“What if there was a witness?” I asked, staring at the empty spot where I had seen the girl.
“Who?” Mira inquired. She moved out of the lamplight and back into the shadows. I looked over in time to see her putting her glasses back into her pocket, staring in the same spot I had been just moments ago. Possibly she had seen the girl too.
“What about a homeless person? This has got to be an area where they occasionally gather,” I suggested.
Mira frowned, crossing her arms over her stomach as she looked up and down the alley. “It’s definitely possible,” she slowly conceded but then shook her head. “But the odds of finding that person are pretty slim. They’re not likely to go to the police. I would need to meet the witness so I could pick the image of the killer out of his or her mind. The chances are pretty slim.”
“True, but we don’t have much to go on at the moment,” I reminded her. “We haven’t even narrowed it down to a particular race.”
“I’ll call Daniel later,” Mira sighed. “See if I can get him to question some of the locals.”
We silently walked to Mira’s car, bogged down by our own thoughts. James lagged behind. In the silence of the night, I could hear his heart pounding in his chest. He was nervous about something.
“W—where do we go now?” he stammered.
“The morgue,” I replied, turning to look at him. “We need to look at the body and talk to the coroner. The way she died may tell us more about our killer.”
“Oh,” he whispered.
“I want you to stay behind. Start doing some more digging into the girl’s past. See what you can uncover,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he asked, though the relief was already evident in his tone.
“Yeah, get out of here. I’ll need you with me in the morning.”
With a quick nod, he wished Mira good night and briskly walked down the street, back to the hotel.
I turned to find Mira watching me with a strange look on her face. “Should I ask what that was about?”
“After the attack on Themis last summer, I think he’s seen enough of mangled dead bodies. He’s more useful to me researching Abigail Bradford, not passing out at the sight of her dead body,” I said.
To my surprise, Mira simply nodded and starting walking back toward her car, passing up the opportunity to mock me and my decision to set the eager researcher free.
But in truth, I shouldn’t have been surprised. We both had bigger issues on our minds. Was a new war brewing, and the catalyst the death of a human that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Had Abigail Bradford gotten in over her head? Or just ended up on the wrong side of a fight within the local pack? Lycans and nightwalkers were killed all the time. Heaven knows that I was more frequently than not the cause. Yet, no one digs into their deaths. The situation is quickly swept under the rug and the body disappears. Sometimes humans are caught in the middle regardless of whether they fully understand the situation or not.
Was this the case with the Bradford girl? Maybe, but there were other players lingering in the shadows. Creatures that would like nothing more than to see Mira’s head roll because humans were enlightened in her city ahead of schedule. There were factors I was afraid Mira wasn’t considering that could get us both killed.
“It seems doubtful a nightwalker killed her,” I hedged when we reached the car.
Mira looked over the roof of the black BMW, her eyes narrowed. Her whole body seemed to have tensed in the pregnant silence that hung between us. “But…” she prompted.
“What if the order had come directly from the coven? Just kill the girl. No feeding,” I suggested.
“No,” she said with a shake of her head. Her answer had come so quickly that I thought it was more from fear of it being a distinct possibility than actual knowledge.
“Even an Ancient?”
Mira didn’t reply, her eyes darting away from me to look at the side of the car. My heart did an odd little skip as I watched her expressive face turn over the implications. It was an angle she hadn’t considered. Until now, I think we had both considered the woman’s death to be accidental or an act of local revenge.
“I would have known if an Ancient had come into my territory,” she stubbornly said at last, pulling open her car door.
I opened my door and slid into the leather interior at the same time. “Not if you were in London,” I countered.
“If you’re implying that Ryan—” she began, but I quickly cut her off. Was Ryan working with the coven? Maybe, but doubtful. From what I had seen, the warlock didn’t play well with others. He liked being in control of a situation, and a herd of nightwalkers with their own agenda would not allow him to remain in control. Right now, I think he saw Mira as more malleable than trying to work with the whole coven.
“No. I think someone might have taken advantage of your brief absence,” I ventured, trying to ignore the fact that if I was even slightly right, we were in serious trouble. “The Ancient could be in the city now. Jabari cloaked himself from you. I’m assuming this isn’t a skill unique to him.”
“Jabari was never in that room. I know his scent as well as my own,” she argued. Mira shoved the key into the ignition, but didn’t turn on the car, seeming content to sit in the darkness.
“It doesn’t have to be Jabari. Any Ancient. Anyone with a grudge. What about the vampire from Machu Picchu?”
“Stefan.” Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
Months ago, Stefan had been sent by the coven to aid us in our ascent to the ruins on the mountain where the naturi were attempting to open the door between our worlds. I didn’t know how old he was, but judging by the power that rolled off him, he was fairly close to the thousand-year mark, if not already past it. He also didn’t seem to be a very big fan of Mira’s. Of course, neither were most of the vampires I had run across.
“My point is,” I stressed, trying to bring Mira’s dark thoughts away from whatever torture she was devising for Stefan. “Speeding along the Great Awakening meets with the desires of your liege and starting it in your city would give the coven yet another excuse to cut your heart out.”
Mira growled in the back of her throat, balling her right hand into a fist. She raised her hand to pound on the steering wheel, but I caught her wrist in my hand. The nightwalker’s glowing lavender eyes snapped to my face.
“You’ll hurt your ‘baby,’” I reminded her in a soft voice as I slowly released her wrist. The glow in her narrowed eyes instantly faded as a crooked smile lifted one corner of her mouth. Her skin was surprisingly cool to the touch with a somewhat waxy feel. I couldn’t begin to guess how long it had been since she had last fed. A grudging respect for the vampire began to take hold when I realized she hadn’t even made a move to bite me at the feeding earlier.
A new thought twisted in my gut, sending a wave of chills running up my flesh. Would I have stopped her if she had tried to bite me? Lost in one wave after another of mind-numbing pleasure, I couldn’t imagine pushing her away if she had come offering to send me along that next wave. Hell, my own face had been buried in her neck and I could clearly remember the feel of my own teeth running along her skin. Even now, something dark and primal demanded I taste her flesh, to drink her in so that she would become a part of me.
“The coven doesn’t need a fresh reason to confiscate my heart,” she said, her grim voice bleeding into the darkness.
“They already have ample reason to cause problems here,” I replied, forcibly pulling my thoughts back to the current quandary at hand.
“I know,” she whispered, turning the key. The engine turned over with a feral growl then settled into a steady purr that would have been the envy of any large cat. “This is all great speculation, but that’s still all it is. We need answers and I think we’ll have a few more after we have a look at the body and autopsy report.”
First, a rather posh apartment in the heart of the River Street club district, complete with body
outline, and now the morgue. Traveling with Mira, I always got to see some of the more interesting sights within a city.
THIRTEEN
The Savannah morgue was a large, one-story building squatting like a fat toad just on the outskirts of town. Made of faded yellow brick, the building sagged and slumbered in a dreary neighborhood that seemed to be weighed down by the nearby hospital.
Mira deftly pulled into the small parking lot in the rear and settled her car next to a white Lexus with gold trim shining in the overhead parking light. There was only one other car in the lot; a beat-up Chevy Nova with fading gray paint and a sign announcing that it was for sale. At a guess, one car belonged to the coroner and the other to the night watchman.
As we slipped out of the car, the back door swung soundlessly open, revealing a short, balding man in a dark suit. His black-frame glasses were balanced on his large, bulbous nose, making his eyes enormous and almost owlish in appearance. He held the door open as we approached, the stubby fingers of his left hand fiddling nervously with the buttons on his blazer.
“We’re in trouble,” he announced in a low voice as Mira stepped into the brightly lit interior. Her pale skin took on a strange iridescent glow under the harsh fluorescent light. It explained why I had never run across a vampire in the aisles of an all-night mega-store.
Mira’s shoes scraped along the battered white linoleum as she turned to look at the man. “What do you mean? Lose the body?” She looked over the rim of her pale blue sunglasses at him.
“Of course not!” he huffed, puffing up his chest a bit at the affront. He lifted his chin and hurried around me, the top of his head not quite reaching my shoulders.
Mira shrugged, throwing me a mischievous smile over her shoulder. “So much for hoping.”
“Who is he?” the man asked with a jerk of his head before continuing down the hall.
“Forgive my lack of manners,” Mira said. “Archie, this is an associate of mine, Danaus. Danaus, this is the Chatham County coroner, Dr. Archibald Deacon.” Her introduction oozed with irritation.
An associate. I didn’t like the sound of it. It made me sound like a business partner, or in the mind of a human, one of her kind. But I wasn’t a nightwalker. Of course, I wasn’t quite human either. Even though I might not like the phrase, it’s not like she had a lot of options. This is Danaus, the vampire hunter. Just trying to wrap his mind around all the ramifications would probably cause his brains to slide out of his ears.
However, the coroner said nothing. He briefly paused as he pushed open a door leading to a stairwell and nodded to me before leading us down the stairs.
“So what’s the problem?” Mira asked, her voice echoing slightly off the concrete walls.
“This body is the problem,” he said sharply. “I didn’t know it was one of yours.”
“Mira—” I began, a fresh knot of anger twisting in my gut. What kind of an arrangement did she have with the city coroner? Did I not know about all of her kills because she had a deal with the coroner to keep everything nicely hidden?
“He means death by an outsider or death of an outsider,” she grumbled over her shoulder at me then turned her attention back to Archie. “What’s been done?”
“Everything,” he said, throwing up his hands in a helpless gesture. “I wasn’t called to the scene of the crime because it was drawing too much attention. You can’t have a senator’s daughter killed in her River Street apartment and not expect a press circus to set up camp outside. I didn’t see the body until it was brought in.” Yanking open the door with a soft grunt, he led us down a narrow hall to a pair of steel double doors. “I had been told that it looked like she died from an animal attack. I ordered the usual autopsy and thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until later that afternoon that I saw the digital pictures the police took of the crime scene. By then, both my toxicologist and serologist had been all over the body. A pair of zoologists had even been through, trying to make a guess at what made the teeth marks.”
In the center of the cool room crowded with shiny stainless-steel operating tables was a large table under a bright light. A body lay on the table covered with a white sheet. Archie walked around to the far side while Mira and I stayed on the side closest to the door.
The chill in the air seeped through my leather jacket and crept up my spine. I had seen more than my share of death over the years, and been around plenty of dead bodies (not to mention a few dead bodies that sat up and talked when you had been quite sure moments earlier that it was completely impossible). Yet being surrounded by all the shining silver instruments and the rows of stainless-steel refrigerators used for housing the bodies caused the illogical wave of dread to sweep through me. The dead were supposed to be burned or buried when the soul left, not dug into and examined.
“Cause of death?” I asked, shoving my hands into my pockets.
“It’s a tough call. Either blood loss or asphyxiation,” he said blandly as he pulled back the sheet.
Abigail Bradford lay cold and dead under the harsh overhead light. Her skin was a stomach-turning gray now that all the blood had been drained from her body. Her shoulder-length blond hair was slightly fanned out beneath her head. She almost looked like she was sleeping. The analysts had not made a single cut on her body. There was no need. The source of her demise was rather obvious: more than half of her throat was missing.
Unfortunately, the throat wasn’t neatly cut up. A chunk of flesh had been torn out using sharp fangs, leaving behind ragged bits of skin and muscle. Could a human have done this? No. Impossible. I doubted a normal human had the strength, and the damage left by the teeth was all wrong.
Could a vampire? Possibly, but a vampire would have spit out the chunk of flesh and no one had yet to mention finding it.
Could a lycan? Definitely.
Archie took out a small penknife and pulled open the wound slightly. My stomach lurched and I fought the urge to step backward. I had spent ample time around dead bodies and caused the deaths of others. I had been surrounded by men mangled by the viciousness of war, but this felt like desecrating the remains, even though pursuing a murderer.
“If you’ll look closer, you can see where one of the lower canines of her attacker scored one of the vertebrae of the spinal cord,” Archie explained. “All wrong for human canines. Definitely animal of some sort.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Mira growled, pacing away from the body. She ran one hand through her hair, but I couldn’t tell if she was shaken or just irritated. “Why can’t you just say she was attacked by an animal?”
“Other than the fact that the apartment was completely undisturbed?” he demanded incredulously, shoving the penknife into an interior pocket of his blazer.
“Leave that to the cops. Your job is to give a cause of death. You have it. Her throat was ripped out by a very large dog,” Mira countered. She walked back over to the table, her heels angrily clicking on the pale yellow linoleum.
“What about the bruises?” Archie snapped.
“What bruises?” I asked.
The coroner pointed out a pair of small, circular bruises under her collarbone near her shoulders.
“Could be anything,” Mira shrugged.
“Look at her back,” Archie directed.
Frowning, I grabbed Abigail’s right shoulder and pushed her up so that she was balanced on her side. A chill swept through me as I realized the flesh of the dead body felt sickeningly similar to Mira’s when I had touched her wrist earlier in the evening.
With considerable effort, I turned my head to look at the corpse’s back. Near the shoulders were a set of four circular bruises marring her white skin like fingerprints. Someone had held her still, or held her down.
“Can you date the bruises?” I demanded, carefully laying the body back down.
“I’d say same night as her death,” Archie replied.
“Backdate the bruises in your report by a couple of days,” Mira said with a slight shake of her head.
“It will look like she had a fight with her boyfriend.”
“Mira….” He sighed.
“We can do this,” Mira said, her voice firm and strong. She was back to exuding her usual confidence, taking control of the situation. “Backdate the bruises. Put down she was killed by a large dog. It’ll be another five weeks before the blood test comes back and the report is ready, right?”
“Yes.”
“I doubt anything will show up, but if it does, fudge the report. I don’t want anything showing up in her blood but a couple shots of tequila at most.”
“What about the police? They won’t believe—”
“I’ll take care of the police. We’ve got to give the press and this girl’s parents something nice and neat to cling to before this mess gets any nastier.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Now get out of here,” she commanded. Her tone hardened to the same consistency as granite and the room grew colder, as if the air conditioner had been kicked into high.
“But—”
“Get out,” she bit out through clenched teeth, her hands gripping the edge of the table. I stood still, the palm of my right hand itching slightly from the overwhelming desire to grab one of my knives. “Go take the elevator up to your office. Check your e-mail. Talk to the guard for five minutes and then leave. We’ll be gone before you reach your car.”
Wisely, Archie just nodded and slipped around the table. His sharp, clipped footsteps echoed through the silent room as he beat a hasty retreat. Mira waited until the double doors were once again closed before she released her hold on the table and walked around to stand where the coroner had been moments before.
Leaning close to what remained of Abigail’s neck, she took a deep breath through her nose. I could only guess she was checking to see if she could pick up the same scent she got a hint of at the apartment. The vampire suddenly lurched away, taking a few stumbling steps deeper into the room, hunched over and gagging. I froze. I had never seen a vampire gag on anything, especially the scent of a decaying body. I honestly didn’t think anything bothered them. Mira finally dropped to her knees, with one hand pressed to the cool floor while the other was pressed to her chest. A fresh round of dry heaves wracked her thin frame, keeping her partially doubled over.
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