Bare Bones (16 page)

“Depends on your definition of ‘better.’” His tone was light and teasing, but I caught the underlying stress. “Can you come up here? I’m in Hampton. It’s north of Towson, just outside the beltway. There’s something I need you to see, to get your opinion on.”

If this serial killer really was non-human, then I needed to research it as quick as I could. Part of me kept remembering what Father Bernard as well as my father had said: demon summoning for information was lazy. And if time was of the essence, I couldn’t let it run out and put me in a corner where I’d have to further sully my soul.

But Dario had always been there for me. Always. At the drop of a hat he’d come when I’d asked. The vampire had never let me down, and that sort of friendship was something to be cherished. I wanted to be the same kind of friend for him. I wanted to be there when he needed me, without question, just as he’d done for me.

“Where in Hampton?” I wrote down the address as well as his comments on landmarks. “At the Target? Should I meet you in housewares, or in women’s fashion?”

“Meet me behind the building, by the dumpster.”

Well, that sounded ominous. I had visions of human bodies in the dumpster, drained of their blood by the rogue group of vampires Dario and his family had been chasing.

“I’m on my way.”

I grabbed my sword and the spelled butter knife, and added my charm bracelet just in case. I’d only bothered to spell three of the charms since we’d been free of supernatural crises the last four weeks, but it would do. Right before I left I paused and looked at the fox figurine. Should I take her?

“I’ll fill you in when I come back,” I told Raven, uncapping the dry erase markers in the hope that there would be a message for me upon my return. Nothing burst into flames, fell off the table, or flew across the room, so I assumed she was down with this plan.

Then I jumped in my car and set my phone GPS to the address in Hampton, hoping between that and Dario’s directions I could manage to get there without too many detours. The call to my father would have to wait, as would any further research on the murderer and my demon mark. A friend needed me, and I wasn’t about to let him down.

B
Y THE TIME
I’d managed to find the correct exit and navigate the unfamiliar area, it was closing on ten at night. Cars still filled the parking lot and shoppers rattled by with their carts full of plastic bags. I parked out front so I’d seem to be a regular shopper and not some robber driving around back to case the joint. Before I could lock my door, Dario appeared beside me, scaring me to the point that I nearly peed my pants.

“What took you so long,” he grumbled as I stilled my franticly beating heart. “Did you drive to Hampton via Frederick or something?”

“I missed the exit and wound up heading to Philadelphia.” Which had been a toll road. I was still pissed about that.

“Well I’ve been babysitting a body for the last hour and a half. It’s cold and stiff at this point.”

Grumpy vampire. It was kind of cute, actually, to see him like this.

“Human body?” I was surprised he hadn’t said “bodies.” His past descriptions of renegade groups led me to believe they were killing machines. Living with a feast or famine cycle tended to make a vampire want to gorge when they managed to grab a victim.

“No, a vampire body.”

Dario turned and led the way while I followed, still shocked at his words. Had one of the
Balaj
been killed by the rogues? The dead had to have been one of theirs. I couldn’t imagine I’d be called in each time they killed one of the renegades. Then I remembered our conversation about the Towson rogues and wondered if a
human
had possibly killed a vampire. A determined, knowledgeable, Van Helsing sort of character wouldn’t find it impossible, but I imagined a college girl trying to break a vampire’s neck and had to stifle a giggle.

Dario and I blended in with the shopping public until we rounded the side of the store, past silent loading docks and around to the rear. Two women stood by a back door smoking, their smocks still tied around their waists. They watched us with a wary curiosity, one edging her foot toward the propped-open door.

I’m sure they wondered what the heck we were doing. Dario headed left, jumping onto an embankment and edging along a narrow path between overgrown shrubberies and the side of a gigantic dumpster. Looking up I saw the back of a low-rise apartment complex a few hundred feet away. No wonder the two women on their smoke break hadn’t been overly alarmed. This was clearly a short-cut from the store to the apartments.

It was also the dump site for a body. I had no clue how the vampires had managed to find it with the thick bushes still holding on to their fall foliage. If they hadn’t, there was a good chance this body would have lain there until winter, when some poor human cutting through to his home saw it.

Or not. Vampires turned to dust in the sunlight, their bodies would, too.

I leaned in, pushing aside the stubborn thorny limbs to get a better look at the dead vampire. It was there I got my second shock of the night. The vampire was completely devoid of skin, legs and arms sprawled outward from a twisted torso.

“The other victims were in the city,” I mused. We were in Hampton. It wasn’t far, but it definitely was a break from where the killers had previously been active.

“And all the others were human.” Dario reached down and grabbed the corpse’s head, turning it to face me. I don’t know if I was more shaken that he grabbed the horror-movie skinned head with his bare hand, or at the sharp set of vampire teeth in her mouth. Big, pointy teeth. I knew they had fangs, but the absence of lips made those gigantic canines look all the more lethal.

No wonder Dario had called me. He knew about the serial killer in Baltimore, but I hadn’t had a chance to tell him my theory about the killer not being human. This particular choice of victim would make a whole lot more sense if the killer was a demon, or demons, with a signature style of killing than if the killer were a human. Human serial killers
were
pretty darned scary, but to take down a vampire required knowledge—knowledge of how to make sure they stayed dead as well as how to quickly incapacitate them. Vampires were fast. The slightest delay and the killer would be the one with a snapped neck, sprawled dead in the thorny brush.

“How…?” I couldn’t even formulate the question I was so busy envisioning how a human, psychotic though he might be, could overpower a vampire and manage to skin one. We might be dealing with a team of two or three, of which at least one might be some type of supernatural, but still… My mind boggled at the idea of even three demons
skinning
a vampire.

“She was killed no more than four or five hours ago,” Dario commented, casually wiping his hand on his jeans. “Otherwise the body would have combusted.”

It would have been daylight five hours ago. It got me to wondering if the killer’s trophy, the skin, would also need to be safeguarded from daylight. He
had
to have known the victim was a vampire. What was driving his choice of victims, though? And why a vampire?

“How did you find her?”

Dario seemed pretty emotionless about the whole thing, so I was assuming the victim was a rogue and not a member of his
Balaj
. Although Dario
did
seem to turn emotionless whenever it was time for business.

“Remember the vampire in Towson with the wild story about the college girl trying to kill him? Well, last night a rogue I spoke to mentioned an encounter with a zombie. She said she’d picked up a woman for an evening meal, had even gone so far as to bite her. Evidently she tasted horrible, like a long-dead corpse.”

“The woman was an orc?” It’s all I could think of, remembering my Anderon game and how I’d been told that orcs tasted terrible.

“If orcs look like humans, then it’s a possibility. This vampire was completely convinced the woman was a zombie. She said after she bit her, the zombie stabbed her in the back of the neck with something that felt like a sharp awl, then bit down on her arm.”

“Ghoul?” They were technically dead, and
did
like human flesh, although there were no reports of them eating live victims. They ate corpses. The older the better.

Dario shook his head. “Ghouls have fangs. This vampire showed me the bite mark. Dull, flat, human incisors. Clear pattern where the teeth had broken the skin and bruising all around the edges. They weren’t sharp. It had happened six hours prior and the rogue still had the marks. That’s one heck of a bite.”

That led me back to demons. If they possessed a human, they’d have the same old teeth as I did.

“Another rogue said a woman of the same description went off with a vampire friend of hers and never came back. She was panicked, thinking maybe we killed her friend. But by the description she gave us, that vampire wasn’t one we’d killed.”

Was that vampire dead like this woman? Or dead because she’d stayed out too late and couldn’t get underground in time? Or maybe she’d moved on, ditching her “friend” for a different town? Either way, this body
must
belong to a different vampire or it would have turned to ash by now.

Unless the killer hid the body during daylight hours, bringing it out tonight. If so, then they wanted it to be discovered. As a warning? Sheesh, the whole thing was just so sick I couldn’t even imagine a motive.

“That was last night. You said this happened tonight?” I asked Dario. “That’s a potential for two vampire victims. Isn’t it odd for someone to be hunting vampires in the same area two nights in a row?”

That took balls of steel. Yeah, these guys were rogues and unaffiliated, but they clearly communicated with each other, and formed short-term alliances. Word would have gotten around. I was now more convinced than ever we were dealing with demons. Either that or a human female really had a death wish.

Human female. No, it couldn’t be. But she’d said something at the Inner Harbor about wanting a vampire. I’d thought at the time she’d meant want, as in to date and have sex with, not skin and assume their identity.

“Was the human female young? High school age? White, with pink and blue streaks in her hair and lots of black eyeliner?”

Dario nodded. “That’s how both vampires described her.”

And now I was rethinking whether the girl seen with Brian Huang and Bradley Lewis was involved or not. Was she also a paranormal creature, or could a human teenage girl possibly have done this?

Then I remembered Russell, and acknowledged that I couldn’t rule out a human killer. The necromancer had been able to take down more than a dozen vampires using vengeful spirits. There was no saying a crazy girl who’d watched too many Buffy episodes wouldn’t be equally motivated to risk her life this way. But there was the whole skinning component. I couldn’t see a vigilante vampire hunter skinning one,
or
killing and skinning innocent humans.

Demons. It
had
to be a group of demons, but something about the theory just seemed off.

Dario nodded. “So there’s probably
another
victim like this one somewhere around if what the rogue said last night is true and all were the same attacker. Although we’ll not find any proof of what happened to the other victim since her body has most likely turned to ash at this point.”

The two dead, well one presumed dead, as well as the vampire who’d been bitten were all women. The female victim who’d survived had been the one who was convinced a zombie had attacked her and the guy in Towson, although I wasn’t sure that attack was related to these. The attacker had adapted, going from trying to break a vampire’s neck, to stabbing and biting, to…this.

I looked down at the corpse with her bulging eyes and fangs, quickly turning my head away from the gruesome sight. I’d seen far too much of this sort of thing in the past few days. “Do you have any idea who this vampire is? Was?”

Dario shook his head. “Not one of ours. I can ask any other rogues we catch, but there’s usually not much of an opportunity for conversation. I’ve only run across six since I’ve been up here who were decent vampires just trying to survive. The others are like berserkers. It’s all we can do to catch them and put them down. This has got to be the most vicious bunch of renegades I’ve ever encountered. It’s not normal, even among vampires who are starving. I can only hope we can catch and kill them all by the week’s end.”

I winced. The
Balaj
didn’t take prisoners, and I couldn’t see a rogue vampire consenting to a question and answer session before execution. Thankfully Dario was willing to ignore Leonora’s orders and let the “decent” solitaries go free.

The whole thing was just bizarre. I mean, the idea of a taxidermy-inclined demon team was strange enough, but a demon who went after not just one, but
four
vampires? “How did the woman kill her?” Our usual methods included beheading or destroying the heart, neither of which appeared to have happened to this victim.

“Her heart is gone, but it happened after the skinning.” Dario shot me a wry glance. “Don’t ask me how I figured that out.”

Ugh. “So she incapacitated her somehow, skinned her while she was still alive, and then destroyed her heart?”

Skinning while alive… I didn’t want to really think too much about what that must have felt like. The humans had been dead first, exsanguinated, no doubt to make the skinning a cleaner process. The humans had all been left with internal organs intact, too. The fact that the killer had taken this vampire’s heart meant she knew about them—and knew how to kill them. That fit with the demon theory.

Dario ran a hand over his short dark hair. “I don’t know how the killer incapacitated her. Vampires don’t go down easy. This vampire clearly fought with her attacker and lost, but I’m not sure how. Oh, and another thing—I’ve got no idea why, but the attacker took quite a bit of the vampire’s blood as well as her skin.”

“The human victims were drained of blood, but we’re not sure if the murderers are doing anything with it. The M.E. thought it was to make the skinning process easier.”