by Gaja J. Kos
Down with Vamps
Gaja J. Kos
Contents
Kolovrat Universe
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Gaja J. Kos
Copyright © 2021 by Gaja J. Kos
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Kolovrat Universe
The ICRA Files: Berlin series is part of the “Future” portion of the Kolovrat universe.
Each series/standalone title in the Kolovrat universe can be read individually, or as a whole for a more complex insight into the universe where myth and reality blend into one.
PRESENT
BLACK WEREWOLVES SERIES
Urban fantasy
Novels:
The Dark Ones
The 24hourlies
The Shift
The Ascension
Novellas:
Never Forgotten
Chased
Black Werewolves: Books 1–4
NIGHTWRAITH SERIES
Paranormal romance
Windstorm
Blackstorm
Nightstorm
Nightwraith: The Complete Series
SUCC
Open relationship standalone paranormal romance
FUTURE
PARADISE OF SHADOWS AND DEVOTION
Standalone paranormal romance
LOTTE FREUNDENBERGER SERIES
Urban fantasy romance
Shadow Moon
Darkening Moon
Transient Moon
Phantom Moon
Burning Moon
SHADE ASSASSIN
Urban fantasy romance
Shadow World
Shadow Lies
Shadow Heart
Shadow Reign
ICRA FILES: BERLIN
Urban fantasy romance
Rock This Wolf
Down With Vamps
Long Gone Witch
FREE PREQUEL: Fang Deep in the Blues
HEAT OF THE NIGHT
Standalone paranormal romance
DAWN OF KOLOVRAT
Urban fantasy standalone novellas
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For the live music industry.
What you do is pure, absolutely brilliant magic.
Chapter 1
I should have gotten used to the disturbing reek of viscera, blood, and raw chunks of human flesh after examining the carnage next door, but the remains strewn around the bedroom and splattered up the sloped ceiling refused to play by the rules.
The uncharacteristically jacked-up August heat persisting throughout the night certainly didn’t help matters either.
Cold sweat prickled my skin. I forced myself to block out as much of the nausea-inducing scent as possible without shutting my senses off entirely, though I suspected the smell, as much as the sight, had imprinted on me with a viciousness I wouldn’t be able to get rid of that easily.
“It’s almost hard to believe all this came from just two bodies,” Finn muttered beside me, his gaze scanning the space we could hardly even step in without ruining evidence.
I grunted in agreement.
This wasn’t just a hunt-and-kill situation. It was a godsdamned slaughter.
Braving the stench, I dropped more of my guards and inhaled deeply. My stomach clenched as every nuance of the violent ends our victims had met flooded my system. I wasn’t sure what was worse—the physical echoes of their brutal dismemberment or the utter terror that had exploded into the space in those brief seconds before their lives snuffed out.
Not helpful, I reminded my mind, then ground my teeth and focused on dissecting the scents embedded beneath the cloying layers of death.
“It’s the same wolf,” I confirmed.
While sight alone suggested this wasn’t a case of another killer sweeping in and riding on the coattails of the other, I’d learned my lesson about taking things at face value instead of double-checking shit the hard way. Hiding a wince, I shoved the memories of Aric’s case aside.
“Why hit this house, though?” Finn asked, more thinking out loud than actually speaking to me, jarring me from the unproductive depths of my mind.
I glanced at him. Grooved tension gathered between his brows, deepening for a moment before he lifted his gaze from the torn-apart mess of bodies, then backed out of the room. I followed, leaving the scene untouched for the ME’s team to comb through. I could already hear them softly piling into the house. They’d get more from it than we ever could.
“I understand going after the neighbors…” Lingering on the edge of the second-floor landing, Finn ran his fingers across the light stubble dusting his chin. “The party in the backyard would have drawn the wolf’s attention. But why hit this couple next?”
I threw a look over my shoulder, then glanced at the polished wooden stairs leading to the ground floor.
After a moment, when the wisps of an idea gained enough sustenance, I said, “Either these two were specific targets picked out beforehand”—which I doubted since nothing suggested the wolf had operated on any kind of reasoning, just killer instinct—“or one of them went to check out what all the noise was about next door.”
With the way the twin house was merged along the longest wall, they wouldn’t have been able to see anything unless they went out into the backyard to peer over the fence. The neighboring houses were far enough away that, with the music blasting, they’d likely think the party just went a bit wild. But the couple here…
They would have heard the screams.
And if they were so inclined by nature, they would have wanted to make sure everything was all right.
Though my nostrils were pretty much fried from the gore, and the house was already too contaminated to make out the finer nuances of the scents—specifically, when they’d traveled a certain path—everything in my gut insisted this was the case.
“A wolf in all-out predator mode wouldn’t be able to resist going after another kill,” I said, descending the stairs, single file behind Finn. “Based on the positioning of the remains, I’d say it was the man who went out. He witnessed what was happening and ran back inside, but our wolf had already caught the fresh scent. She leapt over the fence, burst through the back door, then followed the s
cent to the upper floor, where she attacked both him and his girlfriend.”
Finn hit the bottom of the stairs and peered right at the broken door leading to the backyard. “Exit point?”
Again, I sucked in the air to sift through the tangled scents, grateful the ME’s team hadn’t clustered deeper into the house. I could still smell them from the other room, but with the currents working in my favor, they didn’t drown out the older signatures.
I nudged my chin toward the back door. “Same way she came in.”
Before I could move, though, a shadow stirred at my back. I half turned to see Leon Stein tentatively emerge from the living room. His small team peered out behind him, looking a lot more bedraggled than the ones working the next-door carnage. I sympathized. Getting called in in the middle of the night was always a bitch.
“Are you done with the scene?” Stein asked.
His soothing presence knocked at my brain, but unlike during my visits to the morgue, I refused to let the ME in. I had to stay sharp.
“Yeah, it’s all yours.” I moved closer to Finn to let Stein pass up the stairs, then turned to my partner as the rest of the forensics trickled in. “Let’s head outside.”
We carefully shimmied out the broken door into the backyard that hugged the house on three sides, though it was only on this end that they had an actual yard with lawn furniture strewn on the grass. The front consisted of hardly more than a path and a driveway, the latter continuing along the side of the house to a squat garage that stood solo by the north-eastern corner of the building like a sore thumb. Not the kindest of layouts, but it did explain why the man would choose this exit to check what was going on instead of the front door. The neighbors’ property mirrored this one to a T.
After a quick look around that revealed nothing of relevance aside from the lingering threads of fear, I isolated the wolf’s signature. It was thicker by the house, supporting the theory that she, indeed, came out the same way she got it, but the fresher track didn’t return to the yard. Guided by the scent, I walked past the garage, then gestured to Finn to follow me down the driveway.
Dawn had barely started to break through the blanket of night while we’d been inside, but there was a current of anxious life embedded in the air, undoubtedly lured out into the open by the ICRA vehicles blocking off the narrow road. Far from ideal for tracking purposes. I’d have to move fast before they blotted out the wolf’s scent entirely.
“Finn, I’m going to—”
His phone screamed to life.
Finn shot me a dry look, then pulled the phone from his pocket. “Gerdel.”
Muffled words I couldn’t quite make out came down the line, and a weight pressed on Finn’s brows.
“All right, I got it.” He terminated the call, face grave, and tapped the back of his cell against his palm. “We have two more bodies.”
Ah, shit.
Briefly, I closed my eyes, then asked, “Same wolf?”
“Looks like.” Finn slid the phone into his pocket. “The van isn’t far from here.” He tipped his chin toward the west. “Parked just off the main road. And the bodies are mauled.”
Frowning, I padded down the stone path to the fenced gate.
“Our wolf went east from here.” I glanced at Finn.
His jaw pulsed. “The party wasn’t the first place she’d hit.”
Which…made less sense than before.
Then again, this case and logic had little in common. Four werewolf attacks, five if I counted tonight’s, in the past two months, all perpetrated by the same werewolf who kept vanishing into thin air. Sometimes leaving a single victim behind. Sometimes several.
But never as many as tonight.
“I track, you take the van?” I asked.
“Let me know if you get anything,” Finn said, though we both knew based on past experience that was highly unlikely.
He climbed into our parked car on the side of the street opposite the house while I re-locked on to the werewolf’s scent. Once I had it, I maneuvered past the makeshift ICRA barricade and onto the open road. The lights gleaming from the houses’ windows matched the bubbles of anxiety littering the air, but thankfully, the inhabitants had enough sense to keep their butts and their curiosity indoors.
When the road bent sharply to the left, I carried on straight ahead into a small park. The pavement beneath my feet turned to slick stones set in cement, and a lone streetlamp shone overhead, casting more shadows than light thanks to the wide-branched trees dominating the area. I stopped beneath it and studied the three directions the path branched into. The wolf’s scent continued to tint the air, but the constant breeze flowing through the park in shifting corridors had jumbled up the trail. Shit.
I shimmied my phone from my back pocket and called Finn.
“I just reached the van,” he answered. “You got something?”
“Maybe. The scent isn’t gone, but I’ll have to take wolf form to get a lock on it. I don’t know how long I’ll be MIA.”
Through the line, I heard him climb out of the car and swing the door shut. “Check in when you can.”
“Will do.”
I ended the call, crossed onto the grass, then continued toward the trees set the farthest from the path. Even with the growing dawn, the shadows here seemed thick enough to conceal my stuff from potential passersby. I stripped down to nothing, then stashed my clothes, cuffs, and cell phone at the foot of the tree.
As the cool touch of dewy grass seeped into the soles of my feet, I reached for my wolf.
The shift came over me eagerly. I dropped on all fours, momentarily reveling in how different, how pure the grass and earth beneath my paws felt. I shook from head to spine to relieve any tension and give myself a proper reset, then trotted back toward the path. The wolf’s scent prodded me, jumbled in the air, but beneath the haphazard waves was a thread.
Faint, barely there—but enough.
Nose to the ground, I pursued the echoes of paw prints along the path headed south, then turned east onto a dirt trail when hints of civilization crashed into the bubble of nature. The wolf’s scent pooled more thickly under an outcropping of trees.
I sniffed furiously at the ground.
Whispers of our victims’ blood clung to the grass, buried beneath the far stronger smell of our killer wolf.
She’d slept here. She’d actually curled up and slept here.
The muttering of my human, rational mind tapped at my wolf brain.
Different. This was different than before. But why?
I widened the perimeter, inhaling the grass for a fresher scent. There. The markers were those of a werewolf still shifted. My human brain nudged harder at my wolf, reminding me this wasn’t standard. A werewolf who passed out or slept after a kill usually woke up in human form. So, why didn’t she?
The thought nagged me, but there was no benefit I could get from dwelling on it now, so I simply tracked the wolf’s scent-prints until the grassy area of the park rolled into a suburban street.
A metallic tang smacked my nostrils.
Blood.
Urgency zinged through my veins. I bolted down the road, then lunged over the low, wooden fence cordoning off the house the scent was coming from. The cypress hedge extending on the other side scraped my belly with its prickly ends, but as soon as I cleared the damned thing, I was tearing up the grass, aiming for the partially open sliding glass door.
A weak, breathless moan sent me skidding around the kitchen island. The sight punched me straight in the gut. I shifted shape and knelt beside the injured man, paying no heed to the warm puddle of blood that stained my skin. Not when he was still holding on. Still fighting.
I grabbed a kitchen towel off the counter and pressed it to the wound on his neck, then quickly scanned him over for other injuries. A mean gash gaped along his collarbone, but the wound wasn’t as critical as the one pumping out his lifeblood beneath my palm.
“Hang on, okay?” I said to him, then lifted my gaze from hi
s blinking, shock-widened gray eyes to search for a phone.
There was no hint of a cell phone anywhere in the vicinity. The newspaper I spotted on the counter by his nearly untouched coffee suggested he preferred the old-school way of informing himself about current events rather than scrolling the Internet. He probably didn’t even bring the phone down with him, but, damn it, the man looked old enough to have a fucking landline somewhere in the godsdamned house.
Just as a snarl wanted to rise from my throat, I caught sight of the stationary phone in the adjacent room. I looked down to the man, then maneuvered his arm up until he was holding—well, at least applying pressure—to the wound.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, then sprinted fast as fuck for the phone.
I punched in Stein’s cell number instead of ICRA’s dispatch. He’d be able to get here a lot faster than having dispatch send medics my way.
“Stein. Hallo?” The uncertainty in his tone flooded me with gratitude that he’d even answered the call from a non-ICRA number. I hadn’t taken that possibility into account.