“You guys may be able to see in the dark, but I can’t,” Tim explained. “I can barely see in daytime.” Normally the way he adjusted his glasses after that remark would have made her smile. Not now though. She could still smell blood, and it was chipping away at her self-control. If she’d been Dean’s age and hadn’t fed for as long as she had, she’d have been tracking the scent with the intent to eat whomever was bleeding.
After assuring themselves that Pastor Jameson was safe, for now, they rejoined Dean and Hobbes outside. They’d moved closer to the church, and the smell was even stronger. The light from Priscilla’s headlights allowed her to get a vague picture of the church, the steps, and the figure that was splayed out on them. The trail of blood that ran all the way up the sidewalk to the stairs looked like an oil slick in the moonless night.
The wavering beam of Tim’s flashlight illuminated the figure on the stairs and Priscilla recognized the man in suspenders, with a long honey-colored beard. It was matted with blood, and his formerly white shirt was now crimson, and stuck to his chest.
Absalom Nicholson lay prone and unbreathing on the church steps, an aerosol can full of spray paint still clutched in one hand. His neck had been torn open, savaged like a wild animal had gotten hold and shaken the life from him. Only one thought sprang to mind.
Absalom had been killed by a vampire, and for all Priscilla knew, she was standing next to one of his murderers.
Chapter Four
“This has become a depressingly common occurrence,” Arthur said with a sigh. He leaned heavily against the bars of the cell she was currently inhabiting. “I’m sorry about this, Priscilla. But Agent Winthrop insisted on this precaution after you called this in. Feds trump state and local authorities every time.”
“Of course he did,” she muttered. The man really did seem to have it out for her, didn’t he?
She wasn’t alone in the cell. All five of them were here, including Maddison, who looked bewildered and upset to find herself once more in a cage. She’d been accused of a murder only months before, after Priscilla had found her trying to perform life-saving aid on a dying man. It hadn’t been fair then, and it wasn’t fair now. She hadn’t been anywhere near this body when it had been discovered. Priscilla could understand why she, Dean, and Logan Hobbes were in a cell. They’d been in close proximity to a fresh, exsanguinated body. That was enough to give anybody pause.
It made even less sense why Diane Webb was here. She’d been living in Bellmare for only half a year, and kept herself cloistered in the bookstore she ran. Secondhand Spellbooks was a cozy place to stay, if you had a few hours to kill and the money for coffee and a book. Diane Webb wasn’t even tangentially connected to Priscilla or the victim. Priscilla had visited the bookstore only once, and that had been a clandestine meeting arranged by Anna. Priscilla had been fighting with Arthur at the time, and she’d had to somehow pass on the clues she’d uncovered.
“When are we getting out of here?” Maddison asked in a squeaky tone that sounded nothing like her usual gentle voice. “My mom’s going to need help with Dad at home. I can’t stay.”
“And you don’t think that all of us have better things to do?” Dean muttered, giving her a gimlet glare. “I’d rather be pretty much anywhere but here.”
Diane let out a shrill laugh. It startled Priscilla. She stared at Diane. She hadn’t known the straight-laced woman was even capable of making a sound like that. She looked like she’d stepped off the streets of Chicago circa 1920.
She’d undoubtedly been a trendy woman back then, and it showed in her clothing. Every time Priscilla saw Diane around town she was sporting her vintage wardrobe, salvaged from the early days of her humanity. Today she wore a long-sleeved black dress that would have been hell to wear if she were anywhere but in an air-conditioned building. A black cloche hat with a giant plume of feathers obscured most of her caramel-colored bob and one eye. And to top it all off, the woman seemed to have an endless supply of pearls. The strand she wore today looped around twice and nearly reached her navel.
Diane clearly valued her past. It made Priscilla sort of regret burning all the dresses she’d worn as a Puritan girl as soon as she could reasonably get away with doing so. Sort of. Some things she just wasn’t going to go back to wearing. Like bonnets.
“I’m pretty sure you’d rather be dead than living in this small town,” she said with another half-hysterical bark of laughter. “I’ve heard you and Hobbes skulking around in the back of my shop in the evenings, talking. You know, in my day, men didn’t complain about their lot in life so long as you slipped them some brown plaid.”
“Some what?” Dean asked, scowling at her.
“Scotch whiskey,” Priscilla explained wearily.
She didn’t like where this was going. She’d never actually been in close proximity with this many vampires before, as she’d been the only one in Bellmare for a number of years. She didn’t want to know what would happen if things devolved into violence. Even after Hobbes had moved here, she’d still been the sole monster in town, so far as everyone knew. Out of sight, out of mind, she supposed, and Hobbes was almost always out of sight.
Dean sneered at Diane. “Yeah, maybe I’d be okay with it too, if I’d ever gotten to the age where I could drink. Hell, if I could even taste the stuff now. I can’t get properly drunk without filtering the alcohol through someone else’s blood first. Tell me how that’s fair.”
“Fair?” Diane’s thin eyebrows disappeared under the brim of her hat. “You think any of this is fair? None of us wants to be here.”
Priscilla wasn’t sure if Diane meant that none of them wanted to be here, in this jail cell specifically, or more broadly that none of them wished to exist at all. Which was wrong. Despite all that had happened in her long and storied life, she wouldn’t wish herself out of this existence. There were much worse ways to exist than discreetly snacking on the living and making one’s way on the margins of society.
“Calm down, Webb,” Logan said in a gentle baritone. He had a surprisingly soothing presence for someone who preferred solitude. Priscilla generally found that loner-types gave off the barely-contained energy of a caged panther when they found themselves in circumstances such as these. Hobbes hadn’t said much when they’d first met, and hadn’t really given much protest when he’d been detained with her and Dean.
“Calm?” Diane’s voice shot up in indignation. “Calm? The boy—”
“Is young,” Logan managed to cut across her firmly without sounding rude. A feat, to be sure. Priscilla would have to take notes from him on how to argue civilly. “Were any of us well-adjusted at his age?”
“I’m right here, you know,” Dean muttered. “I can hear you.”
Diane sniffed, ignoring him. “My maker would not have tolerated these sorts of histrionics.”
“Not all of us had the luxury of having good makers,” Maddison said quietly. If anything good had come of the argument, it was the distraction it had afforded. The tension had gone out of Maddison’s thin shoulders and she was staring solemnly at Diane.
Diane had the decency to look abashed. “Of course. You were children when turned. It takes a special sort of monster to snatch you from your parents and make you into this.”
“I did not have a good maker either,” Hobbes informed her. “I was created as a weapon of war during Sherman’s March to the Sea. Flintlock pistols were less effective than guns in those days.”
Priscilla’s stomach did a little roll. How awful that must have been. At least she’d chosen this life out of a misguided sense of love. Hobbes had been used as a tool from the start.
Diane’s eyes met hers and gave her a searching look. “And you? How was your maker, since we have all decided it’s story time?”
“He was decent,” Priscilla said softly. “For the seven years before he left me.”
She looked away as pity flashed across Diane’s face. In vampire society, you didn’t abandon your children. It wasn’t done. T
here were an increasing number of modern-day-vampires who did so to avoid prosecution for turning a minor, but that was a new phenomenon. For vampires as old as she or Logan, childe and sire were supposed to be as thick as thieves. Most of them had common law marriages or domestic partnerships. Only on rare occasions did a sire die and leave their children alone.
What Jacques had done to her hadn’t been quite as bad as leaving a baby on the side of the road, in vampire terms. No, it was more like leaving a cold, hungry, and screaming toddler instead. At least the toddler had had a prayer of learning to fend for itself. The baby would simply have died.
Priscilla didn’t want Diane’s pity. She didn’t really need it. She ought to have aimed it at someone who deserved it, like Maddison or Dean. At least Priscilla had made a choice. She shook her head hard, trying to clear it. She didn’t want to think of Jacques Amaury anymore than she had to.
She was saved from any further conversation by the approach of Jack Riggs and Gabriel Winthrop, who approached the cell slowly. Jack Riggs was a broad man in his mid-forties. Despite that, he still had most of his hair, and only a little of it was gray. Priscilla attributed the silver at his temples and scalp to the stress of raising his children. He looked better in the uniform than almost anyone else, with the exceptions of Jamie—who had an unfair advantage of being a strapping young man of twenty-eight—and Arthur, who only kept in shape because he jogged with his daughter in the afternoon and evening most days.
“We’re ready,” Jack said, addressing Arthur. He didn’t even bother looking at Gabriel.
An outsider might have looked at it and blamed the strain on small-town prejudice, aimed unfairly at Gabriel. Priscilla knew better. Jack didn’t have a problem with vampires. He’d invited her over for dinner with his wife and kids often enough, even though she couldn’t eat his famed spaghetti and meatballs. He was certainly less prejudiced than Arthur who, until recently, had pretty much decided that they were all dangerous killing machines who were liable to snap at any moment.
No, Jack didn’t like this vampire. It was one of the many reasons why Priscilla liked him. He had good judgement.
Arthur gave her an apologetic look and held up a pair of cuffs. “Sorry about this. But he’s insisting. Hands through the bars.”
At first Priscilla didn’t understand exactly what he meant. He’d cuffed her before. It wasn’t until her skin broke out in a bright red rash beneath the metal that she understood. Silver cuffs. Perhaps not fully silver—that would make them too weak to serve their purpose against a vampire—but some kind of alloy. These undoubtedly belonged to Gabriel.
Silver was a universal constant when it came to vampires. Some vampires, like herself, had an aversion to objects that belonged to their human faith. She couldn’t step onto holy ground, hold a Bible, or wear a cross without hurting herself. Even praying made her feel slightly uneasy, but she did it anyway. Faith was not a good way to deter vampires in this modern age. More and more were atheist or agnostic. Deists had a general sort of faith but it wasn’t solid enough to mean that they were averse to anything. And it was difficult to tell by looking at a vampire what their faith might be. In the end though, absolutely all of them were allergic to silver, though not fatally so like werewolves.
She grimaced. “Is this really necessary?”
“Orders,” he grunted, and cast a sidelong glare at Gabriel. He either didn’t spot it or wasn’t acknowledging Arthur’s anger.
“Feds trump cop,” she said with a sigh. “Yeah. I remember.”
The remaining vampires could have rushed the door while it was still open. As skilled as Jack and Arthur were, they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the might of four determined vampires. Even Gabriel, with his superior strength, couldn’t fight off all of them. No one moved toward the door. All of them were better than that, and she knew it.
She was led to the interrogation room. It was a familiar place with stone walls, a single table in the middle of the room, and a large pane of two-way glass on one wall. Jack would probably be waiting on the other side of it, watching the interrogation and ready to jab his thumb on the intercom button to interject if Gabriel took things too far.
Priscilla settled herself into the chair opposite Arthur’s and waited patiently as he handcuffed her to it. He really ought to invest in a better-quality chair. She wouldn’t dream of breaking this one—small-town police departments had too little money already and she didn’t want him to have to replace it—but another supernatural creature might not feel the same way. At least if he got a metal chair, the rivets would be harder to pop if she needed to get away.
Arthur shot Gabriel one last dirty look before settling into the chair beside him. He was slouched in his seat, and reminded her of a petulant little boy at that moment. Gabriel, in contrast, was all stark efficiency as he laid out photos of the newest crime scene. The crime scene investigators must have been working a late night already to send someone out to catalogue the evidence so quickly.
The flashbulb of the camera had illuminated the scene. Without the scent to accompany them, it would have been easy to pretend the dark drag marks were oil, in the limited light available. Light exposed a multitude of things, all of which made Priscilla wince. Absalom had been scared right before he died. Sometimes, when God or fate was merciful, the victims didn’t see their deaths coming. This man had. His face was screwed up in an expression of pure terror.
There was a hole in his throat. It looked like a dog, or something with equally sharp teeth, had latched onto his neck and savaged it. It hadn’t been an easy death, but she could console herself with the fact that it had probably been quick.
Gabriel laid out several more photos and fixed her with a stare. “Care to explain how you came upon a body yet again, Miss Pratt?” he asked.
“You do seem to come across an unfortunate amount of them,” Arthur muttered.
“You say that like I want to be tripping over corpses everywhere I go,” she shot back.
Arthur shrugged. “I’m just saying. Life around you is never dull.”
Gabriel cleared his throat, drawing Priscilla’s attention back to his irritatingly handsome face. The vampire transformation gave everyone clearer skin. She wished he had an imperfection she could stare at, just so she could make him half as uncomfortable as he was making her.
“How did you come across Nicholson?”
“I was out with Maddison Baker,” she began.
“So you say,” he cut across her. “But she wasn’t in the van or anywhere near the scene of the crime when you called it in.”
“Because we split up.” She’d tried explaining this to the irritating vampire when he’d arrived on the scene with Bellmare PD. Arthur had been pretty much set to get her statement and turn her loose, but it had been Gabriel who insisted on bringing her in, along with every other vampire in town.
“To cover up evidence, no doubt.”
Priscilla glowered at him. “We were looking for Maddison’s father,” she said waspishly. “She called while you were violating my privacy and told me he was missing. He has early onset Alzheimer’s. He could have gotten lost or hurt while he was out and about.”
“A convenient excuse to allow you to leave the place you were supposed to be all evening.”
Priscilla flattened her palms against the table and stood, dragging the chair with her as she went. She didn’t care that it made a horribly strident sound as it scraped across the floor. “What is your problem?” she asked, leaning across the table to get into Gabriel’s face.
It wasn’t a good idea. He was a trained member of Parliament, one of their enforcers. You didn’t make it to that position unless you were dangerous. She couldn’t find it in herself to care about that in the moment though. She was hungry, she was cranky, and she wanted to go home.
Gabriel’s stare was cool. For a moment she thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he reached into his folder and drew out that manila envelope again. The envelope that contained the heads
hots of all the people who’d died under mysterious circumstances in Bellmare in the last year and a half. He waggled it at her and then set it on the table.
“These are my problems with you, Miss Pratt. Serial killers have a notoriously bad habit of injecting themselves into criminal investigations. You were a part of allegedly solving all of these cases. I find it interesting that anyone who inconveniences you either becomes your lackey, or dies as a result.”
She wanted to rail at him and shout that it was untrue. But she couldn’t, not truthfully. Priscilla had begun to question the sheer improbability that she, out of all the three thousand and some odd residents of Bellmare, should be the one who consistently found bodies. It didn’t happen every month—if she was lucky—but it did happen with distressing frequency. Was it sheer bad luck, or was there some sort of conspiracy going on? Perhaps the Almighty really did hate her.
Arthur spoke up when she didn’t. “Priscilla was instrumental in solving every single one of those cases.”
“An unqualified, unlicensed—”
“She’s a consultant,” Arthur said, cutting him off. “And has been since the Montgomery murders. I have every right to call in someone to give their professional opinion.”
“Her professional opinion,” Gabriel said, “should only concern confections, Chief Sharp. She is a baker, not a private investigator. My father was a smith, but you don’t see me offering my opinions on metallurgy to modern engineers, do you? She has no place in a police investigation.”
“That’s not your call to make,” Arthur said, and his tone brokered no argument. “And unless you’re going to call up to your superiors and yank this case right out from under me—which you can’t actually do unless a state’s jurisdiction invites you in—then you’re out of luck. Call someone further up the line if you want to make that happen, but for now I trust Priscilla. She had nothing to do with this.”
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