over at his trainee. “That’s something else you should keep in mind. Your chances of finding the bad guy increase to an astronomical level if you outwork their need to stay ahead of you. Sooner or later, all killers, even the good ones, slip up. You just gotta be ready to take advantage of that version of Murphy’s Law.”

  “I’ll keep all this in mind. I promise.”

  Annnnnnd see, this was why he liked working with the kid, Butch thought. Boone listened, accepted advice and criticism, and always tried to do his best.

  Butch reached over and gave the trainee’s shoulder a squeeze. “I know you will, son.”

  SEVEN

  As Boone strode along next to the Brother, it was a relief to focus his mind on something other than himself. Too bad the topic was violence and death, but that was his job, wasn’t it. And he was on the right side of that ledger. One of the good guys.

  That mattered.

  “So what else about the call?” Butch asked him.

  Up ahead, now only three blocks away, it was easy to make out the club’s wait line of humans, the lot of them stomping their feet in the cold, their extravagant wigs and wild makeup the only things that showed of their costumes because everything else was covered up by Joe Blow parkas and full-length coats. In the warmer months, he imagined, they would be like a stand of peacocks, flashing their particular extravagancies in a mating ritual designed to be successful according to the LARPers’ value system.

  Is the killer standing there even now? Boone thought as he remembered the choking horror and fear in that female’s voice recording.

  “What else did you learn on that call?” the Brother prompted.

  Boone’s eyes went down the lineup of humans, memorizing each face. The body types. The hairstyles.

  Rage coiled in his gut. And to answer Butch’s question? Well, the other thing he’d picked up on from that call was that whoever had put the terror in that female’s voice, whoever had killed the most recent victim, needed to die in the same terrible way.

  Somehow, that didn’t seem like a good thing to throw out there—

  He snapped his head toward the Brother. “ ‘The other one.’ In the call, she said ‘just like the other one.’ ”

  “Righto. So what does that tell us?”

  Boone narrowed his eyes on that wait line again, his fangs descending. “There will be others unless we stop the killer.”

  “Yup. That is the one conclusion that I am allowing myself to draw at this point.”

  On that note, Butch unbuttoned his fine cashmere coat. Which was protocol for when anyone interacted with humans. You know, just in case you needed to get to your weapon. As Boone did the same to his leather jacket, he felt that anger of his shift inside of his skin. He was so hoping that they found the guy who did this tonight—

  Butch stopped dead in the street. “Not ‘guy.’ ”

  Pulling up short, Boone looked around. “What?”

  “You just said you hope we find the ‘guy’ who did it tonight.” Butch shook his head. “We don’t know whether the killer is a male or female. Remember, no assumptions at this point, okay? And when we’re in there, just observe. I’m going to do most of the work.”

  Jesus, Boone thought. He wasn’t even aware of having spoken out loud.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Butch clapped Boone on the shoulder and resumed walking. “You’re going to do fine.”

  As they closed in on the entrance to the old shirt factory, bypassing the line, the two bouncers at the door flexed up, but they ultimately didn’t follow through on the my-turf posturing. Instead, the two men just nodded the way in clarity, like they’d been hit in the face with a pair of VIP passes.

  You had to love mind control over humans. And it was not a surprise that Butch clearly was a master at the manipulation.

  “So you’ve been here before?” the Brother asked as they entered and went past a coat check.

  Boone made a mental note to talk to the woman on duty, except how would that go:

  Hey, have you seen any vampires go past you?

  Oh, yeah, sure. About three hundred every night. Were you looking for one?

  He shook himself back into focus. “Ah, I’ve only been here once, and it was a while ago. But like I said, my cousins come a couple times a year.”

  “Yeah, this doesn’t seem like your scene.”

  Boone checked out a half-naked human who was vomiting into a plastic bag in the dark corner. “No. It’s not.”

  Inside the large open area, there was a big crowd dancing, talking, hooking up. The music was loud, so people had to get close to communicate—and the darkness reinforced the need to go clutch: With the limited faculties possessed by humans, they had to get up in each other’s spaces to hear and see properly in the dim environment. And it wasn’t all Homo sapiens LARPing it. He could sense a few vampires milling around among the men and women, but just three or four—and they stayed away. Made sense. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t fraternize with these rats without tails, so no one in the species was going to hi-how’re-ya and reveal themselves in
this environment unless they had to.

  “Let’s go down to the lower level,” Butch said over the din. “V told me the stairwell’s entrance is somewhere back there.”

  As Boone follow-the-leader’d through the gyrating bodies, he stared straight ahead and let his peripheral vision track the masks, the drapes of clothes, the heights and the weights of Pyre’s patrons. Just as he had been trained to do.

  The stairwell to the subterranean level turned out to be easy enough to find, and they proceeded down a dank, cold series of steps, bottoming out in a corridor that was long as a football field and strobe-lit by a series of last-legged fluorescent ceiling mounts.

  “Fourth door down on the right,” Butch said. “Storage area.”

  Boone looked at the sequence of heavy doors. “Is that what’s behind all these?”

  “Think so.”

  The sound of something snapping brought Boone’s head around. Butch had taken a pair of bright blue nitrile gloves out of the pocket of his coat and was putting them on.

  “It’s a little late for this”—the Brother held his hands up like a surgeon—“but old habits die hard and all that shit.”

  “Why is it too late?”

  “There is no way they got the body out without disturbing the scene. No matter how careful they were.”

  From out of another pocket, Butch produced a small headlamp and put it on like a crown. Triggering the beam, he stopped in front of door number four. “You stay out here, but by all means, lean in and look around. Like I said, the scene’s basically ruined at this point, but there’s no reason for us to add to that by both tromping around inside.”

  As the Brother opened the heavy panels wide, the creaking hinges were right out of a horror movie—and so was the scent that hit Boone’s nose like a slap.

  Blood. Not exactly fresh, no. But there was a lot that had been spilled—

  Oh, God, Boone thought.

  Down on the dirty concrete floor, directly in the path of Butch’s frontal lobe beam of light, there was a congealed puddle that was shocking in size.