Bloodless (Henri Dunn Book 2)

by Tori Centanni

  “You don’t want to piss me off right now. I already have one body to dismember. A second won’t make any difference.”

  Cazimir sighed heavily before appearing in the doorway. He lingered outside the bathroom, raising his eyebrow at the sight of the small space covered in black trash bags.

  “I need you to help me get the body out of the tub.”

  He made a face of disgust, but I suspected that was more at the fact that he was being asked to do something he saw as beneath him than the task at hand.

  I set the saw on the counter next to the sink and handed him a pair of latex gloves like the ones I was wearing. Standing next to the shower, I put one foot into the tub and grabbed hold of the corpse on its left side. Cazimir hesitated, clearly trying to come up with a reason not to help me, but he finally pulled on the gloves and put his hands on the left side of the body. We lowered it to the floor gently, so it didn’t hit the ground with a big wet thud.

  Part of why I’d chosen this old brick building was that the walls and floors were thick and lined with concrete, so noise didn’t travel well from unit to unit. But I didn’t want to risk my downstairs neighbors thinking someone had fallen out of the shower. If they were Good Samaritans and called an ambulance, I’d have a hell of a lot of explaining to do.

  “I am not sawing it apart,” Cazimir said, removing his gloves.

  “I wasn’t going to ask,” I said, taking his soiled gloves and dumping them in an open trash bag. “Can you take my keys and get my car? Find parking closer?”

  “I do not operate motorcars,” Caz said, studying a spot on the door frame where the paint had chipped off.

  I sighed. Of course he couldn’t drive. He’d never had to. By the time cars were prevalent, he’d had an entire staff and plenty of mortal pets to do it for him. “Fine. Just keep out of the way.”

  I went to work.

  Three hours later, the sun was rising and I had a trunk full of body parts in black plastic trash bags. I had transported them in my laundry bin, hoping any neighbors who witnessed it would think I was just really quirky about my laundry.

  I sat alone in my car, contemplating my options. If it were still dark, I’d seriously consider dumping the parts in a lake or the Sound. But there was no way I could do something that reckless in daylight. Which left only one choice: the incinerator at the Factory.

  Visiting vampires after sunrise is generally unwise. But so is leaving human body parts in your trunk all day. Facing cranky immortals on their off-hours was way more appealing than being caught with a dead person in bags.

  Exhaustion hit me like an asteroid. I would have killed for some sleep. I settled for stopping at Starbucks for a quad-shot latte.

  * * *

  There was no parking in front of the Factory, and their private lot was fenced off and locked. I didn’t dare risk parking illegally with the body in the trunk. My luck wasn’t liable to hold that well. I found a spot a few blocks away and pulled exactly one trash bag to bring in with me. I slung my purse over my shoulder and triple-checked that the car was locked.

  I probably looked like I was on my way to work at one of the local coffee shops: I wore clean jeans, a black tank top, and big sunglasses. Pretty as it was, sunlight was still hard on my eyes. I’d shoved the sweat clothes and the extra plastic I’d used to line my bathroom into the bags with the body parts for easy disposal. No sense in keeping evidence around my apartment and tempting fate. It’s not like fate had been on my side lately.

  I knocked on the Factory’s front door. No answer. The sun glinted on the dirty, cracked tile in front of the building that spelled out the word “Textiles” in big blocky tile letters, a holdover from the 1850s, when this building had been a textile factory instead of a pretend palace for a self-crowned vampire king.

  It struck me that it wasn’t even a palace anymore. It was whatever Lark was going to make it, at least until Cazimir got his immortality back and reclaimed it.

  If he got his immortality back. That thought made the acidic coffee boil in my stomach.

  I knocked again, harder, and didn’t stop.

  Finally, a security guard answered. He was a man in his thirties, wearing the standard uniform: black slacks and white shirt, with a black tie, like some kind of wannabe FBI agent.

  “Building is closed,” he said. I peeked inside and saw a graphic novel bent open on a folding chair with a flashlight on top of it. Guess I’d interrupted his reading. Tough shit. He probably ignored most visitors and had only gotten up when I’d gotten insistent.

  “My name is Henri Dunn. Tell Lark I need to use her incinerator.”

  The man stared at me for a long moment, as if I’d told him the sun was green. I was a human, after all, and I doubted many humans came by to make demands of the vampires or use their body disposal equipment. Especially in the early hours of the morning.

  “She’s—”

  “Probably sleeping, I know. Wake her up. This is an emergency.”

  Well, it was my emergency, anyhow. The longer I kept those body parts, the greater the odds I’d get caught with them, and instead of finding a way back to vampirism, I’d spend my whole mortal life in prison, where I’d die of old age behind bars.

  There was no way in hell I was letting that happen.

  The man took another long look at me and then fired up his radio. Another security guard answered with “ten-four.” I crossed my arms over my chest and waited, the plastic bag dangling from my hand.

  The Factory was still under construction, although no work was being done right at the moment. The floors were still covered in tarps and the walls down here had been freshly painted an industrial gray. The chandelier that had hung in the entryway was gone, replaced by a stainless steel fixture. I suspected Cazimir would hate it, and I wondered if that was the point.

  I shifted uneasily, the trash bag in my hand getting heavier by the moment.

  Finally, another security guard came down the stairs, which had been stripped of their red carpet, leaving an ugly disparity between the edges of the wood, where there’d been no carpet for decades, and the pristine wood that had been covered. I wondered what the stairs would look like when the renovation was done or if any part of the Factory would be recognizable.

  “She says to come up,” the guard said, so I followed him up to a room on the third floor, different from the one I’d seen last time. He opened the door and then pulled it closed shut behind me, leaving me alone in the pitch-black room.

  My human eyes couldn’t make anything out. I didn’t move, but my heart was a jackhammer against my ribs. I waited for Lark to do something and sincerely hoped that something did not include tearing out my throat.

  “Well?” Lark finally said.

  “Can I get some light? Human eyes, remember?” I said, trying to keep my tone even. She could hear my jackhammer heartbeat, but I was determined to present an air of calm despite my palpable fear.

  I could practically hear Lark smile in the blackness, amused at my human weakness. A lamp flicked on. Lark was seated at a table. A queen bed sat in the middle of the room, bedding mussed. Lark wore a dressing gown, the kind of thing people used to wear to bed in the Victorian era. No doubt she’d been sleeping.

  Vampires don’t need to sleep like people do. They can go days without feeling tired. But there are consequences to staying awake much longer than forty-eight hours at a time: the less a vampire sleeps, the more blood they need in order to thrive. Spending a few days wakeful and busy doesn’t make much difference, but more than that and their blood intake has to increase or they’ll get sluggish. Blood is a commodity. Sleep is easier.

  Lark was as radiant as ever. She smiled, revealing her fangs. “Better?”

  “Yeah,” I said. My heart didn’t slow its pounding, though.

  “What is it you need at this hour, Henri? Some of us are still immortal and enjoy our quiet time.”

  I winced at the remark. She knew I would. “I have a problem.”

  L
ark quirked an eyebrow in question. In response, I lifted the trash bag and undid the knot that tied it closed. Then I upended it and dumped the contents on the table. The dead guy’s head thudded against the wood and rolled a little, finally stopping with its lifeless eyes facing Lark.

  If Lark was surprised, she did a damn good job of not showing it.

  “You know this guy?” I asked.

  Lark stared at the head for a long moment. The face was a little messed up from the effort of getting it detached from the body, but he was still recognizable to anyone who’d known him. “No,” she finally said. “Who was he?”

  “He attacked me last night with a stake.”

  Lark looked from me to the lifeless head and frowned. “So you killed him?”

  “I fought him off and he ran. And then someone left his body in my apartment.”

  “I see,” Lark said.

  “I don’t think you do. This is the third exsanguinated corpse that’s been left directly in my path this week.” I gestured to the head on the table, the base of its spine jutting from the neck thanks to my crude hack job. I’d basically had to kick the head off to sever the spine and there was a dent on the back of the head to prove it. Body disposal isn’t easy without super strength. “Whoever is doing this is clearly trying to get my attention. Now they have it. So, who is it?”

  In reply, Lark zipped across the room. One moment she was sitting and the next she was at a desk against the far wall. Vampires can move so fast it looks almost like teleportation to the human eye. It was completely unsettling to my now-mortal eyes and I struggled to keep my composure. She opened a drawer and pulled out a laptop. Then she was back at the table, clicking keys.

  “It seems we have a shared enemy,” she said. She turned the computer around so I could see the screen.

  There was an article from the Seattle Siren, an alt-weekly newspaper that was distributed around the area for free. They covered fringe news and smaller issues that often didn’t make the Seattle Times or bigger, national media.

  The headline of the article Lark had pulled up read, Vampire Killings! Second Body Drained of Blood Found on Cap Hill.

  I scanned the article, which was about Carrie’s murder and the discovery of her body by a couple walking a dog. She was the one on my street, which was a risky move given the number of people around at all hours, and had probably been discovered quickly by the next people to happen by. It mentioned the body in the dumpster as well, but though the word vampire appeared in the headline and again in the article once, it was clear the reporter didn’t really believe in monsters.

  Lark sat statue-still, her expression an indecipherable mask. I swallowed a comment about how I’d already warned her about these murders. They hadn’t mattered until they’d become a threat to her personally.

  “No one really believes it’s a vampire,” I said, pushing the computer back at her.

  “Not yet,” she said. She shut the computer and then met my eyes. “Henri, places like this Factory exist as safe houses for immortals. The person who maintains them has a responsibility to the supernatural community to keep the mundane-minded humans from discovering our existence. Cazimir understood that. He called himself King, but really, he was a diplomat and a protector.”

  I wondered if Caz would agree with that assessment. “Most people could have a vampire’s fangs in their neck and still make excuses,” I said. “Insist it was swamp gas or a diseased mosquito.” In my experience, most people don’t want to believe in monsters and will erect giant walls of denial around any evidence that might suggest the existence of things that go bump in the night.

  “Perhaps. But there are few laws among our kind that will be enforced. Leaving blatant evidence of your kills is one. You know that, Henri.”

  I did. Vampires are not a collective. There is no Vampire Charter. No one signs a Vampire Contract when they’re turned. But there are a few rules—mostly common sense—that, if broken, will get a vampire hunted down and slaughtered. Leaving bodies and evidence behind so it’s noticed by humans is a big one. There may not have been a queen in a castle to send soldiers to arrest these rule-breakers, but vampires are protective of their secrets and tend to police each other. Sooner or later, reckless vampires are destroyed.

  “And what? You want me to stop whoever it is?”

  She didn’t answer, which was answer enough. I scoffed.

  “You might have noticed that I’m pretty human right now. If you want me to go up against a murderous vampire reckless enough to dump bodies in the open, you’re going to need to help me fix that.”

  She shook her head. “No one knows what your blood might do to another immortal. Even if I were willing to turn you again, that’s a risk I am unwilling to take, and that holds true for most of us. Besides, Sean would never allow another to do it.”

  “If he won’t do it himself, then it’s not up to him,” I snapped. I didn’t give a fuck what Sean would “allow.” If he wasn’t going to turn me back, he could piss off.

  Lark did not bother to argue. Instead, she said, “You are going to stop this person regardless, because you have no choice.”

  Heat radiated through my veins. “Are you threatening me?” I sounded incredulous, but if she wanted, Lark could do worse than that. Better a threat than snapping my neck. I still didn’t have to like it.

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Henri. I simply mean that this person has targeted you. They’re unlikely to stop, now that they’ve left a body in your home.”

  The heat in my veins froze to ice. She was right. I had to stop this person, vampire or not, because they weren’t going to stop on their own. No one who litters bodies around is going to put an end to their game until they reach their goal, and whatever that goal was, there was no way it would be good for me.

  I swallowed. My mouth felt hot. “You really have no idea who’s behind this? No mortals angry that Cazimir is gone?” I thought of the woman who’d threatened me, Lilith. “No vampires who hate the Cure?”

  Lark looked at me like I was stupid. “Of course people hate you and hate the Cure. It undermines everything the mortals wish to become and everything the immortals wish to hold on to.”

  “Touché,” I said. “I mean, no one acting funny, no newcomers weirdly obsessed with Sun Walkers?”

  Even as I said it, I pictured Eva outside my place. If the whole Weeper thing was an act, she could be behind all of it. Something about that didn’t feel right. The hooded vampire with the dark hair was a better bet, but I’d never even met the guy. Hating me and the Cure was one thing. Hating me enough to put a corpse in my shower was taking loathing to another level.

  I described him to Lark, asked if he sounded familiar.

  She tapped her nails on the table, considering. “That’s a vague description,” she said finally.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t think to snap a photo while staring down a vampire alone in the dark.”

  “It could be a couple of people I know, but I’ve seen none of them in years.” She hesitated and then added, “Did you ask Cazimir about him?”

  “Of course,” I said, but something about her question bothered me. Like she knew more than she was letting on. “Why?”

  Lark shrugged. I felt a small ache behind my eyes, a sure sign of an exhaustion headache blooming.

  “If I knew who was recklessly risking the exposure of vampirekind, I’d have taken care of them already, I assure you,” Lark said. She stood, an indication this conversation was over. “Good night, Henri.”

  “The rest of the body is still in my trunk. I need to get rid of it.”

  Lark lifted the radio from her nightstand and called security. A moment later, the guard who’d shown me upstairs was back. Lark instructed him to deal with the “bags” in my trunk and I handed over my car keys. She dropped the head into the trash bag I’d left beside it on the table, and the guard took it without hesitation. He must have been very well paid.

  I left her room without another word and heade
d downstairs. Fiona was standing on the second-floor landing. She wore cotton pajama pants and a matching powder-blue tank top.

  She stared at me like a cat watched a mouse, gauging whether to pounce. My hackles rose. I was used to being a predator, and I really hated being prey. I swallowed, steeling my mortal nerves and ignoring the rapid-fire pounding of my heart.

  “Good morning,” I said, smiling my most vicious I’m-going-to-tear-your-throat-out smile. It wasn’t as effective without fangs, but it was the best I could do.

  She looked behind me, as if she expected to see someone else coming down the stairs, and I thought I caught a trace of fear in her eyes before her gaze snapped back to me. “You killed my maker.”

  “Aidan killed Thomas,” I said. Cazimir’s mortal lover had stuck Thomas with what he’d thought was the Cure in order to see how it worked. But the vial had been full of a werewolf serum that had destroyed Thomas, burning him up from the inside out.

  The hatred in Fiona’s laser eyes could have sliced through metal pipes. She spun on her heel and disappeared down the hall.

  My heartbeat didn’t slow until Lark’s human guards had finished emptying my car of body parts and I was safely behind the wheel of my car, with the sun coming through the windows so brightly that I needed sunglasses to see.

  Fiona was hardly the only vampire to hate me for the role I’d played in bringing the Cure to fruition. She wasn’t even the loudest. But if she believed she’d lost her sire because of it, her hatred was bound to run deeper than most.

  I tried to calm my nerves, but the adrenaline left me shaky and unsettled.

  As I pulled into a lucky spot a block away from my building, a cold chill brushed over my skin. Was Fiona the one leaving the bodies? If she hated me that much, I supposed it was one way to make a point, if an absurdly roundabout one. She struck me as the sort to be more direct with her ire. Then again, hatred had a way of defying logic.

  Chapter 9

  I slept until one that afternoon, which gave me less than six hours in bed. It wasn’t really enough. As a vampire, six hours could keep me going for two days, but as a mortal, it left me feeling groggy and unable to stop yawning.