I joined Erin at the doorway, happy to step back over the threshold and out of that foul, smoky room. It made me itchy and I wanted to be far, far away from the strange corpses.
Erin did not shut the door, and I couldn’t stop staring at the bodies.
“Okay,” I said, pulling an Altoid tin out of my purse and popping a mint into my mouth. “This is definitely going on my list of Top Ten Most Fucked Up Murders, but I’m not sure what you’re expecting me to do.”
“This isn’t the first murder. We found similar bodies in a field three nights ago.” She gestured inside toward the bodies. “All of those victims were human. The field is a place where we often do rituals as a group. It’s one of our own doing this. We need to figure out who it is and stop them.” Anger tinged her words, and something else. Disappointment. Maybe even a measure of shock that someone like her could be behind such gruesome acts.
“But now they’ve killed vampires,” she continued. “It’s pretty clear whatever spell they’re attempting hasn’t worked, and they’re upping the sacrifice in order to make it successful.”
“Which means they might try to kill more vampires.”
“Yes,” Erin said. “And possibly witches.” She glanced at the bodies and shuddered, hugging herself like she was cold, though the autumn air was warm. “And, of course, vampire bodies complicate the situation. For now, we’d like to keep this quiet. And you have managed to stop two homicidal maniacs this summer.”
She’d already pointed that out but she had the wrong idea. I hadn’t missed my calling as a detective. I’d stumbled across Aidan’s guilt, and I’d been lured into a trap by the murderous vampire Tertius. I’d survived both encounters, which was nothing short of a miracle and partially due to the help of two different vampires, neither of whom were around to help me now. Cazimir was in a vampire coma and Eva had gone back to New York.
“What exactly are you asking me to do?”
“I’m asking you to help stop this motherfucker. We know it’s one of ours, and that makes all of us biased and blind to the things we don’t want to see. An outsider will help, and obviously we can’t go to the cops. We don’t want to alert the supernatural community and start a panic or a literal witch-hunt. Especially among the vampires. But if they find out, we’re hoping you’d be able to smooth things over with Queen Lark.”
I stared at her, my expression making it clear how unlikely I thought that was. She stared right back.
“She’s not a queen,” I finally said.
Erin let out a hiss of irritation. “Henri, you’re one of the only people I know who isn’t terrified to go inside the Factory now that Cazimir’s gone. I might need you to stop the vampires from declaring open season on all witches. That’s the biggest part of this job. Hopefully we can keep this under wraps until we have the perpetrator identified, but just in case, I need someone to play peacemaker. If Cazimir were still in charge, I might be willing to do it myself. Fifty years ago, the Seattle Witches’ Guild signed an Accord of Peace with him, promising to sit down and talk out our problems when shit like this happened. But since he’s gone—”
“You have no idea how Lark will react to the news that a witch sacrificed a few vampires for some nefarious magical purpose, especially since you don’t have a person to pin it on and that makes you all suspects.”
“Exactly,” Erin said, sounding relieved that I understood her predicament.
“I’m not exactly the peacemaker type,” I warned her. “I prefer hitting things.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the best thing we’ve got right now.” She didn’t look that pleased about it.
“Thanks,” I said, as sarcastically as I could manage. “I guess I’m in. I can’t let this asshole kill more vampires. Some of my worst friends are vampires.”
“Good.”
“That means I’m going to need a moment with the corpses. Alone.”
Erin looked mildly disturbed but gestured that I should go ahead. I took one big breath of clean night air and then stepped inside the house, closing the door behind me.
Chapter 3
I stared at the bodies, wondering how exactly I was going to extract blood from these stones. Finally, I ducked into the kitchen and found a sharp knife. I knelt down beside the fleshy legs of the woman, wondering if I’d known her, who she’d been.
What terrible series of events had led to her being here, forced to die in such a terrible way?
Corpses didn’t bleed. Without the heart to pump it around the body, blood pooled and coagulated.
I bent down and lifted her leg. There was a purple stain on her skin that showed where her blood had pooled, and that was where I sliced. I jammed my fingers into the wound until I managed to get some dark, gelatinous blood on them. It was cold, sticky, and thick, the kind of blood even my vampire self would have turned her nose up at.
I suppressed a gag, swallowed the bile that was crawling up my throat, and closed my eyes. I shoved the blood into my mouth. It tasted like iron gelatin, sour and salty.
The vision struck me like a truck. The vampire was walking down the street when a heartbeat in the alley caught her attention. A person in black sweat clothes and a ski mask jumped out at her. She laughed, happy this villainous little snack had crossed her path.
The attacker raised their arm. She flashed her fangs, expecting the mortal to cower in fear. Instead, they lobbed something toward her—or so she thought. There was nothing but a woosh of air, then the cold struck her like a bolt of ice to her heart. She froze in place, everything going cold and dark.
The vision cut out. I tried to make sense of it. A spell? Freeform spells were, as far as I knew, a little more draining and required the witch to have power to fuel them stored in an amulet or piece of jewelry.
I’d never seen a freezing spell, let alone one that could work on a vampire, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.
The person in the ski mask had been wearing black boxy clothes, and the glimpses I got were not enough to tell me much about who they were.
So basically I didn’t know who the victim had been, nor who her attacker was. Fantastic.
I steeled myself as I approached the second corpse and then repeated the process. It was about the same, only he had been grabbed more haphazardly. He’d left a bar where he’d been stalking a victim of his own, a murderer he’d followed across the country. He’d been surprised by a gust of wind that felt like a physical punch. His veins had gone cold as ice and he’d shivered—such a strange feeling, almost foreign, because vampires did not shiver—before everything went black.
I let their last conscious moments wash over me, that confusion that morphed into fear and then blackness. They’d never been allowed to wake up, at least not for long enough to make an impression that would result in a vision. They hadn’t been aware of their horrible end, but that didn’t make it any better.
When I stopped shaking and got my breathing even—or as even as I could get with the smell of ash and death in the room—I opened the door and met Erin outside. I popped a whole fistful of mints, but even curiously strong peppermint couldn’t quite get the taste of rusted iron out of my mouth.
Erin gave me a questioning look and clearly wanted to know what the hell I’d done. I didn’t explain. If she examined them, she’d see the cuts on the fronts of their legs and maybe she could guess. Still, I didn’t want to reveal my ability to her and become even more of a freak than I already was in her eyes. I wanted to avoid any and all questions about the Cure, how it had worked—which I didn’t know the details of anyhow—and the small ability it had left me with.
“I’m done here,” I said instead.
Erin hesitated, clearly torn about whether or not to ask questions, and then she locked the door. We headed back to her car.
I told her that I thought the vampires had been subdued by some sort of freezing spell.
“How the hell could you tell such a thing?” she demanded.
I waved away her quest
ion. It wasn’t any of her business that I retained the power to read people’s blood even though I was no longer a vampire. “Is that possible?”
“Yeah, I guess. I mean, a spell like that would take a lot of energy, especially one powerful enough to work on a vampire.”
I’d suspected as much. Most of the magic I’d personally witnessed were things like Mark lighting candles from across the room or catching a glass with magic before it hit the ground and broke. Freezing an immortal was a whole different caliber of power.
“That sacrifice. What kind of magic is that?” I asked as I slid into the passenger’s seat of her car.
Erin let out a breath and buckled her seatbelt. “Hard to say. In theoretical terms—and that’s the only way I’ve ever heard about such magic, you understand—rituals like that are meant to generate energy for large spells. Death magic gets you a hell of a lot of juice—the kind you’d need to store in a large precious stone of some kind, or use right away—but it also comes with some serious bad juju.”
“Death magic?”
“Death magic is forbidden and frowned upon, for a lot of reasons.”
“Like that murder is bad?” I asked.
Erin raised an eyebrow and gave me a sidelong glance. “Do you really believe that?”
“Not always. Some people deserve to die,” I said honestly. Was it still wrong to take justice into your own fangs? Maybe. But I’d never been one to agonize over the moralities of blood drinking. As long as I wasn’t plucking innocent, decent people from their lives to fulfill my bloodlust, I hadn’t seen a reason to brood over it. “But that doesn’t mean you can kill anyone anytime without consequences.”
“Witches think murder is bad,” she said. “Death magic is banned for that reason first and foremost, but also because it can only fuel nasty shit. It’s the basis for things like curses and magical plagues and necromancy.”
“So basically, it’s a real party.” I sounded flippant, but to be honest, the thought of zombies wigged me out. Vampires were one thing, but animated mindless bodies without heartbeats were freaky as hell.
“Sure, if you like your parties with a body count.” She glanced over at me again. “Maybe you do, I don’t know.”
“Not particularly,” I said. “So this person is trying to, what, start the apocalypse?”
Erin shrugged. “Who the hell knows? Without knowing the exact ritual or what they’re funneling the energy into, it’s hard to say what their goal is. The fact that they’re brazen enough to do these rituals in our own places of practice tells me one thing: they plan to be powerful enough that getting caught won’t matter, or they plan for everyone to be dead before they’re caught.”
A shiver went down my spine as I thought of the mostly-skeletonized corpses left out in the open for fellow witches to find. Erin was right. Not even the cockiest asshole would do that if they were worried about hiding for long.
“How would it make them powerful?” I asked. “Other than giving them an army of plague-ridden zombies?”
Erin snorted. “Luckily, an army of corpses would require an army of sacrifices.” She bit her lip, as if she regretted the words. “I doubt that’s the goal. But that kind of power can be used for other spells, at least according to the old stories. Say, spells for immortality and invincibility.”
I perked up. “Wait, you can become immortal with magic?”
I probably sounded too desperate. Erin frowned deeply and said, “No. At least, not in any way I’ve seen. There are stories from hundreds of years ago about people making immortality amulets and shit, but absolutely zero proof, no witness corroboration, no confirmation. And the most telling: no living examples. It’s a fairy tale.”
I deflated a little. I didn’t want that brand of immortality, not really. I wanted to be a vampire again, and there was no magic spell for that. Still, the idea was intriguing. Forever without the fangs. How many people would get in line for that?
“Okay. So they could be trying to set nefarious shit in motion, or trying to make themselves into a serious badass.”
“Yep. And I’m not sure which is worse.”
She drove onto the freeway heading east. I mulled over the implications of immortality spells that required large numbers of murders and maybe even a few immortal sacrifices, and wondered if someone was really attempting that when there were easier ways to get immortality, particularly if you had access to vampires. Sure, the vampire had to be willing to turn you if you wanted it to be done right, but it seemed like convincing them would be easier than wrangling them into a circle like that. After all, a vampire won’t stay staked for long. Fifteen minutes, tops. Keeping them unconscious so you could tie them up and murder them would be one hell of a task, unless that freezing spell was way more powerful than I thought.
I looked out the window. It was dark outside. The highway wound through fields, and the only lights were from farms we passed along the road.
“Where the hell are we going?” I demanded, tired and hungry and ready to go home.
“My brother’s place,” Erin said. “The highest-ranking members of the Guild—the Elders—are there. I want them to meet you.”
“Why?”
“So they can see you’re real.” She sounded like a teacher who was tired of answering the same question. “A lot of people think the stories are bullshit, you know.”
Heat rose in my middle. I wasn’t okay with being paraded around like some kind of freak. “No way. Take me home.”
Erin’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, but she did not stop or turn around. “Henri, we’re paying you to play detective and maybe peacemaker. They want to see you and judge that you’re a competent, real person who is capable of doing those things. That’s all. Besides,” she said, “I want you to take a look at these people. This is powerful magic, and it’s being done on our Guild’s property. I really hope it’s not one of the Guild Elders, but it may very well be.”
I had to grudgingly admit that made sense. She wanted me to look these people in the eye and see if any of them sent my hackles up. Not a bad plan, especially under the guise of “meet the freak.” I still didn’t like it.
The drive was long, and I dozed off. When I woke up, the car was turning onto a dirt road marked with a well-lit hand-painted wooden sign that said Messer Farm.
The farmhouse was a mile or so down the road. It was charming, with a manicured front lawn and lots of fences. Out in the fields beyond, I could see cows and a barn off to the side.
There were several cars in front, parked on the sides of the driveway and in any nook the driver could squeeze their vehicle into. Erin double-parked behind a pickup.
I got out of the car and spun around slowly to take it all in. The air was heavy with the smell of manure and cut grass. I inhaled, a rush of memories hitting me like a tsunami.
I grew up on dairy farm. Back in those days, everything on our little farm was done by hand, and I spent many hours feeding and milking cows, churning butter, and stirring cheese curds. My older brother got the better job of delivering milk in glass bottles by buggy and, eventually, when my family could afford it, by truck. I hadn’t thought of that farm in ages, but the earthy smell of the fields mixed with the odor of cow dung really brought me back. I basked in the strange nostalgia and wondered if the Dunn Family Dairy Farm still existed. If it did, it had probably been gutted and upgraded and would be unrecognizable to me now.
The first rule of Vampire Club is that you can’t go home again. There are a lot of reasons for that, but mostly because it just leads to hell and heartbreak. I’d only been tempted a couple of times when my immediate family had still been alive. I hadn’t had any desire since the last of them had passed away.
“You okay?” Erin asked, a mixture of worry and annoyance straining her voice.
“Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
Erin and I weaved through cars until we reached the porch, and headed inside.
Chapter 4
Several
people were seated around a table in the kitchen. None of them looked particularly old, so I assumed “Elders” was one of those terms that was more title than descriptor.
The aroma of basil and oregano filled the air, along with a hint of citrus and something sour that I couldn’t identify.
A man with tan skin like Erin’s and short, inky black hair stood at the stove, stirring something in a stainless steel pot. A woman in a frilly yellow blouse and slacks stood behind him, watching him carefully with a look of consternation on her face.
“That’s too much turmeric,” she said.
“I have the recipe right here,” the man said, but he put the spice shaker down.
“And I’m telling you, that’s too much,” she insisted. “If you add too much, it won’t work.”
The man bit his lip, as if trying to prevent himself from arguing further. He looked at Erin, and they shared some sort of nonverbal exchange.
“Carla, why don’t you let Evan cook his own spells?” Erin asked.
Carla—the woman in the yellow blouse—shot Erin an angry look before her glance slid to me. Her brown hair was streaked with gray and pulled up into a tight bun. She straightened until she was as rigid as someone with a rod on their spine and put her hands on her hips. She was probably in her late fifties, going by the lines on her face.
“You brought her here?” Carla demanded.
Erin stiffened and folded her arms across her chest. “You wanted to meet her.”
“We decided we were being rash.” The voice came from the table. I turned to see a bald man with tattoo sleeves jutting out of his polo shirt. “We should have called you, Erin. We changed our minds.”
“About what?” Erin insisted.
“Her,” said a young woman with pink streaks in her hair. She was sitting next to the guy with the tattoos and had a few visible tattoos of her own. She gave me an apologetic smile. “You must be Henri Dunn.”
Sanguinity (Henri Dunn Book 3) Page 2