Baines grunted. “I remember that.”
Lore saw his chance to get into the condo again before every trace of scent was trampled away. He hadn’t had much of a chance to check it out before Talia had burst from the kitchen. “I may recognize your drawing. I know the neighborhood and its people.”
“This is a crime scene. You’re not a cop.”
Lore could feel the man’s suspicion like a physical touch. He shrugged, keeping his face neutral. “You’re in charge here, but I might see something you won’t.”
And I’ve got the suspect you really want chained to my bed.
Interestingly enough, though, Baines was considering a range of suspects and not just the vampire roommate. It improved Lore’s opinion of the man.
The detective studied him for a moment. Beneath the wariness, Lore sensed a lot of curiosity. “Like what?”
“If you’re dealing with graffiti, I can help. Vampires are big on signs and symbols. Do you know which vampires belong to which clan, and which monarchs claim ownership of them?”
Baines shrugged. “I know Queen Omara demands the loyalty of any vampire living here.”
“There are things she doesn’t know.”
“And you do?”
Again, an image of Talia flashed through his mind. “I have my nose to the ground.”
“You a snitch?”
“I keep order.”
“I thought that was Alessandro Caravelli’s job. He’s the peacekeeper in Spookytown.”
“He hires my pack from time to time. Right now, I’m his vacation relief.” Lore gave a slight smile at the phrase. It was just so wonderfully, mundanely human.
After a long moment, Baines gave a small nod. “Okay. Maybe you should take a look at what we’ve got in there.” He glanced toward the open door to the condo. “Put some of those booties over your shoes.”
Lore obeyed, barely fitting the protective covers over his long feet. Playing along with the humans’ rules irked him, but at this point he’d take answers wherever he could get them. He’d hoped for more information from the hounds who questioned the crowd at the fire, but they’d come up empty. Helver had given the most detailed account.
After leaving the scene of the fire, Lore had found the pup and made him explain himself again. And again. Lore was taking his time to invent an appropriate punishment for stealing the campaign money. He was still too angry to think straight, and it wouldn’t hurt Helver to stew a little.
Unfortunately, the young idiot hadn’t had anything useful to add to the story. No sight, sound, or scent of an intruder. Lore guessed the fire had been ignited from a distance. Definitely sorcery, probably necromancy. Maybe a warlock, demon or vampire. Big, thick spell books required the patience of an immortal.
He walked behind Baines, taking in the scene. It was crowded with officers and hot with all the lights in the place turned on. The brightness showed everything in lurid colors. Lore had watched enough crime dramas to know they could tell a lot from the way blood splattered during a murder.
The walls and ceiling had a lot to say.
Hellhounds knew death intimately. They were predators, and they’d been preyed upon in the prison where Lore had grown up. He’d seen enslavement, torture, and cruelty for the sake of pleasure, and yet the sight of Michelle’s body made his chest burn with sadness. She’d been a slight woman, her shattered body reminding him of a fallen bird. Slashes seamed her skin where she’d tried to fend off her attacker. The neck was a gory mess, clumsily hacked apart. Lore prayed she’d been unconscious by the time that happened.
The vampires executed their own with swords. Those wounds were, by comparison, precise. Lore guessed the killer had used something that required a lot of cuts—a dagger or a knife.
The camera kept flashing, the bursts of light setting Lore’s nerves on edge.
The police had left the head where they had found it, apart from the body. The eyes were half-open, the lips slack. Lore turned away from the waxy face. It was far too much like Talia’s.
An officer stood in the living room, making a sketch of the placement of the toppled furniture, the body, and the severed head. With no camera or sketch pad, Lore had to remember what was there: a floor lamp toppled, a small bookcase capsized, paperbacks everywhere, pictures askew. Michelle Faulkner had fought back.
Lore tensed as someone bumped into him. There were too many people, and no one was dusting for fingerprints yet, tweezing up bits of thread or vacuuming the carpet for evidence. He supposed even more personnel would arrive to tramp through the place.
To a hellhound, it was a stupid way to investigate. The first and most obvious tool was a good nose, and now there were too many scents crowding out any trace of the killer. The only thing Lore could tell for sure was that hellhounds and vampires were the only nonhumans who had been there in recent history.
His other sense—the one that gave him premonitions—was jangling with a sense of wrongness. The place stank of violence and terror.
“Where’s the drawing?” Baines asked a young officer standing by the window.
“There.” The man pointed to the living room wall.
With a ping of annoyance, Lore wondered how the hell he’d missed it earlier. Then again, it didn’t exactly stand out—just more blood on a bloody wall.
“Well?” asked Baines.
Lore stepped closer. The symbol was crudely done, and at an awkward height. The blood was turning a rusty brown, soaking into the bland off-white paint. He estimated the distance to the floor. “It looked like whoever drew it knelt, scooping up the blood from the carpet with his fingers.”
Baines nodded. “So, what does it mean?”
Lore’s first impression was of a meaningless splodge. If he squinted, it reminded him of a pup’s drawing of the summer sun. Or a squashed spider. Or a head with crudely drawn hair. What had the cop been thinking? Gang symbols had more style. “Honestly, I can’t tell.”
Baines shrugged. “It was worth a try.”
Lore straightened, fixing the childlike scrawl into his memory. As he took one last look, he noticed there was a tiny squiggle disturbing the bottom smears. “There’s something written beneath the blood. It’s almost covered up.”
Baines quickly bent down, bringing his nose nearly to the wall. “It’s in pencil.”
He pulled a penlight from his pocket and shone it directly on the small printed letters. The writing was ragged, the letters uneven. It reminded Lore of his own awkward penmanship.
“Vincire,” Baines said. “Latin. Something about binding, I think. It’s been years since I studied it.”
“Latin?” Lore thought about the fire, dark sorcery, Talia, and the dead body mere feet away. “What kind of a binding?”
Baines didn’t answer. He straightened and looked out the window. “Huh. The snow’s started coming down in earnest.”
Lore followed his gaze. Fat flakes were twirling through the beams of the streetlights, the wind gusting them into spirals. A brief moment of wonder seized him. So that’s what snow looks like. He’d seen pictures, but never the real thing.
“I dreamed that it would snow.” In the dream, something was chasing him. The snow was so deep, he couldn’t run. There had been no choice but to turn and face his enemy.
Prophecies came in dreams. They were the gift and burden the Prophets sent to the Alpha of the pack. The problem was deciding what was a prophecy and what were the aftereffects of the three-day-old pizza he’d left in the fridge. It seemed this time the dream was a warning.
“The snow’s a nightmare all right,” Baines grumbled. “Roads’ll be hell by morning. No one here knows how to drive in this shit.”
The detective turned away from the window, then stiffened. He was looking at a desk with a laptop pushed into the corner of the living room. Lore recognized the detritus of a thinker’s profession: highlighters, sticky notes, bits of torn paper used as page markers, and more books than any one person could reasonably read. A teacher, perhaps? A stack o
f papers sat on one corner of the desk. The title page of the top one said Paradise Lost.
Lore wondered how anyone could sit still long enough to read that many books.
“What did the missing cousin do for a living?” Baines addressed no one in particular, raising his voice to be heard by all.
The answer came from the young cop who’d pointed out the blood on the wall. “Rostova’s a sessional tutor at the university. She’s got a master’s in education and a bachelor’s in Western literature.”
Baines gave a low whistle. “So she knows Latin?”
“I guess, maybe,” the young cop replied.
Lore understood why Baines had asked. There was a Latin dictionary sitting on the desk. The detective shifted some of the other books stacked on the desk. “Beginning Latin Translation. Virgil’s Aeneid. Pride and Prejudice. Anna Karenina. A DVD of Hugh Grant’s greatest hits. Good to have balance.”
A ripple of puzzlement passed over Lore. He could usually sniff people out. But with her endless shopping bags, glittery cell phone, and ridiculous heels, Lore would never have guessed Talia was a teacher. She didn’t put out the smart girl vibe. But then she didn’t put out the knife-fighter vibe, either.
She was deep in hiding, and better at it than anyone had guessed.
Maybe someone had found her out, and gone after her. If so, why?
Or maybe Lore was entirely wrong, and he had a murdering fiend chained to his bed.
He looked out at the snow, watched it gusting down the cold, dry street like handfuls of sugar. It was starting to stick to the grass.
Baines came to stand beside him. “If this keeps up, the city’s going to be shut down by morning.”
“That will make it hard for our killer to run.”
Baines snorted. “You’d be surprised how well they usually hide in plain view.”
Chapter 8
Tuesday, December 28, 11:35 p.m.
Downtown Fairview
Darak tasted the evil that hung in the air and ached to smash it.
Pluto’s balls, some idiot went and got himself a spell book.
Wasn’t that just dandy?
Who the hell in this backwater has that kind of power? For a pinprick on the map, Fairview was just full of surprises. Vampires standing for public office. Entire prison dimensions. And his personal favorite—invisible evil that set stuff on fire.
Come for the election, stay for the magic of mass destruction.
Darak heaved himself to his feet, stiff from crouching on the peak of the cathedral roof like an oversized gargoyle. He dusted away the snow that had collected on his sleeves and scanned the horizon while he took a slug from his flask.
The dark leathers he wore kept out the wind, but the cold seeped through seams and zippers. One of the old Undead, he could ignore it. What bothered him more was the smoke—not the comfortable scent of a hearth fire, but the reek of a burning building. The acrid stink had drawn him to the highest point he could find, and now he could see the source—a glowing maw of flame to the southwest, unnaturally fierce and bright.
Who or what had caused it? Only one way to find out. Go to the source.
Darak balanced on the roof’s ridgeline, walking toe to heel along its length. Pride made him careful. Vampires could fly, but at close to seven feet and three-fifty, Darak was not exactly aerodynamic. Control was important, unless he wanted to drop like an anvil.
When he reached the roofline, he jumped, a streak of shadow against the black sky. The air rushed to meet him, snow stinging his cheeks. He landed lightly enough, boots skating on the frosty sidewalk. Pulling himself upright, he began walking toward the fire.
Darak and his blood-sworn kin were Undead, but they bowed to no queen or king. It had taken them two millennia to gain enough strength for true freedom, and they’d done it by force of arms. The honest way.
Darak didn’t like magic or the people who used it. Weapons were far more reliable. Nevertheless, it took a cartload of power to start a blaze like that.
Power was interesting.
He stopped walking when he came to one of the telephone poles that dotted the street. An election poster jostled for space with ads for lost cats and ska-goth fusion bands. Darak read the poster with a sense of bitter amusement.
Elect Michael de Winter
Equality and fairness for all citizens of Fairview!
Choose a candidate with centuries of experience!
It’s time for an interspecies perspective.
The vampire candidate. Like many, Darak’s crew had come to watch the election.
Michael de Winter was backed by the vampire queen, Omara. Her goal was equal rights for the nonhumans—but a lot of vampires were nostalgic for the good old days of crowns and scepters. After all, vampires survived by feeding on the weak. A desire for dominance was natural.
Bottom line: Did the queen want to reign over more than vampires? Half the humans were ready to riot, so apparently they believed the worst. Meanwhile, Omara’s vampire enemies waited and watched for an excuse to topple her throne.
Who said politics wasn’t a blood sport? Among vampires, politics often ended in war—and that meant innocents would die.
Not okay.
That’s when Darak and his brethren voted with cold steel.
He turned away from the poster and began walking toward the fire once more. Yes, it had taken true power to set that blaze.
Maybe Darak could use the fool with the spell book. If election fever turned bad, they might need an extra weapon in reserve.
Or maybe he’d just tear off the fool’s head.
That sort of thing was his specialty.
Tuesday, December 28, 11:40 p.m.
101.5 FM
“Good evening and welcome back to CSUP. For those just joining us, tonight’s program is all about the special bond between lover and beloved, hunter and prey. Where do the two intersect, and what does the battle of the sexes have to do with the battle between species?
“It brings us, my dark faithful, to the topic of slayers. These days, it seems as if any cheerleader with a stake can get into the game, but I’m not talking about the wannabes or even those oh-so-scary mercenaries who accept a bounty on our lives. I’m talking about the crazies, the ones who kill from a sense of devotion.
“There are human tribes from Eastern Europe called the Hunters. They don’t kill for sport or for money. It’s a family tradition handed down from parent to child since the dawn of written history. To them, killing us is the purest act of love for their own kind.
“They’re the ones I worry about when I turn out the light.”
Tuesday, December 28, 11:45 p.m.
Lore’s condo
When she heard Lore leave the condo, Talia curled up on her side, cradling her cuffed wrist in her free hand. Relief drained the last strength from her limbs. He hadn’t hurt her, but she wasn’t convinced he wouldn’t. No one handcuffed a woman—a stranger—without the possibility of harm. That last look he’d given her was the pure, remorseless gaze of a predator.
But at least he was gone for the moment. She’d needed an interval of privacy to gather her wits. Too much had happened since she’d . . . had she really been shopping a few hours ago?
Now that she was alone, her emotions began to unfold from the clenched ball of pain lodged in her gut. Fear. Guilt. Loss. Loneliness.
Talia pressed her face into the coverlet, her feelings too crowded to cry just yet. She’d lost her mother, then her fiancé, and then the rest of her family. It was like a recurring nightmare where pieces of her flesh were torn away, leaving nothing recognizable. After Talia had lost her humanity, she’d thought there was nothing left to take—but the horror had come back again. She’d still had something to lose. Still more pain to endure. One more time.
Perhaps the last time. Michelle was all she had left. Now there was no one. Pink tears began to stain the pillowcase. Grief was finally finding release.
Michelle had been the one to anch
or Talia, to patiently remind her that not everything was obliterated because she’d been Turned. She’d helped Talia pick the threads of her true self from the tangled, damaged mess she’d become. If it hadn’t been for her cousin, Talia would never have gone back to teaching.
And she was only one of the many, many people who had loved Michelle. Tonight, a light had gone out of the world. And it was my fault. Talia sobbed in earnest. There was no way to bring her cousin back. Not even an ancient vampire could save someone after their body had been so badly broken.
Talia’s tears slowed, the last thought pushing her from sadness to fear. It should have been me who died. A vampire would have known the difference between a human and one of their own. That meant the murder was either a huge mistake or a warning.
Who wants me dead?
Talia’s stomach cramped as cold terror washed through her. There was her sire, who had reason to hate her. She’d escaped from his clutches and also swiped a small fortune on her way out the door. But would he really risk Queen Omara’s wrath by coming to Fairview and beheading the locals? She had counted on the fact that he would not.
And then there was Talia’s family. Dad.
In his eyes, she was no better than a rabid dog. The Talia he’d raised from a baby had died the moment the vampires took her for their own. If he caught her now, he’d butcher her without mercy.
Strike the monsters before they kill or corrupt an innocent human. That was what her whole neighborhood— the tribe—had believed. When you saw the crossed-blade symbol of the Hunters, you knew you were dealing with monster-killing machines, bred for the job and trained from birth.
Talia pulled up the right sleeve of her sweater. Twin Hunter sabers, crossed at the hilt, were inked on the inside of her forearm. Against pale vampire skin, the fine detailing would never fade or blur. Nor could she ever get the damned thing off. Everything she wore, however fashionable, would be long-sleeved. Forever.
She made a fist, the design shifting along her skin. She’d never been big, but she’d always been good with firearms. She’d also been a risk-taker to the point of stupidity. She’d wanted her father’s approval and at sixteen, she’d made her first kill. A ghoul. He’d given Talia the tattoo as a reward.
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