‘So he likes killing them by breaking their spine?’ Mike asked. They were in Winthrop’s lab, going over the information Mary had gathered while the old man ran tests.
‘He has sex with them, and then he breaks their neck.’
‘He rapes them?’
‘No, it seems to be entirely consensual, though I doubt they expect the finale. The L.A. Hunter looked into the murders and someone was ended for them. The L.A. Concilium did an information management job on the thing and had the entire vampire angle hushed up. The bites were never revealed to anyone outside the police. The issue here is that an innocent vampire may have been executed.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Dione said. ‘It could be a copycat, of course, but I’m not sure I buy that.’
‘I am assuming that this is not a copycat,’ Winthrop said. ‘The match in MO is too exact. The bites were never revealed outside the L.A. police, but other vampires would have known. That cannot be used as a distinguishing feature. However, our killer has a rather specific skill set which appears to have been applied in both cases. He is certainly a vampire. I found Haemovirus residue.’
‘You get the lineage?’
‘He’s a valentine. And he’s definitely a male. I found seminal fluid in the victim’s vagina.’
‘You’ve never mentioned it,’ Mike said, ‘but I’m assuming you can’t get DNA out of that?’
‘Perhaps unsurprisingly, no. While male vampires continue to produce the fluids, they don’t produce sperm. There are viral particles, because he’s a valentine. I assume incubi are the same, though I’ve obviously never had the chance to find out. You don’t get even that in the other species.’
‘Okay. Who booked the room?’
‘John Dover,’ Mary supplied, ‘but he paid cash, the address he gave, in Maryland, is false, and the only camera in the hotel is in the lobby and it hasn’t worked in three weeks.’
‘Right… John Dover sounds more like something you’d find in the credits of a porn film.’
Mary’s lips twitched. ‘Not that you’ve ever seen the credits of a porn film.’
‘Uh…’
‘Mike would obviously watch porn with Leeanne,’ Dione said, ‘so it’s unlikely that they would get to the credits. Now, we know he’s likely to strike again. Do we have any more information on his MO?’
‘All his victims are blonde, between the ages of twenty and thirty,’ Mary said. ‘No linkage was found between the victims, so it appears that he picks them at random. The L.A. police found witnesses who said they saw the victims in bars and clubs the night before they were found dead. It seems that he takes a hotel room near his target bar, lures his victim back to it, has sex, kills them, and is gone before the body is found. A couple of the victims were seen with a man, blonde, good-looking, but that’s as good as the description gets.’
‘Not helpful…’
‘Any new valentines in the city?’ Mike asked. ‘They’d have arrived in the last ten months.’
‘That is helpful. Mary?’
Mary nodded. ‘I’ll check the Concilium records, but he could be a transient.’
‘We’ll check with Pat and the other pascua owners. You haven’t seen the other ones yet anyway, Mike.’
~~~
‘No,’ Pat said, ‘no new valentines here. Not permanent or transient.’ They were sitting in Pat’s apartment at the top of the Black Candle, mugs of coffee in hand. Mike knew Leeanne was on duty at the moment, but Lisa was home, Pat’s home, and sitting nearby trying not to listen and failing.
‘If any show up,’ Dione said, ‘let me know. It’s doubtful, since he’s fed, but…’
‘I’ll keep an ear open, see if any of the others have heard of anyone. Um… We keeping this quiet?’
‘I’m not anxious to make a lot of noise about it.’
Mike frowned. ‘Any particular reason for not spreading the word? I mean, this guy’s not going to go after vampires, so we’re not going to panic anyone, and if everyone was looking out–’
‘That,’ Dione said, ‘is precisely the problem.’ She looked at Pat. ‘You want to tell this one?’
Pat grimaced. ‘Yeah… I guess I was there.’
‘There being?’ Mike asked.
‘San Francisco. I grew up there.’
‘I thought you were from New Orleans.’
‘Patrice Lumiere is from New Orleans. Patricia Hewes was born in San Francisco in nineteen forty-seven. By the time it got to the sixties, I was wearing tie-dyed skirts and painting daisies on my cheek, and I went to Woodstock, got wasted in a tent with a guy named Silas on the first night, and woke up at the end of the festival with a desperate need to suck blood.’
‘That was fast,’ Lisa commented. ‘It took almost a month for Juliana to convert.’
‘She didn’t die of a cocktail of alcohol, drugs, and minor blood loss. There wasn’t much damage for my body to repair. I was really pissed off I missed Jefferson Airplane. Though I did catch a bit of Jimi Hendrix’s performance, even if I spent most of it wondering what the fuck was going on. Anyway, Silas took me back home. Uh, he was from San Francisco too, which is why I’d ended up in his tent. He took it all pretty seriously, for a total dropout. He stuck with me right through until I got out of my filia obligations, and we stayed friends… And this is nothing to do with the story.’
‘Skip to eighty-three,’ Dione suggested.
‘Yeah. November nineteen eighty-three when the bodies of five women are uncovered in an apartment in Cathedral Hill. All of them have been drained of blood and their hearts have been torn out, but what really incenses the locals is that it’s pretty obvious that they’ve been engaging in a lot of sexual activity prior to their deaths. The local Concilium, under the guise of not panicking the public, manages to put a cap on things and the vampiric aspects are hidden from the public, but not from the vampire community. There was no Winthrop there to tell us a valentine was responsible, but someone knew who had been living in that apartment and someone on the Concilium started mouthing around rumours about valentines in general.’
Lisa was frowning now. ‘What rumours? Why would they do that?’
‘Well, we think it was one of the oldest of the Concilium members. He was over three centuries, Catholic, and he wasn’t very fond of the whole “free love” thing which valentines kind of represent… And he started saying maybe valentines were infected with the same sort of problem as incubi.’
Lisa turned her attention to Dione. ‘Incubi,’ Dione said, ‘male succubi, are basically uncontrollable sex fiends. We go out of our way not to make them.’
‘They’re a danger to the secret,’ Mike said, ‘aside from being murder-rapists.’
‘Okay,’ Lisa said, ‘but male valentines aren’t like that.’
‘No,’ Pat went on, ‘but the rumour spread that they might be unstable. They could go nuts and turn bad without warning.’
‘That’s theoretically true of any vampire. Any human for that matter.’
‘Granted, but valentines are some of the most potent vampires in existence. Succubi too. Probably more so given a succubus can walk into a room full of people and turn the lot of them into willing blood dolls in a few seconds. I’d have to work at it a bit more, but you can see why the other vampires might be…’
‘Jealous?’
‘That probably has something to do with it,’ Dione agreed. ‘However, on a sheer numbers basis, succubi don’t count. We’re rare. Valentines have been growing stronger since they were conceived and some of the older vampires didn’t like it.’
‘So they started hunting down valentines and ending them “as a precaution,”’ Pat said. ‘It started out with the males, but they decided the females had to go too because they might convert their boyfriends.’
‘Shit,’ Lisa said, her voice soft.
‘Silas went missing in December and I bugged out just after the turn of the year. By then, the insanity was spreading into other areas and the Summus Conciliu
m in London had decided that enough was enough. They sent a special agent to San Francisco to put a stop to the witch hunt.’
‘They sent word out to all the Hunters telling us to slam the lid down on it as well,’ Dione said. ‘By the end of January, the stupid had worn off, but they’d ended about four fifths of the valentines in San Francisco, and all the rest had petitioned to move to other cities.’
‘I ended up in New York and met Di, and… Well, the rest is history, as the saying goes. But the idea of a valentine serial killer who has sex with his victims…’
‘I get it,’ Mike said. ‘A pogrom like that can’t exactly be good for the secret either.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Dione said. ‘That was why the Summus Concilium acted. The stuffy bastards weren’t that bothered by the ending of a few valentines halfway around the world, but the corpses were piling up and people were starting to ask questions. We are not going to end up with the same thing happening again, so we keep the specifics quiet until we need to let them out.’
‘Thanks, Di,’ Pat said. ‘I don’t want to have to move cities again. I just got this one how I like it.’
16th February.
‘A health food shop?’ Mike looked up at the frontage of Elysium Fields with a raised eyebrow. It was in Queens and, technically, served all of Long Island, though Dione had told him that the vampires who lived out in the Hamptons tended to be straights.
‘Health food superstore,’ Dione corrected. ‘Barry is quite particular about that. You don’t think the metaphor is appropriate?’
‘Well, I–’ Mike stopped as the thought hit him: vampires were coming there to eat, for their health. ‘I guess it is, in a slightly twisted way.’
Dione grinned and pulled the door open. The place did have a big interior, and it was packed with just the kind of thing you would probably expect to see in a health food shop. There were huge tubs of protein products for bodybuilders, racks and racks of vitamins and supplements. There was also a big section of fresh produce and a couple of rows of organic foodstuffs. Mike felt vampire pricking at his mind as soon as he walked into the room and was sure it was not simply Dione. The staff, all wearing plum-coloured outfits of one form or another, watched them all the way to the back of the store.
At the rear, beside a huge display which proclaimed the benefits of royal jelly, was a door marked as employees only. Dione checked around briefly and then opened it, and it seemed like it really was just the back-of-store area until you walked past the break room and the office, and you found the vampire sitting at a desk with a log book of some sort.
‘Barry downstairs?’ Dione asked.
The woman at the desk looked up. ‘Uh, yes. Is there a problem, Hunter?’
‘Just after some information.’ Dione nodded to a door and the woman reached under her desk. There was a buzz and Dione opened the door. ‘Come on, Mike.’ She waited until they were on their way down a flight of stairs which the door concealed before going on. ‘Barry’s okay, but he likes to watch. I don’t think he’d have got permission for this place if it were up to me.’
‘Watch the sex or watch the feeding?’ Mike asked.
‘The latter. If it was the former, I’d have just thought he was male.’
At the bottom of the stairs was a waiting room which looked like it belonged in a dentist’s office. Chairs sat against the walls and there was no conversation, except between a few people who seemed to have arrived in pairs. Mike got the impression that this pascua was smaller than the Black Candle, and less of a social club.
Dione nodded to a thickset man watching the floor before opening a side door and stepping through into an observation room. Mike figured he was right about the size: there were eight monitors in the room, one per room, and the Candle had two monitors for each of its eighteen rooms. The man watching the displays looked to be in his early forties, with brown hair starting to recede, and he was a little on the thin side with no obvious muscle tone. When he turned to see who had come in, Mike saw brown eyes, a long thin nose, and a rather pointed chin.
‘Hunter,’ the man, who was presumably Barry, said. He had the kind of voice that made almost anything sound guilty.
‘Barry. I don’t think you’ve met my partner. Barry Fields, Michael Williams.’
Mike reached out a hand and the vampire took it. ‘Nice to meet you,’ Barry said. ‘I’ve heard good things.’
‘Uh, thanks,’ Mike replied. He had heard next to nothing about their host.
‘We’re looking for information,’ Dione said. ‘Any new vampires visiting this place? Transients, in the last month or two?’
Mike looked across the array of screens as Barry considered his answer. Six of the rooms had supplicants in them, which likely meant the other two had been used recently since there were people waiting outside. Two of the six had a vampire in them, neither of them doing anything more intimate than feeding demanded. It might have been the monitors, but the rooms looked smaller and not as clean as the ones at the Candle.
‘We get a few transients through,’ Barry said. ‘Usually Europeans on business or holiday. Carpathians, usually.’
‘Anything else?’ Dione asked.
‘Nothing that stands out. Uh, I misspeak. We had a wolf in last week. Said she was migrating from England and hadn’t settled yet. She was headed out west, I think.’
‘Unusual.’
‘I thought so.’
‘You get mostly carpathians and nubians?’ Mike asked. ‘No valentines, or succubi, or… whatever?’
‘There’s a few valentines live out in the Hamptons,’ Barry replied. ‘They don’t come here though. They don’t usually have trouble settling into straight relationships, lucky bastards. Only succubus I’ve ever met is the Hunter. We got a few trannys.’ He frowned and looked up at Dione. ‘Last couple of weeks, they’ve been a bit sullen. Some “task force” the Concilium organised has been poking at them.’
‘They’re looking for Societas members,’ Dione said. ‘If they get too annoying, I’ll do something about them.’
‘Well… Why the interest in valentines and succubi, Detective Williams?’
‘What?’ Mike blinked at Barry as though surprised. ‘Oh, no, I’m still getting used to all this. Trying to get a handle on who’s where and how many. Only so much you can learn in the classroom.’
‘Huh, ain’t that the truth? Of course, when I was born, you were lucky if you ever saw a classroom. I’m sure what we’ve got now is an improvement. Probably.’
~~~
‘How old is he?’ Mike asked as they drove away in Dione’s sleek, black monster of a car.
‘Barry? Uh, just over the two hundred mark, I think. Nice work with the valentines thing. Not that you’re going to be able to use that “I’m still learning” line for much longer, but I couldn’t have asked him directly without giving it away.’
‘Kind of what I thought. Besides, I am still learning. Really, I should know more about who lives out here. My mom lives out this way.’
‘Georgina is quite safe. And you don’t really need to know everyone in the city. I don’t. I know the ones I need to, and I have people like Pat and Barry who know more in their areas. I can introduce you to the Vicarius in your mother’s area, if you like.’
Mike nodded. ‘Thanks, that might be useful.’
‘I’ll arrange it. For now, Newark.’
‘Is it just me or are these places near airports?’
Dione favoured Mike with a smile. ‘It’s not just you. The Candle is there mostly for the resident population; the other two handle a lot of the transient traffic. Vampires aren’t creative, but we handle organisation pretty damn well.’
~~~
Carbon 14 was far more like the Black Candle, but in a larger building and rather more obvious. Like the Candle, Carbon 14 was a counterculture club, heavy on the Gothic, but the Candle was fairly discreet, an ex-apartment building with barely any signage to declare its existence. Carbon 14 occupied an old industrial b
uilding of some sort and had the name of the club in huge, neon-trimmed black letters over the door.
‘Tends to attract a different class of clubgoer,’ Dione said as they walked around to a side entrance. ‘Younger vampires, larger percentage of humans. Most of the humans who do go to the Candle are supplicants, but the percentage of those is lower here as well. The other difference is that Donovan has rooms on the upper floors here for transient vampires to stay in.’
‘It’s a hostel too?’ Mike asked.
‘Basically. A lot of larger cities have something like this. For some, it’s really useful because they can’t easily show their face in public. Or in the case of transylvanians, if they’re outside too long in daylight, they’ll burn.’
Once again, the pascua was underground, accessed via stairs right beside the entrance Dione took them through. There was a guard at the bottom, who just nodded to Dione in passing, and the usual registration desk.
‘Is this place bigger than the Candle?’ Mike asked as they entered the waiting area, which seemed pretty big and had several corridors leading off it. There were a number of supplicants sitting around waiting.
‘About the same size,’ Dione replied. ‘Twenty rooms, but the throughput is a little slower. They get thirty minutes, mostly because sex is pretty much a given here. Donovan sends the supplicants who won’t put out to the Candle. Which works, because most supplicants will.’
‘Yeah, well, vampire sex is the bomb, right?’
Dione laughed, and half the room looked their way. ‘Well, Lisa keeps telling me it is and it would seem rude to call her a liar. This way.’ She headed straight for an office door which, somewhat to Mike’s surprise, did not lead into the observation room.
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