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I took that as a yes and sighed. After retrieving a towel from my trunk to drape over the driver’s seat—because I was under no circumstances going to put this now-filthy ass on my nice car seats—I leaned in and turned on the car. The engine purred to life, and I adjusted the heat vents to point directly at my furless passenger.
“I’m not leaving it on the whole time,” I told the dog. “I’ll let it get warm in here, though. And I’d appreciate if you didn’t piss or shit all over the inside of my car. Deal?”
A soft whine.
I sighed. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
I left the dog in the car and went back to the business of dealing with the dead.
2
It was almostmidnight by the time I actually managed to leave the damn crime scene. First, there was the problem that was currently curled up on my coat in my passenger seat. I’d gone to check on the dog a couple of times and let it out to pee once, although I’d had to lift it down because it had taken one look at the jump from the seat to the ground and just whined at me. It also wasn’t using one of its back legs at all, hopping tripod-style to a strip of grass to do its business, then back before looking up at me to pick it up and put it back in the car.
At least the fucking thing didn’t try to run—or hobble—away. I tried to take that as a sign that it trusted me, but I didn’t quite buy my own argument. More like it had resigned itself to the fact that I’d catch it and make its life miserable if it tried. It wasn’t wrong, but the fact that I totallywoulddo that made me feel like a dick.
I feel like that a lot. Probably because I am a dick. What can I say? It comes with the job.
The second problem was that our dead lady wasn’t very helpful, which had Ward about ready to throttle her. I suggested that he justmakeher tell him, and he rather irritably informed me that he didn’t want to traumatize her any further.
I had decided not to fight with the scary warlock. Fortunately, the second problem was made largely irrelevant by the third problem, which was that one of the more observant uniforms had found a blood trail a few blocks away and followed it to a second body in an access stairwell to a nearby parking deck. Which meant more uniforms, more crime scene tape, and a second CSI team.
The second ghost was more forthcoming than the first, although she didn’t actually know much. She told us her own name—Tatiana Zhirov—that she was nineteen years old, and that she was a bear shifter. She also told us that she didn’t know anything about the other passengers who had been packed into the back of the van with her.
She said she’d only just gotten to Richmond a few months ago and had started dancing at a club in Shockoe Bottom. One of the men who had been coming in regularly had asked if she needed more money and offered her a job doing what he’d called a “private gig for a group of friends.”
He hadn’t been where he’d asked her to meet them—instead, she’d been grabbed and shoved in a van, a bag put over her head.
She’d had no idea where they’d taken her, other than saying it smelled stale and had a cement floor. She’d been there for a few days, and they’d brought her food and taken her to the bathroom every few hours, but she’d remained blindfolded the whole time.
Early this morning they’d loaded her and another two people—shifters, she could tell, but didn’t know anything else—into the van, where there had been another two shifters already in animal form. She told Ward they’d smelled to her like dogs.
As they’d rounded a corner, one or more of the others had made an escape attempt, knocking aside their guards, then opening the doors and throwing themselves out of the moving vehicle. When the van had stopped and their handlers got out, she had pulled off her blindfold and started running without bothering to look behind her.
I didn’t blame the poor thing.
She’d heard the screaming as the other woman had been caught—and murdered, although Tatiana hadn’t known that for sure. She just kept running until they caught up with her.
Both women’s throats had been ripped out.
Given the dog’s whine at the suggestion of a vampire and the type of injury, it seemed like we were looking at a vampire as our killer for all three victims. Our second ghost confirmed it, but that didn’t necessarily mean we were only looking at just one. Maybe there were two murdering vampires on the loose. Or more.
I really hated it when our perps were ‘predatory’ Arcanids. Vampires, orcs, ghouls, and shifters already had it hard enough without people’s biases being confirmed when they started killing people.
Of course, vamps did turn homicidal sometimes—although to be fair,anyonecould turn homicidal, given the right motive—and newly turned vampires had significant bloodlust. I’d seen that for myself when I’d been an inadvertent witness to the slaughter of an orderly at St. Christopher’s Arcane Hospital back in Milwaukee who hadn’t been careful enough around a newly reawakened vampire. The vamp had gone straight for the throat.
I’d never seen so much blood in my life, either before or after, and I’ve seen more than my fair share of blood, let me tell you.
But in this case there were multiple shifters, some humans, and a van in addition to the vampire, which didn’t sound to me like new-vampire bloodlust out of control. It sounded like someone who had hunted these shifters down so they couldn’t escape. Escape from what, I didn’t know, but I was very interested to find out.
It was possible that whoever or whatever they were, they’d deliberately tried to make these homicides look like new-vamp bloodlust—maybe because they didn’t realize the police worked with mediums who could get the story out of even dead victims. Or maybe they just wanted to create a media shitstorm. Arcanid killers almost always created media shitstorms, at least if that information got out.
I was going to do my damnedest to make sure it didn’t. Not before I wanted it to, anyway.
The part that was extra shitty is that this was clearly an organized group targeting shifters. Any media freak-out was only going to compound the danger these shifters were already in, because when the media flipped out about Arcanid killers, it didn’t actually matter whatkindof Arcanid it was, all the ‘predatory’ Arcanids took shit for it. The rest of us—the elves and fauns—just got side-eye.
The big question, of course, was who was behind it. And how many of them there were. This case didn’t seem to me like the modus operandiof the Antiquus Ordo Arcanum, the cult-like order of warlocks who had been responsible for at least a dozen plus Arcanid homicides and a handful of human deaths over the past decade. They were warlock purists with ties to old Virginia blood—families who had been here since at least the early nineteenth century.
The old history was Doc’s business, not mine. I was far more concerned with their recent streak of homicides, although I was hopeful that we’d at least curtailed the worst of it about a year and a half ago by arresting pretty much the whole inner circle of the Ordo. There was still one asshole in Antigua I hadn’t been able to get my hands on, although the minute he set foot on US soil, his ass was mine.
