‘That is not exactly covering much,’ Mike pointed out.
‘Everyone’s gone to bed by now and it covers me… a bit… just in case.’ She slipped quietly out of the door and crossed the landing to the bathroom, moving quickly, but as quietly as possible in the dark. She was reaching for the door handle when the door opened by itself and she found herself looking at Dione.
‘Oh,’ Dione said. She looked almost as surprised as Leanne and stepped back a pace. She was dressed in the robe Leanne had bought her. Leanne could see the shadows of her breasts through the sheer, silky fabric. Her nipples dimpled the cloth. ‘You look beautiful, Leanne,’ Dione said after a second. ‘Mike was so worried over buying you something.’
‘Uh… You think it looks good on me?’ Trying to rally her composure, Leanne brought her hand up to her head and cocked her hip in what she thought might be a sexy model pose. The teddy was quite brief, a sort of halter bra connected to a thong by a cross of fabric over her stomach. The fabric itself was a mesh with black roses appliquéd onto it. Leanne was acutely aware that, with the bathroom light full on her, everything showed.
‘He went for something a little more risqué than I expected, but you can carry it off.’ Dione knew she should be apologising and leaving, but she could smell the sex on the girl and it was just too much to ignore. ‘Very sexy,’ Dione said.
‘Thank you,’ Leanne replied, focusing very hard on not stammering. ‘That robe really works for you too.’
Dione ran a hand over the fabric, down her stomach where it was, thankfully, a double layer and opaque. Leanne watched the hand move. ‘It feels good against my skin,’ Dione said. ‘Thank you for the gift.’ She stepped forward and Leanne held her breath, but Dione stepped aside as soon as she was through the door. ‘It’s all yours.’
‘Right.’ Leanne slipped quickly into the bathroom and closed the door.
Dione turned to her room with a sigh. So much for not making things worse.
~~~
The sound of piano music drew Mike down the stairs. It was a light, rolling tune, classical, possibly a pastoral, but Mike did not recognise it. His mother had taught piano after his father died, but he rarely heard her play anymore. Maybe Dione was up and had asked about the piano in the corner of the lounge.
It came as a surprise, then, when he walked into the lounge and found Georgina sitting in her chair with a mug of coffee while Dione sat at the piano, fingers drifting across the keys with grace and precision.
‘Isn’t she good?’ Georgina said. ‘At least as good as me.’
‘Yeah… I didn’t know she played,’ Mike said.
‘The flute too.’
‘Courtesans,’ Dione said, ‘were expected to be able to do more than entertain in the bedroom. I spent about thirty years in Japan as an oiran, in the Edo period. I was tayū class. I learned flute there, among other things. They called me “The White Lady.”’ She cocked her head and segued into something more uptempo. ‘Leanne’s coming down.’
‘I’ll make coffee,’ Mike said, heading for the kitchen.
‘You play piano too?!’ Leanne exclaimed when she arrived.
‘I’m multi-talented,’ Dione replied, grinning, and shifted into something more like jazz.
~~~
‘This,’ Winthrop said as he looked over Mike’s book, ‘is a thing of beauty. Of course, he was writing down the mythology rather than the facts, but it’s still a fascinating work.’
‘Check out the page for “mora,”’ Mike suggested and Winthrop leafed through to find it.
‘Oh…’
‘That looks just like Dione, doesn’t it?’
‘It should do,’ Dione said. ‘I spent a week posing for it. I’m fairly sure he just liked looking at me in a sheet. The vampire one was quicker.’
‘You met him?!’
‘Obviously. I was heading east, generally, away from the councils, and I came across this strange little man who recognised me for a vampire and didn’t seem especially bothered. And then he asked if I’d pose for the paintings. I figured, why not?’
‘Huh. Oh, what’s an oy-ran?’
‘Oiran. An upper-class “woman of pleasure.” Yūjo were the general sex workers, but oiran were a cut above, expected to be able to entertain in many ways. They were replaced by the geisha, to a large extent. There were two classes, tayū at the top and kōshi below.’
‘Does that mean you can do that tea ceremony thing?’
‘Actually, yes.’
Mike grinned. ‘Is there anything you can’t do?’
‘I’ve yet to master turning into a bat.’
‘Huh. Hey, that story you told last night, the Garibaldis. How much of that was true?’
‘The names were different. The vampire was a carpathian I’d been tracking for several months. By the time I arrived in the area and learned he’d been busy, he had already taken “Alexandrina” and “Paulo” was dead, his throat ripped out when he tried to stop the bastard. I was the one who found him, and a rather terrified filia, in a cave in the hills.’
‘Alexandrina,’ Mike said, nodding. ‘Filia are brand new female vampires. I may be getting the hang of Latin, a bit.’
‘I ended the carpathian, finally, and Alexandrina was allowed to go on, but she never got over Paulo’s death or what she now was. The following summer she threw herself onto a bonfire.’
‘Not quite the happy ending you told last night.’
‘Happy endings,’ Winthrop said, ‘are not as common as we would like.’
Dione gave a shrug. ‘I’m still enough of a romantic, despite my age, to believe in them anyway.’
27th December.
Despite the fact that Mike walked to the crime scene, he was there when Dione arrived, talking to the detective who had caught the case.
‘Mike,’ Dione said, nodding to her partner, ‘and it’s… Dolan, right?’
Dolan smiled as though he had just won a prize. ‘Yeah, good of you to remember. Seamus Dolan. I remember Mike from when he was with the thirty-second.’
‘Back in my uniformed days,’ Mike said. He held up a plastic evidence bag with a metal object inside, like a crucifix with the top broken off. ‘What do you make of this?’
Dione took the bag and examined the object inside. It did look as though something had been broken off the top of it: clean metal glinted irregularly in the overhead lights of the apartment. ‘Broken dagger of some kind. Homemade, from the looks of it.’
‘With a square cross-section.’
‘Yeah… Could be. Dolan, you’re going to want to talk to Detective Oliver in Central Park, see if the cases tie in. Where’s the body? Probably headless.’
‘No body,’ Dolan said. ‘There was an attempt to make one. Someone set light to the guy who lived here, but the paramedics said they had a pulse or something and they rushed him to Harlem.’
‘Leanne’s on A and E this evening,’ Mike said. ‘Maybe she’s got him.’
‘Maybe,’ Dione said. Now that she knew about the burns, she was seeing evidence of a fire around one of the chairs: burned fabric on the furniture, burned carpet around it. ‘Doused the guy in something and set light to it?’
‘Lighter fluid, we think,’ Dolan said.
‘If someone walked into your home and squirted lighter fluid on you, would you sit there and take it?’
‘Well, no.’
‘And they say he was alive when they took him away?’
‘That’s what they said.’
Dione frowned at nothing in particular and Mike said, ‘Maybe he missed. Knife in the chest has to hurt.’
‘Missed?’ Dolan asked.
‘The heart. This guy thinks he’s killing vampires, so he rams a square-bladed knife through their heart to stop them moving. Of course, it does, because a knife in the heart will do that.’
‘I thought it had to be a wooden stake.’
‘Depends which book you read.’
‘No,’ Dione said, ‘there’s something n
ot right about this. And why’d he switch to fire? He cut the heads off the couple in the park.’
‘Maybe he’s watched Blade too many times,’ Dolan suggested. ‘“Getting tired of chopping you up, thought I’d try fire.” Come to think of it, Blade uses silver stakes.’
‘Loved that movie,’ Mike said, smiling reminiscently.
‘Wesley Snipes,’ Dione said. ‘Dodgy vampire mythology, but you can’t fault Wesley Snipes. Mike, get on to the hospital and check the status of our possible vic, would you?’
Mike pulled out his phone. ‘I’ll try the shortcut way first before I work through all the admin.’
‘Good plan.’
~~~
Leanne felt her phone vibrate against her thigh and ignored it. ‘I’m calling it. Official ToD is… eleven thirteen, but if he was alive when he came in, I’ll eat my scrubs.’
Nurse Juliana Nails nodded sadly. She was a cute, mid-height girl with light chocolate skin, brown eyes, and bobbed hair which was somewhere between brown and red. Generally, she looked happy, but not now. ‘How could someone do that to another human being?’
‘They’re sick? My boyfriend’s a cop. Between what he tells me and the things I’ve seen here, I may have a jaundiced view of people.’ She looked down at the corpse and sighed. The face was almost gone, blackened by the fire and burned through to bone in places. There was no hair. The chest was almost as badly damaged on the surface layers, but the fire had been put out before it could get into deep tissue. Her attention was drawn to the face. ‘Huh, that’s weird.’ With a gloved hand, she pushed what was left of the upper lip aside.
‘He’s got fangs?’ Nails said, eyes widening at the sight.
‘It’s a genetic thing. The weird thing is that I know someone else with the same problem. This isn’t her, obviously.’
‘If your friend is a her, then no.’
‘Strange to see the same defect when I didn’t even know it existed until I met her. What the Hell is that?!’ She had scanned down and seen something glint. Pressing around the area produced a piece of metal which was protruding through the ribs. ‘He’s got a chunk of something buried in his chest. Uh, get me some forceps and a kidney bowl. The cops’ll want it.’
It took some effort to pull out the six inches of metal spike which had been driven into the man’s chest. Leanne dropped it into the kidney bowl and frowned at it for a second. ‘Uh… chain of custody thing… Look, Juliana, could you watch this guy and that… thing.’
‘It kind of looks like a weird knife blade,’ Nails commented, peering at it.
‘Yeah. You make sure it stays there. I’m going to call my boyfriend. I have a feeling he might be on this case anyway.’
Leanne walked out of the curtained-off cubicle and retrieved her phone. She noticed that Mike had tried to call her and figured he was, indeed, after information about the John Doe she was dealing with. She hit the call-back button and got voicemail. ‘Damn, he probably rang admin.’ She waited a few seconds and was about to try again when her phone vibrated in her hands. Caller ID said it was Mike. ‘Hey,’ she said into the microphone, ‘are you calling about this unnamed body I was handed?’
‘Burned, maybe stabbed?’ Mike asked.
‘That would be the one. Definitely stabbed.’
‘Well, I can give you a name. He’s Aaron Quade, student at City College. I’m at his apartment. We wanted to know his status.’
‘I’d say cold and dead, but it’s a bit callous and he looks like someone lit a bonfire on his head. Also, I have some evidence for you. I’ve got my nurse watching–’
The scream from behind her made Leanne turn. It had sounded a lot like Juliana’s voice. ‘Hold on, Mike, there’s something…’ There was a crashing noise and Leanne bolted forward, pushing through the curtain without a thought. ‘Shit! Mike, get here fast. The body’s gone.’ She cut off the call before he could answer and rushed on through the other side of the cubicle. It was not just the body that was missing: Juliana Nails had vanished with it.
There was a service door behind the curtain and no sign of anyone about, so Leanne ploughed on, through the door and into a corridor with storerooms off it, a fire door at the end. That door was alarmed and there were no bells ringing, so whoever had grabbed Juliana was still in the building. Leanne moved down the corridor, listening, and slowly coming to the realisation that she was doing something really stupid. She stopped. The sensible thing to do would be to go back and get security. That was what she should do.
She paused as she heard something like a moan to her right. Was that door a little ajar? Maybe… Then that was where security should look first. ‘Move, Leanne,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Come on, move.’
The door was flung open and she had a brief image of blackened flesh and then a fist connected with her jaw and her vision went blurry. She felt herself falling and then hands grabbed the front of her scrubs and lifted her as though she was a rag doll, spinning her around and then slamming her back into the wall. A fist pounded into her stomach: once, twice… She heard something, maybe shouting, and she found herself falling, sprawling on the floor. Bells began to ring and she struggled to turn herself to the door her attacker had come from. She caught a brief glimpse of Juliana, sprawled on the floor of a store cupboard in a pool of blood, and then Leanne blacked out.
~~~
‘It just cut off,’ Mike said, again.
Dione pulled off a highly illegal manoeuvre around a car she decided was going too slowly and jerked her own vehicle back into lane before hitting oncoming traffic. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in worrying until we get there and find out what happened.’
‘I’m sure I heard someone scream.’
‘Yes.’ Dione slammed the car across the street, jammed it into a vacant spot near the hospital’s entrance, and was out and moving before Mike’s brain had registered they had stopped. He followed and heard the locks engage behind him.
‘Where did you learn to drive?’ he asked.
‘I took lessons from Henry Ford,’ she snapped, pulling her ID from her coat as she ran for the doors. Fire alarms were still sounding through the building and there was generalised chaos as people milled around, unsure of what to do, but flashing her shield at a nurse got a pointed direction and Dione set off at a rapid walk in the indicated direction. ‘Someone shut that bloody alarm off,’ she yelled as she walked.
Mike caught her as they reached the service door. The corridor was occupied by far too many people. When you had injuries in a hospital, there were no shortage of doctors and nurses, but there were also security guards and one NYPD uniform, the latter trying to clear extraneous people from the area. He was about to say something to Dione as she pushed through the crowd, but she lifted her badge to his face and then lifted her head.
‘Will everyone not directly involved in dealing with this incident please leave.’ The words seemed to cut through professional curiosity and worry. A second or two later, there were only two doctors, a nurse, two security guards, and the cop left. Dione looked at the uniform. ‘Where’s your partner?’
‘He went out the fire door. Witnesses reported the attacker escaping that way.’
‘Go after him, check on him. Both of you back here, make sure no one else comes or goes via that door.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Dione turned to a guard. ‘You secure the other door. No one in or out.’ She got a nod and both guards went: there was likely nothing to do now that the police were taking control. Dione turned and looked around at the scene before stepping closer. Leanne was on the floor and the nurse and one of the doctors were busy sliding a backboard under her. There appeared to be no wounds, but Dione could smell blood, quite a lot of it.
Stepping closer, Dione asked, ‘How is she?’ before Mike could gather his wits to ask himself.
‘This one is bruised and unconscious,’ one of the doctors replied. ‘Maybe a concussion. We’re being cautious about moving her, but we think she’
s probably okay. The other one…’
Dione stepped around him to look in the storeroom. That was where the smell of blood was coming from. A nurse lay there in a pool of it, eyes still staring at the ceiling. The neck of her scrubs had been torn open and part of the sturdy, white, cotton bra she was wearing was visible. The wound to her neck was not a clean bite, but Dione had seen wounds like it before.
‘All right.’ Dione turned, stepped up to Mike, and gripped his shoulders. ‘We need to work. The doctors will take care of Leanne. There is nothing you can do for her that they cannot do better.’ She enunciated the last sentence firmly and carefully. Mike looked into her eyes for a second and then nodded. ‘Good. Call Mary and get her to send an ME here for the nurse. Tell her to ask Winthrop to come over and handle the forensics personally.’
‘He’ll do that?’ Mike asked, his voice sounding a little numb, even to him.
‘She’s one of us, even if she’s not in the unit. You’re in charge here; handle it like any other crime scene as soon as they’ve moved Leanne.’
‘What are you going to do?’
Dione looked towards the fire door. ‘I’m going to see if I can track the bastard who hurt her.’
Outside, she checked on the two uniforms while she picked up the scent. Blood and vampire was not hard for her to locate, even in an urban environment, and she hurried off through the buildings and rapidly found herself stalking down Malcom X Boulevard, heading north. She took her time, not running, and a few minutes later she found herself looking at the 145th street subway entrance.
‘Damn,’ she muttered and pulled out her phone. ‘Mary? It’s me. Have you started running this Quade character?’
‘The basics,’ Mary said. ‘A carpathian, just out of filius. Moved here last fall to study classics.’
‘Right. See if he’s got a pass for the subway, and if he has, see if he’s used it in the last thirty minutes. If he has–’
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