Page 68 of Call of the Blood

“Oh, fair. If they were ignorant and scared, they wouldn’t have been careful. They just wouldn’t have gone back. Clean up is for hiding.”

“Exactly. That’s the way it is in, I would say, ninety-five percent of these cases. But if I see a spot with more bodies than other places, perhaps I could focus there next; it might be the hub. They don’t dispose well; we have the evidence for that.”

“Okay. I was just looking through data on my uncle. I can spare the rest of the night for this to help you.”

“Thank you. Did you get his new name?”

“I did, and Maria already gave me the file. Which I’ve already deleted permanently from your work email, so don’t go looking for it.”

I saw his eyes go to the papers on my desk, and I closed my laptop and flipped the papers. I couldn’t have him chasing down my uncle in some possessive display of… something. He seemed very capable of it.

“Fine,” he muttered.

“He’s for me,” I reminded him. “And it’s not like he’s going to run or anything. He has no idea I’m even looking into him. Let’s get your situation with the vampires and dead bodies handled finally. And here you were, telling me that you don’t need me for like three weeks.” I actually stuck my tongue out, and the heated frustration that flashed in his eyes tickled me.

“You should keep that in your mouth unless you want me to put it to use,” he said, hot and threateningly. I never thought being slightly threatened would be immensely hot, but here I was, in deep with a man that most of the world was terrified of.

“Is that a threat?” I asked, faking shock at his words.

“It’s very much a promise, Everly… one I often fantasize about, but we can discuss that a different night. Let’s get this done. I know how to identify what seems like it’s vampire-related and what isn’t. We’ll be looking more at missing persons and probably people taken off the street, not out of their homes.”

I looked for the records, lucky that the United States had a centralized database for missing persons. California had one of its own, as well as the Los Angeles police for the most local cases. Using those, I was able to start finding relevant data.

“What time frames are we looking at?”

“Let’s say the last year to start,” Alexius said. “I would have tried to cross-reference this information earlier if I had known they were killing people. In a city this large, with no other evidence of kills that Maria’s nest would have found… I didn’t want to deal with the mountain of information you’re about to pull.”

It was work. I actually had to figure out how to download all their data for my own use. It was messy, and it certainly wasn’t safe in some cases. But once I had it saved to my own computer, I could leave, quickly cleaning up any tracks I may have left to make sure no one brought it back to the house or me.

“This isn’t easy, you know,” I said, looking up at him, hissing as he impatiently tapped a foot. “Not if I want to do it right.”

“Sorry. You make it seem easy.”

“Well, it’s not.” I made a face as I pulled up what I took from each site and started to find a way to sort them and remove anything I grabbed but didn’t need. “Some of these will be older cases from national and state databases. LAPD will be the most recent and luckily the most public. And obviously, if people weren’t reported missing, we’d have no idea. And if they were found as a bloodless body, then vampires have bigger problems.”

“Of course.”

We started marking them, using small tacks straight into the drywall using the last known location or residence of the missing person, depending on what was available. Maria’s wall was going to need to be redone entirely when we were done. In an hour, we got over one hundred tacks into the wall, and sure enough, there was an interesting little patch in one spot. None right on top of a potential sleeping location, none too far, either, though.

“I assume you’ll be going there, and we’ll revisit this tomorrow if it doesn’t work out?” I looked up at him as he studied it.

“Yes… I think I’ll camp out here.” He pointed to a specific spot, a building near seven different missing people in the last two years that Alexius believed could have been caused by a vampire. The building was also in a circle range of some of the vampire sightings. “I’ll feed and stay up all day for safety, but it puts me in a good spot to catch anyone else trying to hide and rest. I can catch them waking up hungry and looking to feed if that is one of their most active hunting locations. I won’t lose time to travel once the sun goes down.”

“I don’t like it. What if some human finds you and tells you to get out?”

“Any human going in there would be having a problem… The nest owns that building,” he explained, frowning. “That is the same address, I think,” he said, looking at his phone at something. “Maria sent me a list of addresses, places the nest or her companies own for the nest to store things quietly without suspicion. Places that don’t get a lot of foot traffic. I can handle this. You can get back to what you were doing. Thank you for helping me.”

“Of course. Good luck.” I waved at him as he left the room, moving quickly back out to his car. Sunrise was just before seven. He had limited time to get back to that location, hide the SUV from the vampires he was looking for, and find a place where he felt safe to hunker down for the daylight. I knew he could do it. He had done it for centuries before he probably learned what it was like to have a stable, safe place during the daylight. He’d survived the threat of sun when he was, for lack of a better term, feral. I didn’t like the word, but I couldn’t think of one better for the time I heard about before Jacob entered his life.

I looked back at my work on my uncle and sat down, knowing I had enough to dig for more in new ways. I had to be careful. He’d certainly get an alert if I tried to log into the wrong account. Everything was so interconnected now.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t. I just didn’t know if I had a need to do anything risky yet. What I did was take his information, places to break later on a list for easy reference, and look for easier sources that wouldn’t notify him that I was looking into him.

And that revealed some interesting finds. He had more than one cell phone number, so I added that second number to my contact. He owned two properties, but the nest was only aware of one, based on records. The second property was interesting. I would check it out at next sunset since it was already too close to sunrise to safely get there and back. Getting caught sleeping in his place would be a terrible situation.

“I wish any of this told me why he was exiled, but nothing.” I sighed, knowing dawn was coming soon. I looked at my phone to see an update from Alexius that he was in a safe location.

We were both waiting on the next time the sun went down.