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He took out his comm unit and snapped a few quick photos of the dead man and his collection of body art.
Peering closer, Mathias noticed something interesting about one of his tattoos.
“Look at the Celtic cross on his left forearm. The six-pointed star behind it is fresh.”
“And only half-finished,” Thane added, staring down at the reddened skin and black ink.
Even incomplete, the star was intricate, rendered by a highly skilled hand and an artist’s eye for detail.
“Hope the dumb fuck didn’t pay in full for half a job,” Callahan joked lamely.
None of the warriors laughed along with him. Thane and Deacon were looking at Mathias with the same glint of possibility.
“Something’s not right about this whole situation,” Mathias said, thinking out loud. “Six dead members of a gang no one’s ever heard of, now a seventh body turns up days later. Why?”
Callahan shrugged. “Gangs kill each other all the time. If you ask me, we should let them carry on and thank them for saving us the trouble.”
The kid had a point, albeit a wrong-headed one. And dangerous besides. If a gang had ideas about bringing their war into Mathias’s city, under the Order’s watch, they would need to think again.
And something was nagging him about the slayings, even before this last body was pulled out of the Thames. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on yet. He needed more information. Seemed to him, the best place to begin that quest was the place where tonight’s floater might have spent some of his final hours.
ER 1
The night sky over London hung thick and ominous, heavy with black clouds still lingering from the evening’s torrential rainstorm. The downpour had lasted for hours, driving most of the city’s residents inside for shelter.
It was an advantage that Mathias Rowan and the three other Order warriors accompanying him on patrol tonight had made full use of, knowing the vampire lair they’d located in Southwark the week before was all but certain to be occupied amid the storm.
While Mathias never found it an easy thing to kill his own kind, the nest of blood-addicted Rogues squatting in the derelict brick building had to be terminated. The collection of human bones tossed in a pile in the back room of the foul-smelling lair had been more than ample justification for the Rogues’ executions.
Rory Callahan, the warrior behind the passenger seat Mathias occupied in the Order’s black Range Rover, let out a howl. “Damn, those were some sick, Bloodlusting fucks.”
Still green and mostly stupid about life, Callahan leaned forward, grinning, the tips of his fangs still visible behind his lip, evidence of the battle rage that had gripped them all during the raid. The youngest of the squad, he hadn’t seen enough death or violence yet to understand how closely every Breed male tread to the madness they’d encountered tonight.
From beside Callahan in the backseat, Deacon, the third member of the team exhaled a low, solemn curse. “They’d been killing for a while. Good thing we ashed them before they got tired of draining homeless people and moved uptown where folks were apt to notice the thinning of their herd.”
Mathias grunted in grim agreement.
Only Liam Thane, the Breed warrior behind the wheel of the speeding vehicle, hadn’t said a word since they’d done their business and left the lair.
Mathias had known the male for more than two decades--back when they’d both been part of a different, and since dissolved, policing organization for the Breed. Mathias had served as director in Boston then, and Thane had worked mostly covert ops around Europe and the United Kingdom.
While no one would ever call the hulking, black-haired vampire jovial, tonight Thane seemed more pensive than usual. Mathias glanced at him from the passenger seat. Thane’s long hair was gathered in a tail at his nape, accentuating the severe cut of his cheekbones and stern jaw. He stared straight ahead, unblinking, focused on the rain-slicked road that followed the bank of the Thames.
“I knew one of them,” he murmured, his gaze unblinking, never leaving the road. “He was a good man once...my cousin, Jacob.”
The vehicle went silent at Thane’s admission, nothing but the hum of the Rover’s engine and the night wind buffeting the windows as it blew up off the river.
Mathias didn’t offer apologies or sympathy. Thane wouldn’t look for it any more than Mathias himself would. They were warriors. They had a job to do and they did it, no matter how unpleasant.
No matter how personal.
Even under ordinary circumstances, the Order’s justice was swift and final when it came to dealing with the diseased killers among their race. After all, it had only been twenty years since the Breed was outed to mankind around the world in a massive Rogue attack. To say that human/Breed relations had been tenuous in the time that followed was putting it mildly.
And now, just days ago in Washington, D.C., the Order had been dealt more cause for concern. A bombing meant to disrupt a world peace summit--using a weapon powered by Breed-killing ultraviolet light--had been thwarted by the Order’s founder, Lucan Thorne, with mere seconds to spare.
The attack, and the war it was meant to incite between the vampire and human populations, had been diffused, its chief architect killed, but the threat remained very real.
The Order had powerful, hidden enemies. They’d eliminated one in D.C., but they’d come away from the battle realizing there was an untold number still operating in the shadows, plotting destruction and waiting for their chance to strike again.
