by Kayleigh Sky
“We give him the courtesy of making an appointment.”
A bark of a laugh erupted from Prosper’s chest. “Courtesy. A pimp is only one step up from a whore.”
“That’s what I mean. Good will, Prosper. We use honey. Somebody drained the drainer, and it wasn’t a human. We’re looking for a vampire.”
A thin smile crossed Prosper’s face. “That means you need me.”
“I need you to stay out of my way.”
“You aren’t pushing me off of this case.”
“We have a convention full of people who might have seen something.” Otto tapped the flyer. “We should interview these people and the staff. Get a list of conferences in other districts and other drainer murders.”
“The drainer part might not mean a thing. If he hid it, maybe nobody knew. Just got lucky.”
Fucker. There was no sensible reason for that comment to bother Otto because he didn’t like drainers any better than the next person. Blowing off this guy’s case was as easy for Otto as Prosper blowing off Maisie’s murder, and maybe that was it, maybe he wasn’t ready to extinguish that last part of him that still gave a damn about a stranger’s life. Even a drainer’s. Something about this murder didn’t sit easily with him. Something telling him it wasn’t simple bad luck that had put Acalliona at the wrong place at the wrong time.
“I want to see if he had a car or rented one. Canvas the neighborhood again. If he walked there, maybe somebody saw him.”
“In a commercial district? In the middle of the night? Not likely.”
“Where was his donor card?”
“Hotel safe maybe?” Prosper shrugged. “Something to check.”
“You check it.”
Prosper grinned. His white teeth flashed, and somewhere behind his sharp canines, sharper fangs hid. “Trying to get rid of me?”
“Splitting up is more efficient.”
“You aren’t going to Comity House without me.”
“I’ll go back to the scene. If the manager shows up, I’ll check on the security footage. In the meantime, you find out whatever you can at the Sheraton, and we’ll meet up tomorrow at the blood center.”
“I don’t trust you, Jones.”
“Like I give a fuck, Prosper.”
Prosper’s laugh followed him as Otto headed to his car. Part of him wanted to return to the scene, but he doubted the chaos had died down enough yet not to stab into his brain like knives. Another part of him wanted a drink. Something cheap and strong to burn out the niggle of dread in his gut.
You better not.
He snorted as he slid behind the wheel.
Yeah, right.
5
Feeding
Jessa sprawled on his belly on Isaac’s bed in Comity House, held onto Isaac’s arm, and bit. The gush of blood into his mouth cooled the raging heat inside him. He gulped at first then slowed to let Isaac’s blood coat his tongue, savoring it.
“Swallow,” Isaac murmured.
He stroked Jessa’s back slow and easy, and Jessa obeyed. What choice did he have? Being a drainer shamed him, that’s why he hated to feed and resisted his hunger as long as he could, but his memory of being sick—of almost dying, actually—was still as sharp-edged as terror.
After a moment, he pulled his fangs out of Isaac’s wrist and flopped onto his back with a gasp.
“Jessa! What the hell? Are you okay?”
Isaac perched over him, gazing down with panicky eyes.
Strange. Yet, Isaac had been acting strange since Jessa arrived here. A frown formed on his face, but he made himself smile. “Just not hungry, I guess.”
“Liar. You never feed enough.” Isaac gave a wink that clashed with the worry on his face and said, “Unless you’ve found somebody else to slake your thirst. Is he pretty?” Isaac asked, a smile dancing on his lips.
“Goof.”
Jessa visited Isaac once a week, though many drainers fed two or three times that much.
“I mean it though, Jessa. What’s wrong?”
Isaac’s question stumped him. He was wrong—a failure as a vampire and a human. Yet, if he said it out loud… It was as if the wall of denial protecting him would crumble like the underground cities. If the Upheaval hadn’t happened… Well, he’d be like every other vampire. Nobody would have to be afraid of him the way he was afraid he might have once drained somebody in a mad frenzy he’d wiped out of his memory… and his family had lied to him about it. Maybe he was a murderer.
“I wish I could drink Synelix.”
Isaac sighed. “I guess I’m a dick because I’m happy you can’t myself. You’re my only real friend, Jessa.”
Jessa leaned over until their foreheads touched. “Rune says nothing is chance.”
Jessa wasn’t sure he believed that though. Thinking anything was within his power didn’t mesh with thinking nothing was and making the best of it.
And making the best of it was what Jessa did. He’d gotten some good things out of his life so far.
When he’d fallen ill the first time, Mal had put him in a room in the castle they lived in that had a view of the gardens and the mountain. The room had clearly belonged to a young girl once—all white and gold and frilly—light filled and airy as a cloud. Mal had bought him a store’s worth of stuffed animals. He seldom had the energy to get out of bed, but the toys had kept him company. And then he’d found the books piled on the built-in bookshelves in the closet. Romances and detective novels. He’d burrowed back in bed with his newfound treasures, his heart stuttering over the heroes on the covers. Strong and brave and beautiful. Too bad he wasn’t beautiful.
He bit his lip. “I want to be normal though.”
“You are. You have to drink blood. That’s normal for you.”
“Not draining people.”
Only rogue vampires drained people on purpose. The stories of “turning” humans were myths. Only murderers did that.
“Be patient, Jessa. Somebody’s going to come up with something better than Synelix any day now.” He smiled. “And I’ll be out of a job.”
Jessa frowned again. A strange tone tugged at Isaac’s voice, stretching it as thin as glass. Jessa half expected it to shatter. Something was wrong.
“Are you okay, Isaac?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? You’re the one not eating.”
Jessa scooted back into the corner of Isaac’s bed and leaned against the wall. “In a minute,” he said. “We have time.”
Isaac lay on his side, propped on his elbow, and dropped his arm into Jessa’s lap. “Fifteen minutes. I have to meet a new client.”
Jessa sighed but didn’t pick up Isaac’s arm right away. A wisp of longing stirred inside him. What would it be like to drink from somebody he was madly in love with? The thought scared and excited him, but it was a silly waste of time to imagine because it was never going to happen. Feeding from a fated love was as rare as finding a blue rose. And hoping for it was like hoping for a gorgeous hunk to jump off the cover of one of his romances. Or for somebody like the guy who rescued him in the parking lot the other day.
And that reminded him. “I have something for you.”
Isaac groaned as he scrambled off the bed. “Jessa.”
“Just a minute.” He grabbed his bag from where he’d dropped it on the floor when he came in. “I got these for you.”
Isaac approached and wrapped his arms around Jessa’s waist, looking over his shoulder as Jessa rummaged in the bag. “On your illicit book run?”
Jessa snorted. “It’s stupid for Uriah to have to drive me places when I should be able to go out on my own. I’m just like everybody else.”
“Yeah, but drainers are an easy target for people who don’t want peace between us. Just give it time. Everybody will get used to each other.”
“I hope so. Anyway, I found these. I almost got caught, but it was worth it.”
Isaac let him go and took the mysteries Jessa passed to him, saying the titles out loud. “A Taste of Death. The
Snowman. Tripwire. Double Indemnity. This one’s real old.”
Jessa dropped his bag again. “Is that okay?”
Isaac kissed his cheek. “It’s amazing.”
When he pulled away, he grinned, and Jessa’s heart swelled. It was so easy to make Isaac happy. Sometimes it scared him how easy it was because it reminded him of how little Isaac had.
“You are amazing,” Isaac added, and Jessa blushed.
While Isaac made room on his little bookshelf, Jessa gazed out the window. Comity wasn’t much of a city. Most buildings were shorter than they were tall and sprawled all the way around the base of the mountain. But Comity House was on several acres planted with lush gardens that made Jessa feel at home when he visited here. He loved flowers and fashioned floral themes into most of the jewelry he made, though he was seldom allowed to work. Certainly not without one of his cousins in attendance.
“I feel like the air right before a storm,” he said. “You can feel the pressure building and building until you want it to burst. I wish they’d find a cure, but like you said, you’d be out of a job if they did. Everybody here would be, so why would they bother?” He moved his fingers to his neck, hovering over the mark there as though it had a magnetic pull to it. “We’re profitable.”
Isaac came up behind him. “I’m not going to say people aren’t that cold, but you can’t give up, because it’s an allergy, and people grow out of allergies all the time.”
“I’m twenty-three.”
“That’s young.”
“Older than you.”
Isaac didn’t reply, so Jessa gazed at his reflection in the glass. He was young and homely with a skinny nose and a thin upper lip. His bottom lip was full, and the two looked weird together. His hair was a bizarre mix of colors, not dark like every other vampire, his eyes more amber than brown. He was fast and limber, but not as strong as most vampires. And he drank blood, so he didn’t even make a good human.
“Come on,” said Isaac. “Drink some more.”
Giving in now, Jessa returned to the bed, propping himself on Isaac’s pillows. Isaac lay beside him, and Jessa cupped his elbow and the back of his wrist in his hands. The slide of his fangs coming out sent a frisson of pleasure through his body. He tugged Isaac’s arm closer and sank his teeth into a long blue vein. The blood drenched his tongue, and his stomach rolled, but he drank anyway, pulling in long swallows. After a moment, he lifted away again and said, “Not too long.”
“I won’t let you,” Isaac murmured.
The same enzyme that broke down the blood Jessa took in was present in his saliva and was supposed to boost Isaac’s recovery and improve his immune system, but Jessa was half human and worried he’d fail in this way too. He sucked slowly, and a bitter flavor burned his tongue. Weird. Jessa’s heart accelerated, and he took only a few more swallows before pulling away again. Isaac smiled and got up, but Jessa knew what that taste was now.
Fear.
Isaac tasted like fear.
6
Fog
Chuck, the warehouse manager, was a tall guy with thinning hair, a barrel chest, and watery blue eyes. Otto followed him around the perimeter of the building while the guy pointed out the randomly spaced cameras. Not that Otto gave a fuck about any but the ones on the corner of the delivery ramp, but trailing the voluble manager in the early drizzle was a dozen steps up from Prosper’s grating presence.
“Now not all of ’em work. Deterrent,” the manager added, glancing back.
“You’ve had break-ins before?” Otto asked.
“Oh yeah. We have specialty glass in here. Orders from Prince Rune. I have very particular clients on top of my retail trade.”
“The prince, huh?”
Chuck nodded. “Prince Rune often sources his own glass, and I do the purchasing and arrange for shipping. Not great amounts. All art quality though.”
“For what?”
“I’m guessing art,” Chuck said with a laugh.
Right. Ha, ha.
They circled back around to the steps leading to a single glass door. Chuck held it open. “After you.”
“The film feeds to…?”
“A memory chip. They’re all self contained, but again, they don’t all work. Reception is spotty, as I’m sure you realize. Some of the cameras are in dead areas, but nobody but us needs to know that. Even the ones that work go in and out, but whatever I can do to help, just let me know, of course. I can’t get over somebody being killed right outside my front door, so to speak. A vampire too. They aren’t that easy to kill.”
Easy enough for another vampire. Not so easy for humans.
“Looks like another vamp got this one,” said Otto.
A tiny reception area led into a narrow hallway with dingy gray walls and cobwebs in the corners. The top of Chuck’s head flirted with the ceiling. Otto was tall too and eyed the acoustic tiles warily.
Around the corner, a few doors lined the hallway. Chuck entered the last one, and Otto followed him into a spare office with a row of small, square windows set high in a wall. The light that drained in was pale and soft.
Chuck pulled out a chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”
A computer monitor and DVR sat on a desk in a corner of the room. Bookshelves lined with fat red and green binders covered the other walls.
Otto sat. “What do I do here?”
Chuck tapped the keyboard. “It’s all set for you. Click the arrow to start. You can fast forward and reverse, whatever you need. And this…” He pulled a box that looked like a speaker away from the wall, “is an intercom. Just press this button here and talk if you need me. I’ll be here all day.”
Otto nodded. “Thanks.”
A moment later, alone, he stared at a screen that might as well be a still life for all that anything moved on it. The camera had caught a sliver of the parking lot and a long trapezoid of darkness that had to be the field. The lights had created a luminous gray gleam along the edge of the pavement. The timer at the bottom of the screen jumped in ten second increments. Otto fast-forwarded. Noises outside came in dull through the thick walls. The early morning coolness grew stuffy. The manager had made a copy of the recording, so Otto had no real reason to sit here, except it wasn’t the station, wasn’t someplace where he had to interact while his hangover eased. The blur on the screen didn’t help, and he was antsy as fuck.
His hookup the night before had done nothing to dispel his pent-up energies. The guy’s long dark hair had been too much like a vampire’s probably, the skin showing between his ink, vampire pale, his nips pierced. When Otto had tugged on one of the metal bars with his lips, the guy had thrust his chest at him, practically chipping a tooth.
“Oh, sorry,” the guy had gasped. “They’re sensitive.”
Otto’s weren’t, and he’d never seen the appeal of playing with them, but he knew some guys liked it, so he was willing to suck on their nips if they wanted him to, though his hookup was just as happy when Otto’s focus had drifted to his shiny red cock. He’d stroked it while the guy rolled his hot ass until Otto let loose in the condom inside him and the guy collapsed with a laugh and said, “Fuck, that was nice.”
It only took Otto a few minutes to thank him and get him the fuck out of his house, still as wired as when they’d arrived.
Now he pinched the bridge of his nose and stared at the screen. According to the coroner, death had probably occurred between midnight and four in the morning. The body had been discovered at five thirty. Time of death was difficult to establish with vampires. They were hardly undead, but they had an ability to recuperate from injuries mortal in a human. That had probably contributed to the myths surrounding vampires, but it also contributed to the uncertainties surrounding death. But Brillen Acalliona had been drained, and if that’s what had killed him, there was no recuperating from that. So a four-hour period was likely.
Restarting the film at eleven, Otto sat with his elbows on the desk, fingertips rolling circles at his temples. The same sha
dows filled the monitor. The timer jumped—11:00:10, 11:00:20, 11:00:30… He forwarded it by fifteen minutes, watched for a few minutes more, then forwarded it by another fifteen minutes until a thickening of the darkness occurred at twelve forty-five. Otto straightened, reversed the film by three minutes, then restarted it. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen. The picture jumped from an empty parking lot and field to an oblong a shade darker than the night. A second later the oblong took on a grayish cast. Ambient light shone around something that had moved in front of it. Otto squinted as though he might force a view of the black night.
What was it? And why here?
Because it was near the Sheraton. Within walking distance. But if Brillen was in that field, he wasn’t alone. The shape in the dark was too big.
For three minutes and fifty-three seconds nothing happened. Then the film jumped ahead and the shape in the field shrank and expanded. They were moving but staying close together. Otto struggled to pick out their separate shapes. A fuzziness surrounded them.
A minute passed.
Then the movement grew jerky, and Otto leaned closer to the screen. This was the murder, but… He wasn’t sure and strained to see, but the bigger figure, the one he thought was Brillen was… absorbing?… covering up the other figure. The amorphous blob wavered back and forth until—
Fog?
Otto stopped the film and leaned in close. That only made his vision worse. The snowy dots lost all shape. But that was fog. It was a dove gray color, opaque in places, transparent where the night penetrated like a physical thing. It gave the fog a mottled look. Otto drew back and started the film again. The fog enveloped the figures, hunkering low to the ground, growing lighter, darker.
It blew away. So suddenly Otto jumped. One of the figures ran, and the fog reformed over the other. A few steps took the escapee out of the camera range, but Otto knew he was following the beaten down path through the weeds, heading for the street.
