Dog Eat Dog World: Limited Edition Bundle (Black Dog)

by Hailey Edwards

  The only common thread between our victims had been gender. This one, being male, broke that trend.

  I stayed with him until backup arrived then left the techs to start processing the scene and hunted down Jones. He had taken the woman, Hazel Vasquez, to the table where we had eaten dinner. She sat hunched over a small glass of clear liquid that might have been water or something stiffer while Jones scribbled notes in his ever-present notebook. I walked up behind her but didn’t interfere with the rapport he had established.

  “Did you see anyone else near the victim?” he was asking.

  “A shadow,” she murmured. “It was this hunched, blackened thing. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.”

  “That’s why you decided to check on the man?”

  “Yes.” She rubbed her hands up her arms. “It looked…wrong.”

  “Did you see where it came from?” He was careful to ignore me, allowing me to act as an impartial observer. “Where it went?”

  “It ran toward the villa.” Her voice faltered. “It was more of a limp, really. I thought it would fall before it reached the patio.”

  “It? Do you think the person you saw fleeing was male or female?”

  “That thing wasn’t human.” Her hand flew to her throat. “There were puncture marks here.” A nervous laugh bubbled up her throat. “Madre would say it was el chupacabra, but that’s a silly superstition.”

  Jones graced her with a tight smile. Superstitions were rooted in reality, and our reality was far different from hers or her mom’s.

  “Wait here, ma’am, and an officer will drive you back to your hotel.” He stood and gestured over a marshal who had taken up a position similar to mine, content to watch Jones work, and he let her handle getting Ms. Vasquez back to her room. After the witness left, he crossed to me. “You sure know how to show a guy a good time.”

  Humor was the antidote to working one too many crime scenes, so I played along to dull the edge of horror that another life had been lost. “I aim to please.”

  His grin was a dimpleless flicker. “What did you find?”

  “Male victim. Marks on his neck mirror those found on the women. The scent I picked up on the first victim was present on him as well. He hasn’t been dead long. If I had to guess, I’d say our killer was dining around the same time as us.”

  Awareness a crime had been perpetrated while we sat less than a half mile down the beach caused the food that had been so delicious going down to roil in my gut. We couldn’t work twenty-four hours a day. We had to stop and eat sometime. But the fact I had let the case go, let myself enjoy Jones’s company, made it a bitter pill to swallow.

  “Don’t,” he said, reading me as though I were an open book. Perhaps for him I was. “This was not your fault. This didn’t happen because you let your hair down for a few hours.”

  “I know.” But knowing and accepting were two different things. “All the same, I think we should cool this, whatever this is, until we close the case.”

  “Is this a brush-off?” His shoulders tensed as though preparing for me to land a physical blow.

  Aware we were being watched by other marshals, and unwilling to provide more gossip fodder, I refrained from grabbing his hand. “No.” I pushed out a dramatic sigh. “There’s something about you, Jones. You’re too young and too pretty for me, but you’re also smart and—”

  “I have dimples,” he added sagely.

  I mashed my lips into a flat line.

  “I won’t hesitate to use them,” he warned. “I’ll give you until the case ends, but the second we get this nutjob locked up, I’m asking you out on a second date.”

  I almost protested the label, but I had been the one who slipped up and called dinner the D word. “Fine.”

  “One last question before we put this on hold.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Would you have let me kiss you good night?”

  I snorted and spun on my heel. “Guess you’ll never know, Dimples.”

  Chapter 6

  We searched the villa and the patio, which reminded me of a tropical garden spiked with enormous, trumpetlike umbrellas to protect guests from the sun portion of the sand and sun equation. We came up with nothing. No blood. No obvious tracks—there were simply too many footprints in the sand to distinguish one set from another. No convenient witnesses to point us thataway.

  “We’re missing something.” I leaned on the railing overlooking the beach and strived for perspective. “What was the killer doing on this end of the island? The other bodies were found within a half mile of each other. This one is two parishes away.”

  “You think it followed us.” He didn’t make it a question.

  “Is that so crazy?” I glanced at Jones, who had adopted the same pose as me. “Maybe it scented us at the scene and trailed us.”

  “Chupacabras are too animalistic to comprehend the idea of a car or travel,” he mused. “Looks like we’ve cleared our first suspect. The killer must possess higher reasoning skills, and speed, to track us this far. The average speed limit was forty-five miles per hour.”

  Fast and lethal with one heck of a parched throat. And then there was the smell to consider…

  “The volume of blood consumed is what worries me most.” Outside the fact three people had died to supply the killer. “My gut says we’re dealing with one killer. But the math doesn’t work. There must be more than one.”

  “Or it’s very, very thirsty.”

  A hazy idea coalesced in a swirl of memory, there and gone before I grasped it. “I need to call home.”

  He straightened, his brow furrowing. “Is everything all right?”

  “I want to ask Dad a few questions, that’s all. My blood requirements are negligible compared to what a true vamp requires. Since there are no coveys on the islands, it would be quicker to pester him than locate another vamp on the payroll to ask.”

  Jones indicated a table and chairs several yards away. “I’ll give you some privacy.”

  Unsaid was he wasn’t leaving me alone out here with a killer on the loose.

  I dialed home, and Dad answered on the first ring. “Lena?”

  “Hey, Dad. I have a few questions to ask you. About feeding.”

  “Are you having trouble?” The warmth in his voice dropped like a stone, and he zoomed into full papa-bear mode. Having a half-vamp kid involved a lot of trial and error, and Dad worried over my diet to the point of sending me bagged blood via courier with shot glasses hand-marked for my weekly allowance. That was after I turned away the men he paid to offer me their veins. Those had come with stopwatches to time my feedings. I figured it was the vampire equivalent of making plane noises while shoving a spoon in my mouth. “Are you still in Nevis? I can catch a flight if you—?”

  “Daddy,” I said firmly. Well, as firmly as a grown woman falling back on childhood mannerisms got. “It’s for a case. I’m fine. I’m eating well. I’m drinking well. I’ve even gained back five pounds.”

  Only fifteen more to go until I reached my pre-Edelweiss weight.

  “Oh.” He brightened. “That is good news. I’m happy to help however you need. What’s on your mind?”

  “How much blood does a full-blooded vamp require?” I left the timeframe open for his interpretation.

  “The average human body contains around ten pints of blood. A vampire on a regular feeding schedule can make do with one pint taken every five to seven days.”

  That was about what I expected him to say. “How bad off would a vamp have to get to drain a human?”

  The line went quiet for a moment, and then Dad exhaled. “Some of the older vampires sleep for decades at a time. When they rise, they’re ravenous and not quite sane. They can drain three to five humans before getting too blood drunk to keep gorging. Generally, when they wake, they remain in a stupor for up to a year before slowly regaining awareness and requiring another feeding.”

  “That’s regulated now, right?” Since vamp law didn’t ap
ply to me or any other dhampir, our mixed heritage forcing us outside their hierarchy, I wasn’t up to date on the edicts of their ruling body. “There would be records of any ancients hitting the snooze button?”

  He paused. “Yes.”

  “I sense a but coming.”

  “But,” he continued, “ancients who slumbered prior to implementation are not part of the public record.”

  I did the math in my head. “That would mean any vamps not included in the census would be close to a century old. Can vamps sleep that long?”

  “It’s possible. The older the vampire, the longer their rests when they retire from the world. What is the purpose of these questions? Do you believe you’ve stumbled across an ancient?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. Tell him yes, and he would contact the vamps to handle the problem in-house. Tell him no, and I might be lying to him and complicating the case. I chose the middle road. “Locals think it’s a chupacabra.”

  “I thought those were native to Latin America.” He sounded intrigued. “You do meet the most interesting people.”

  A harsh breath burst from my lungs. Yeah. I did. And some of them tried to kill me. A few of them almost succeeded.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I only meant to tease.”

  “I know.” I monitored my breathing, got everything back on track. “And before you ask, I’m fine. I’m dealing. It just hits me sometimes.”

  “Understandable.”

  “The techs are leaving,” Jones said from far too close. “We ought to get some sleep too. There’s a meeting in the morning, and we’re expected to be there. You in particular, since you were the first on scene.”

  “Who’s that?” A growl entered Dad’s voice.

  My gaze flicked to Jones. “He’s my partner.”

  “What does he mean we ought to get some sleep?”

  “Dad.” Heat rushed into my cheeks. “It’s not like that.”

  Jones leveled a stare on me that called me on my bull.

  “Okay, so maybe it will be like that, but it’s not right now. Love you. Gotta go. Bye!”

  “Your dad didn’t seem thrilled with the idea of you dating,” Jones observed.

  “I’m his baby. Of course, he doesn’t want me to date.”

  The clouds shrouding the moon caught his attention. “So, it’s not because you told him what I am.”

  “My folks are in a mixed marriage. I’m a half-blood. Do you really think they care if you are too?”

  “Some parents do.”

  Protocol be damned, I covered his hand with mine. “I’ll let you in on a little secret.” I leaned close. “I’m a grown woman. I make my own choices. If my dad threatened to greet the sun over me dating a half elf, I would send him packing with a bag of marshmallows.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.” He rolled his thumb over my knuckles.

  “Okay, so I would chain him to a chair in the basement, hose him with SPF 100 in case he escaped, and then call Mom. The point is, I can date whoever I want, and the rest of the world can deal.”

  “I think I’m going to like being yours,” he murmured.

  Heat swirled through my chest, and my pulse skipped. “You’re not mine.”

  “But I will be.”

  The way he said it sounded like a promise.

  Chapter 7

  I didn’t sleep much that night. Too much information pinging around in my head. The victims. The witness. Jones. And the conversation with Dad. The last part pulled what had troubled me from the start into focus, and I said so at the meeting in front of the rest of the task force the next morning.

  “I think we’re looking for an ancient.” The weight of so many eyes on me dried the saliva from my tongue. Standing there put me on display. This way no one had to sneak peeks at the crazy transfer. Leading the meeting gave them an excuse to stare to their heart’s content. Jones shot me two thumbs-up from the back of the room where no one would notice, and I soldiered on. “The punctures are too precise, and a scent lingers on two of the bodies. We should have the results of the saliva tests this afternoon. That will confirm we’re dealing with one killer.”

  The marshal who had driven Ms. Vasquez home the night before raised her hand. “That’s a lot of blood. Could one vampire hold so much? That must be…” she made a mental calculation, “…thirty pints.”

  Most folks didn’t know the math. That she did made me wonder what she was, though I wasn’t so rude as to ask. “I called a consultant last night.” They didn’t need to know it was my dad. “He confirmed the only time a vamp consumes blood in that quantity is after they’ve awakened from a deep sleep.”

  The outpost director perked at that, no doubt gleeful to have some other branch to blame the deaths on. “We’ll have to get the vampire council involved if that’s the case.”

  “We can’t sit on our hands and wait on them to clean up this mess,” Jones protested. “We’ll have to keep making sweeps. Maybe last night will spook him, and he’ll hole up until they get here.”

  “Vamps maintain a strict hunting territory,” I added. “That our perp has ventured outside his zone is worrisome, but I have a theory about that.”

  “Last night you thought it was possible he followed us,” Jones said, oblivious to the stares his statement generated. I hadn’t been ready for the others to know there was—or might be—an us. “Are you saying you think he followed you?”

  A smart man was Dimples. He had picked up on the link as I had known he would. “As I said, vamps maintain a tight perimeter, but the one thing guaranteed to send a vamp seeking outside his holdings is having another vampire invade his territory. He might have tracked us and killed on what he assumed was my land to prove a point.”

  “Don’t the vamps keep records of this kind of thing?” another marshal asked.

  “They do.” I was grateful to have done the legwork last night so I had answers this morning. “But if this had been a monitored sleep, the vampire wouldn’t be on the loose now. Assuming that’s what we’re dealing with, he would have been woken at a predetermined time and been fed and cared for until he was at full strength. The process takes around a year.”

  “Are you saying this vamp is a rogue?” Director Smith sat up straighter. Labeling him as a rogue, basically any vamp who posed a threat of discovery to the supernatural community based on their erratic behavior, put the vamp squarely in our territory.

  “Most vamps sleep for a decade or so, long enough for the world to be new but for their mortal acquaintances to still be alive. If our vamp is an ancient and he went to sleep without someone to wake him, or that person died before he could complete his task, then the vamp rose on his own. It’s possible he’s slept away a century, which means he has no point of contact. No one to care for him. He’s insane. Bloodlust has clouded his judgment, and the advances in technology must terrify him.” Murder was murder, but I had to add, “He hasn’t torn out any throats or otherwise tormented his victims that we can tell. All signs indicate he’s used a lure when feeding. Some part of him might be reachable.”

  From the expressions pinned on faces throughout the room, I gathered we had all come to the same realization. The vamp council would pardon an ancient who rose alone, left to fend for himself. As long as he was captured before humans got wise to his killing spree.

  Director Smith rubbed his forehead. “I’m calling the vamps. They can send their team. We’ll continue sweeps from dusk until dawn and try to minimize the casualties until backup arrives.” He grunted. “This is all we need. This would have been easier if the killer really had been that goat-sucking thing.”

  The meeting broke up after that, and we were told to return to our rooms or homes to rest up for the night shift. Jones and I had ridden together, so we returned to our hotel and parted company in the hallway. I’m not sure how he spent his day, but I burned through mine hunched over my laptop, trying to chart the vamp’s territory and digging for any lore or missing vamps listed in the conclave datab
ase that might explain this one’s identity or origins.

  Around four in the afternoon, I was wiped and crawled in bed to catch some shut-eye. I noticed the light on my phone flashing, groaned when I realized I hadn’t unmuted it after the meeting, and checked my messages. I had one. From Dad.

  “I asked a friend about your predicament, and he’s got an idea of who you might be dealing with. Call me before engaging.”

  Two hours until dark. So much for sleep.

  Chapter 8

  After a restless few hours of failed attempts at sleep, the sun went down, and I dialed up Dad. He answered with a groan that told me I must have woken him. He was usually an up-at-dusk kind of guy, so his muzziness put me on alert.

  “Everything okay?” I led with instead of hello.

  “Stayed up drinking with the friend I mentioned. Feels like someone struck my head with a hammer.”

  Dad was old school. Vein only. Bagged blood need not apply. Usually Mom sustained him, but when her job took her out of town, he visited DeLuca’s, a blood bar. Same for when he entertained fangy friends. Basically, vamps picked donors off the menu and sipped their meal—wrist only—at a table in a mockery of the human dining experience.

  That right there was enough for me to swear off vamps and their derivatives. I couldn’t deal with my significant other getting toothy with another woman. Or man.

  “No.” He snorted at the very idea. “We spend a few hours at DeLuca’s, sampling one of his newest concoctions.”

  The only way to get a vamp drunk was for them to dine on inebriated humans. Though I suppose there was just as much variety in how you got them tipsy as in any of the other myriad ways Presley DeLuca kept her clients happy.