Authors: Jocelynn Drake
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.
“Mira?”
“I’m okay,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and rough. She held up one hand, warding me off. After another minute, her whole body stilled, her eyes closed in a look of peace. Whatever it was, it had finally passed.
“How’s your sense of smell?” she asked, slowly pushing off the floor. I was surprised that she didn’t use her power like usual to lift herself to her feet, but the nightwalker had been acting strangely since I first saw her at the hotel. Why should this be any different?
“Human,” I replied. I had the same sense of smell as a normal human being. Being part bori enhanced only a few aspects of my life.
“Figures,” she grumbled, walking back over to the corpse.
“What happened?”
“I’ve never smelled anything like that before,” she said. Her upper lip curled in disgust. She was now keeping a bit of a distance from the body, as if trying to keep from getting another whiff of whatever she had smelled. “It’s worse than rotting meat left in the noonday sun. It’s more than just the smell of death. And it’s not coming from her. It’s whatever attacked her.”
“The same as what you smelled in the apartment?”
“Maybe…” she said slowly, her eyes narrowing on the girl’s throat. “It was just so faint…I don’t know.”
“Does that rule out vampires then?”
A frown tugged at Mira’s full lips and creased her brow. For a second, she looked very sad and weighed down by her thoughts. “Unfortunately, no.” The two lonely words were a faint whisper as they tripped from her lips to me. I think she had come here confident that she would find her answers, but ended up with only more questions.
“We have to go,” I reminded her.
“Just a minute,” she said, picking up Abigail’s left arm. She turned it, looking at the inside of the bend in her arm. Mira then reached across the body and picked up the right arm, inspecting the interior of the arm. “Look,” she said, running her thumb across a pair of faint white scars. Vampire bites.
“I thought you preferred the neck,” I said.
“Her owner would have. It’s the first place we look to see if the human has been tagged,” Mira said, putting the arm down and turning her attention back to the side of the girl’s neck that was untouched. “Someone not her owner must have taken a nibble. Look. Here’s another set.”
I walked around the table so that I could see the girl’s neck more clearly. There was another set of bite marks on her neck. These looked like they were a week or two old at most, compared to the set on her arm. “So she was bitten on the arm weeks or even a month ago, and her owner bit her a week or so ago. Two vampires fighting over the same piece of flesh. One decides to kill her so the other can’t have her?”
“Part of that is probably right. The neck wound is only two weeks old and was probably made by her owner, but the wound on her arm is only a few nights old,” Mira began. She lifted up the girl’s arm to the light so that I could clearly see the two marks left by vampire fangs. “The nightwalker tried to heal it but didn’t finish, or botched the job. The wound is closed, but the bruising is still there. For such an aged-looking scar, there shouldn’t be any bruising.”
“So who are the two vampires?” I inquired.
Mira leaned close to the girl’s arm. I didn’t even see her take in a breath. She jerked back with a hiss, dropping Abigail’s arm back to the operating table. “We have to go,” she said, her words sharp and crisp as she quickly walked around the table.
“What?” I demanded, jogging after her. “Who is it? What about the neck wound?”
Throwing open the double doors, Mira hurried down the hall to the staircase. “I’ll never pick up the scent of the other vampire over the scent coming off the neck wound. It doesn’t matter. I know how to get the information.”
I followed after her as we silently climbed the stairs and slipped out the back door into the parking lot. Things were exactly as we left them. Mira’s BMW sat all sleek and black next to the white Lexus under the single parking-lot lamp. The Chevy Nova hunkered in one of the far corners, hoping to go unnoticed.
The second her feet hit the blacktop of the parking lot, a wave of power exploded from Mira. The tidal wave swept out from her body, washing over the city. I nearly stumbled under its unexpected weight. She was searching the city for her prey. And I had no doubt that whoever the culprit was, he or she knew we were coming.
FOURTEEN
A
nger radiated off the nightwalker as her hand slid along the steering wheel. Mira remained silent, as if words couldn’t squeeze between her clenched teeth. The air in the car had chilled to the point where I expected to see my breath fog if I sighed. Yet this cold would not be cut by a blast of warm air from the heater. She had erected a barrier around her thoughts, keeping me out. But I didn’t need to be in her mind to know that whoever had been involved with Abigail Bradford was toast, literally.
We had returned to the historic district of the city, quickly stopping at a lonely square near the edge. I had expected us to return to the club district of River Street, where most nightwalkers were known to congregate while in the process of hunting down their prey. Mira whipped the sleek, black BMW into an open parking spot on the street and was out of the car before the engine was completely shut off.
In the far corner of the square rose an ornate gazebo. Constructed of stone, the architecture had an Old World feel to it, with its odd bits of ironwork. In one of the windows looking out at the small fountain in the center of the square sat a vampire.
The air was silent except for the crunch of stray gravel beneath our feet. I followed behind her, a knife tightly gripped in my right hand as I searched the area for other vampires. There were a few lurking about a mile off, but after Mira’s brief display of power at the morgue, I doubted any other vampire was going to risk coming close enough to catch her attention.
I reached the gazebo just a couple seconds behind Mira, who was now standing in the center of the structure. My heart lurched in my chest as my eyes settled on the creature resting on the ledge of the gazebo and I fought the urge to scan the park again for another vampire. I couldn’t stop from blinking twice, convinced that my eyes were lying to me in the darkness.
“How is it that I find you involved in this?” Mira snarled. The heavy shadows within the gazebo hugged her body, making her little more than a threatening voice in the cool winter night.
Tristan sat with his back against one of the columns that formed the window. His right leg was bent before him with his foot resting on the ledge and his right wrist balanced on his knee. His left leg hung limp in the air, swaying slightly. The vampire appeared relaxed, and he had yet to look directly at Mira. His gaze was straight ahead as if he was intently watching the fountain in the center of the square. “I didn’t kill her.” His normally soft voice held an underlying edge to it that I had never heard from him before, causing my muscles to clench defensively. It was a warning for Mira to back off.
“Did you know who she was?” I asked. My deep voice broke between the two in an attempt to put a little distance between them before Mira set him on fire. There was still a good chance that he had some valuable information as to who Abigail Bradford was and with whom she associated. I would prefer to acquire that information before Mira finally lost her tenuous hold on her temper.
“Yes,” he hissed. Tristan slowly turned his head to look at me over his shoulder, his pale blue eyes seeming to pick up the distant lamplight like a cat’s. “I had seen her around town during the past month. She was the daughter of a prominent official and a fan of our kind.”
“Why didn’t you contact me immediately when it happened?” Mira snapped, her temper still bubbling to the top.
The younger vampire’s icy gaze finally reached Mira’s face. “Contact you?” he repeated with a slight tilt of his head. “And how would I have done this? I reached for you, but as far as I could tell, you were as dead as Sadira.”