by Kayleigh Sky
The vampire was gone.
Turning away again, he ran toward the city lights.
3
The Scene
A cop pulled the blanket off the body, and Otto stared into the dead vamp’s cloudy gaze. A glimpse of a tattoo tugged at him, dragged his stare down a bloodless face to a broken infinity sign, and Maisie’s cynical grin floated into his memory.
Hell if he cared about solving this crime. What was another dead vampire to him?
Except he was here with a sledgehammer pounding against the inside of his skull. God, he wanted a drink. The snap of a camera beside him drove nails into his brain. He’d gotten, what? Two hours sleep.
“Almost done,” came a woman’s voice. Soft, as though the winces he hid at every syllable she spoke weren’t so hidden after all.
He glanced at her and nodded.
The body lay in a lot the size of a football field that bordered the gray hulk of the warehouse behind him. Tall weeds stood straight in the hazy light. A crazy zigzag path cut from the body across the field to the corner of the parking lot where it met the sidewalk. Weird. If it’d been made by the killer, why zigzag unless somebody had been chasing him. Or her. Otto let his gaze drift across the uniforms to a small crowd hovering on the street. A tall vampire with his hair in a tight bun stood talking to a guy in running shorts and a T-shirt. Otto’s stomach clenched, pushing acid into his throat. Fucking vamp was the reason he’d drunk himself stupid, hoping to escape the memories of Maisie that kept swamping back.
He strode to the patrol sergeant standing by a ramp that led into the warehouse.
“Any luck?” Otto asked.
“Not yet.”
Otto’s gaze rose to the cameras above the corrugated door at the top of the ramp. One pointed forward down the ramp, the other two angled to the sides. With any luck they’d get something on the film because Otto wasn’t getting any kind of vibe from the scene. And that was weird too. Usually there was something, something that hit a chord inside him.
“What kind of warehouse is this anyway?”
Hamilton’s was the name on the sign above the front door.
“Glass.”
Probably a good business considering the vamps’s inexplicable fondness for the stuff. Glass jewelry, bowls, vases, artwork. They had a thing for drinking Synelix out of elaborately decorated glassware. Though Otto shouldn’t complain. It was the fake blood that brought the peace, and some of them actually liked the damn stuff. Ghouls.
“Hey!”
Otto spun. Across the field, Upwood Prosper bolted after the guy in running shorts. There was no chance of escaping a vampire. Prosper routed him after a few steps. He probably didn’t break a sweat doing it. Probably didn’t spend the night in his cups trying to banish Otto from his thoughts. Trying to forget the murder of his sister and the cop who’d investigated it. Otto hadn’t been a cop nine years ago. It had been Prosper’s job to find her killer, yet he hadn’t. Was Maisie’s murder even important to him? Or only one of dozens that had crossed his desk? If Prosper remembered her and Otto—and he had to—he gave no clue.
“Keep me posted,” Otto said and headed across the field, skirting the beaten down path.
A cool lick of wind reminded him of the clouds hovering on the horizon, waiting to wash away the evidence of whatever had happened here.
The guy Prosper had corralled held up his hands, palms out. “I thought we were done.”
Prosper glowered down at him. “What part of ‘don’t go far,’ didn’t you understand?”
“I thought you meant out of town. Look, I’m sorry, but I have to get to work, and I didn’t see anything anyway. I was just passing by. I always run this way.”
“Did you make the path?” Otto asked, stepping sideways and gesturing at the tromped-down ribbon.
“No. I use the sidewalk.”
Otto’s gaze dropped to his shoes. Clean enough, though the path was grassy not muddy, but there were no grass stains either. He nodded. “You can go.” Prosper’s head snapped around. “We’ll let you know if we need anything else.”
The guy darted off.
“The fuck,” muttered Prosper.
Otto’s head throbbed, and the words in his mouth burned like the acid in his belly. “How much energy you gonna spend chasing ghosts this time.”
Prosper tipped his head back and a smile stretched across his face in slow motion. “This time?”
“You heard me.”
Otto headed back to the body.
“Gonna make this as tough as you can, huh? Not sure what you have against me.”
Surely he was baiting Otto. Nobody was that stupid. No way he forgot about Maisie that easily. Now it was Otto who had to find her killer, and he didn’t plan to fucking rest until he did. Find him and peel his skin off in the blazing sun. If the sun ever blazed anywhere anymore. Though the sky was a clear blue, purple clouds piled on the faraway horizon, and that weird mist floated at the other end of the field. A gray ribbon of fog, rising and sinking as though caught on a current.
The yellow blanket covered the corpse again.
Otto ignored Prosper. A few of the local businesses had opened, and employees and customers stood on the sidewalks. A couple cops had gone to talk to them. Otto would follow up with his own questions later. It annoyed people to have to go over it again, but tough fuck, because Otto put a lot of stock on his gut reactions and getting a feel for a scene. That was probably the only reason he still had his job. His imagination leaped from scattered clues to the face of a killer with not much to go on. Nine times out of ten he was right. This time though? This time he was getting jack from the scene, but he circled the block anyway, noting the vehicles, the business names on the doors, the whish of an occasional car, the curious faces. Something might return to him.
He made his circuit twice before he approached the body again. This time the blanket lay at the vampire’s side. Prosper’s dark gaze held him tight. “You see this?” he asked.
The thing Prosper meant was the broken infinity sign. Up close, the tattoo was unmistakable. Only a group of vampires called drainers wore them. They were required too, actually. “Yeah,” he said.
“Hate crime?”
“Something to think about.”
Drainers made Otto’s skin crawl. Just being a vampire was bad enough, but drainers were vamps whose bodies rejected Synelix. Mixing vampire enzymes into a glass of human blood didn’t work either. They had to bite. Without fresh blood they killed in a frenzy of hunger and drained their victims dry. Though it wasn’t their fault, Otto cared no more about the reason for it than he cared why other vampires hated drainers too. But they did, and drainers didn’t usually go out alone. They got their blood from donor centers, and it was a legitimate job to feed them. Supposedly, it paid well. Humans who failed to get in at a center, sold it on the streets. Blood whores were illegal, but prostitution had always been illegal, and not much ever stopped it.
“Wonder why he was alone,” Prosper said. “It was almost an invite.”
“No sign of a struggle.”
“Maybe he wanted it,” Prosper said.
From the look of him dead, you’d hardly know he was a vampire, let alone a drainer. Otto didn’t want to think maybe this was the drainer who’d killed Maisie and had finally gotten his comeuppance. That would mean there was nobody left to hunt, nobody to make pay. Or worse, it would mean Otto would never know if this had been the guy.
He crouched down. The tattoo look washed out, like he’d had it for years, but drainers hadn’t started to be marked until eleven years ago. A faint line crossed the mark like a scratch. He stood and cast a glance around until he spotted the woman with the camera who’d been taking pictures earlier. “Hey, Dina, come on over here, will you?”
She approached with a quizzical frown, clipping her pager to her belt as she walked. “Whadda you need?”
“You get this?”
He pointed at the vamp’s neck.
Her frown
turned into a bit of a scowl. “The tat?”
“The scratch.”
“Not sure that’s a scratch, but yeah, I got it. Got it all. You guys are free to do your thing.”
Prosper rummaged through the vamp’s jacket. It had been lying about two feet from the body, lain out in the weeds as though the guy had put it there.
Prosper held out his hand. “You got a bag?”
Otto pulled a freezer-sized baggie out of his pocket and held it open. Prosper dropped a key card into it.
“You know where that is?” he asked.
The key belonged to the Sheraton. Why was he alone? Or was he? “It’s a couple blocks away,” Otto said. “Within walking distance.”
Prosper glanced at the empty parking lot. All the police vehicles were on the street. “You think that’s what he did?” he asked. “Walked?”
“Or flew.”
“Funny.”
Prosper dropped a glossy brown and yellow stone in the bag and waved a flyer at Otto. “This is from the Sheraton,” he said. “Some kind of jewelry convention.”
Otto picked out the stone. “What’s this?”
“Tiger’s eye.”
“I know that. It’s got something written on it.”
Plain surfaces were anathema to vampires, blank canvasses begging for design.
Otto stiffened as Prosper leaned in. “It’s a letter. Means resurrection.”
“What’s it for?”
Prosper shrugged. “Could be for anything. Some people keep them for good luck.”
People. What a fucking laugh. Creatures or demons, but not people. A drainer sure wasn’t. A drainer was… well, that. A drain.
“Anything else?”
“Nope.”
Prosper looked toward the horizon. Vampires weren’t as pale as myth suggested, though they were still pretty damn pale, and they’d never lived in total darkness. “They use bioluminescence,” a lecturer at the police academy had once said. “Think glow sticks. You’ll find they are much like us.” The color of Prosper’s eyes was a shade lighter than mud. He was probably good looking if Otto wanted to look at him that way, vampires usually were. He flashed Otto a grin. “Gonna rain. Let’s go sit in my car and go over this.”
“It won’t rain for a while yet.” The strange wisp of mist lifted in a curve like a wing. “I’m not sittin’ in your car. Meet me at the Starbuck’s by headquarters.”
Otto focused one last time on the corpse in the weeds. There was no sign of struggle, but the dead vamp didn’t look peaceful either. One leg had folded under the other, arms thrown to the side. No rings on his fingers, but his nails were grimy as though he’d dug into the weedy dirt. Otto flashed on another pair of hands, chipped polish on the nails, scooping tattered romance novels into a bag. Had the guy painted his nails for somebody in particular? The memory of a strange pain lanced through his chest again. He massaged the flesh over his heart—what he had of one—his mind filling with the image of a thin nose and a wild stare.
Romances.
Who had time for that?
Not Otto.
He looked up to see Prosper duck into his car. Otto had come from home and parked on the street a block away. As he watched Prosper reverse, he noticed the mist again, but now it floated into the sky and broke apart.
4
Coffee Break
Vampires were human, or so Otto was told. He chose not to believe it. The fuckers had fangs.
They all had dark hair, with some variation in shades, and light skin. No wings, though ridiculous of all, they claimed to be the children of fallen angels. Contrary to myth, they had no special powers but were stronger, lived slightly longer, and at dusk, at the right angle, they faded from sight. Dimming, it was called. They had lived underground for thousands of years in cities carved from rock, fishing the cave lakes, foraging for mushrooms, crabs, and ferns. They’d hunted too because they had never been far from the surface of the earth, and some had lived in the human world. The myths were true, but more romance than reality.
Romance.
What kind of guy read romances? And why the hell was Otto still thinking of him? Christ, he needed somebody to fuck. Tonight, the minute he got rid of Prosper, who was probably dillydallying right now to show Otto he couldn’t order him around.
Whatever.
Otto tipped his chair back against the short wall behind him and sipped his coffee. The coffee shop was busy, all the tables outside taken, a line snaking out the door. The view around him gave no hint it wasn’t pleasant here, normal. Pedestrians made their way down the sidewalk, and a handful of cars passed by. A slight tremor rolled underneath him, and he closed his eyes for a moment.
The earthquakes, usually small thankfully, were commonplace now, and sometimes Otto wondered if the earth wasn’t destined to shatter and shoot into space. Other times he didn’t think it hardly mattered.
The war with the vampires had lasted six years before a scientist from a company called SynTech Solutions developed Synelix and the vampire who was now king somehow got ahold of it. Otto didn’t know the true story of how the vampire king got it or what happened to the scientist who’d created it, but one of the vampire royals had used it to negotiate peace. Though it was hardly a peace to Otto. Vampires ruled but pretended they didn’t. Their cities had fallen, but they had been preying on humans for centuries. They were hardly innocent.
The clack of a set of keys dropping to the table broke into his thoughts. “Back in a sec,” said Prosper.
Otto let the front legs of his chair drop to the ground and finished his cool coffee. A minute later, Prosper dragged out the chair across from him and sat down. “Drove by the hotel,” he said.
“What for?”
“Just to check it out.”
Otto stared, feeling his ire rise hot and painful. “You break the case with your dogged detective work?”
“Very fucking funny. What the hell is wrong with you, Jones?”
Why the hell didn’t they sound alien, otherworldly, something not exactly like everybody else? “Let’s make a plan and stick with it,” he said.
“Fine. The manager of the Sheraton said the convention is a five-day event, going on three days already. Gave me this.” He unfolded a piece of paper and shoved it across the table. “That was taken on the first day, at a meet and greet.” Prosper tapped a figure in the flyer with a long square finger. “That’s our guy. Name’s Brillen Acalliona. A wholesaler from the Eastern District.”
“Who are the others?” asked Otto.
The flyer was poor quality, something they’d probably done on site. Acalliona stood in the center of a group of other vampires, smiling with the loose good cheer that usually went with a lot of alcohol. Otto swallowed, throat burning. “They don’t seem to mind him.”
“I think he was hiding it. That sweater covers him up,” said Prosper. “The manager had no fuckin’ idea.”
“That’s not legal.” The point of a tattoo on the neck was its visibility.
Prosper shrugged. “Neither’s murder.”
“True.”
“With a five-day convention I’m thinking he’d need to feed somewhere.”
“Maybe he got what was coming to him,” said Otto.
He glanced into his empty coffee cup, pushed back in his chair, and ignoring Prosper’s stare, headed into the coffee shop. The gloom was like a breath, cooling his burning eyes. Wood paneling lined the walls, the floor was a dull terra cotta, and the thick glass of the windows blocked the light. Otto was tempted to walk out the other door and leave Prosper behind him. But he was on thin ice with his job as it was, and the echo of his lieutenant’s voice droned in his ears as he stepped up to order another coffee.
“Can you at least pretend you’re not coming off a bender, Otto? Look. I don’t wanna lose you. Nobody else has your track record, but do me a favor. Quit this job if you don’t want it anymore. Don’t make me do it.”
Did he want it? He glanced around at humans and vampire
s sitting together at impossibly small tables. Machines whined as milk frothed. Everything was fucking normal as though a goddamn drainer hadn’t murdered his sister and a vampire hadn’t been assigned to work with him. The same vampire who’d never had the least bit of interest in the murder of a blood whore.
“Five dollars, please.”
Otto paid for his coffee.
He needed his job. The likelihood Brillen Acalliona had drained his sister was slim. He wasn’t from their district or from Heritage where Otto and Maisie had come from. Her killer was probably still out there. Uncaught because Upwood Prosper had dragged his feet harassing Maisie’s deadbeat friends instead of the fucking vampires who’d paid for her. “It’s a dangerous lifestyle,” Prosper had told Otto’s father.
“My daughter’s no goddamn whore, demon.”
But she had been. Otto had known it, though their dad hadn’t known much beyond his next drink.
At the nudge of somebody behind him, Otto made his way outside again. The glare of the sun hit him in the eyes. But still the rain threatened, and the street rumbled underneath him. He sat down.
“Comity House is about a mile north of the Sheraton,” he said.
“So let’s go.”
Otto shook his head. “No. We’re doing this right.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Honey. Do you know what honey is?”
Prosper rolled his eyes. “Yes, I know what honey is. What of it?”
“You catch more flies with it.”
Prosper got a look as though he’d swallowed sour blood. “I hadn’t planned to knock their door down.”
“The owner is named Prydwen Wrythin.”
“Wrythin. He’s royal. Low though.”
“Still royal.”
Prosper shrugged and swirled his coffee in his cup. “Name only. But like I said, I wasn’t planning on kicking his door down. I’m here to do a job. You want to make that difficult, I can accommodate you.”
