Companions (7 page)

He took another step.

She fired the gun.

The little room echoed with the roar of the shot. She'd been braced for the recoil, but it still took
her back a half step.

Istvan yawned. He stretched. He scratched the spot where the bullet had entered his chest. He
didn't bleed, fall down, and die.

"I need a shower," he said.

He should have at least been writhing in agony. He almost reacted to the pain that shot through
her head and back to him with such sudden intensity that it forced her to her knees. She didn't
drop the gun, though. Istvan plucked it out of her hands.

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The trick was not to let her see how much it hurt. If he hadn't been prepared for it, he'd be
bleeding all overher white-tiled floor right now. Strong, stubborn will kept him going.

First, he carefully placed the gun in the cabinet beneath the sink. Then he grasped Selena's wrists
and pulled her up. Her expression reflected the pain they both felt. His fingers were numb, but he
managed to untie the belt of her robe without fumbling too badly. He gave himself points for style
and was just glad the bullet had made a fiery exit through his flesh instead of lodging in the rib it
had shattered.
Thank God for high-caliber projectiles,
he thought, as he dragged Selena into the
shower stall with him.

Hot water helped. It usually did. He'd discovered that sometime in the fifteenth century, when
he'd been dragged into a castle to entertain
—

Istvan cut the memory off before the loathing and anger could fully surface. The boyar had died
long ago, and Istvan had made the discovery that he liked being clean.

Even hell had a few amenities.

He didn't mind remembering what happened in the shower after Selena shot him, but thinking about the first vampire he'd ever killed was not a daymare he wanted to relive. Then again, centuries-old memories didn't surface among his kind without a reason. Istvan lay in his box, fully awake but completely immobile. He considered what he knew of his current assignment and what he remembered of the mortal boy who'd ripped out the heart of a —

The
first
vampire who'd made him a companion.

He'd been young, eleven, maybe twelve; it had been a very long time ago. The noblewoman who kept him in her castle was of an ancient, haughty line that had ruled in the mountainous forest from time out of mind.
She
had ruled from time out of mind. He was hardly the first Roma she'd taken to her bed, to her heart. Her kisses drew blood. She taught him bed play deep into the nights, though his young body had had no such male stirrings before she touched him. She gave him her blood, only a little, saying she wanted him to grow into a fine, big man. That she wanted him as her bed slave for decades. That's all companions were to her, slaves worthy of a bit more time and torture.

The taste of her pure, noble blood sickened him, disgusted him. He had felt no devotion, but he had pretended, and she had believed. Her pride had killed her as surely as the knife he smuggled into her bed. He had known enough to take her heart and burn it. He had taken her head as well, just in case, and burned her beautiful body and scattered the ashes in the sunlight.

He chuckled silently now at the boy's thoroughness. The heart had been enough, but he hadn't known that then. Still, he'd enjoyed destroying the body that had used him and used him and destroyed everything that was left of his childhood.

He'd been a companion who could do the impossible and kill the vampire who bled him. Selena had tried to kill him with his blood singing fresh in her veins. But he was
dhamphir,
she was the
dhamphir's
companion. He didn't think it was possible for him to have taken a bonded lover that wasn't as strong-willed and ruthless as he was. What would be the point?

The Enforcer in Denver had reported the death of a local vampire to Olympias. The body had been found by mortal authorities in a public park. The remaining members of the victim's household had disappeared. The Enforcer of the City was concentrating on keeping the mortal police and media from
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finding any information about the victim or any clues to the killings. Istvan's job was to find and stop the killer, which was the height of irony, since he'd never seen how killing vampires was a bad thing. Still, he'd agreed to live by the Laws of the Blood.

Since strigoi claimed to be instinctually unable to kill each other, Olympias had listened to the Denver Enforcer's report and suggested to Istvan that a strigoi had used a mortal to destroy an enemy. This sort of killing used to happen in the days when nests fought Mafia-style wars with each other. Olympias was a bright female, but she was an old broad who didn't get out of town much. There were two or three other possibilities Istvan could think of that Olympias hated to consider. He was surprised at her reluctance to think out of the box on this one, but even the thought of mortals acting on their own made strigoi nervous.

Sometimes she showed her old-line sensibilities at the oddest times, but she was anything but a fool.

Once upon a time, before the founding of the Council, before the oral code of Laws had been written in blood, legend said there had been a city full of vampires. The legend was one of the things the oldest vampires, the
surviving
vampires, kept very quiet. Because they didn't want anyone to know how that city had been destroyed. But Istvan knew.

That was why his past bubbled up to remind him of what he'd done when he was still close to being a normal human being. That was why the memory of Selena's defiance when she'd barely been bitten filled his dreams. It was not a strigoi he needed to look for or a mortal vampire hunter who'd put his trophies on display as a warning to the world. His instincts told him the killer he was looking for was a companion.

A few suspects came readily to mind. One of them was Selena.

"There are some things man was not meant to know." Don Raleigh held up a hand. "I am not listening to any of it, Crawford."

It frustrated Selena that her partner didn't want to hear about her cousin's wedding shower after his telling her that she looked like something the cat dragged in. How else was she supposed to explain her obvious tiredness? She couldn't very well tell him that the bags under her eyes had more to do with being up all night satisfying the insatiable sexual needs of a vampire than it did with bridal registries, pink punch, and party games. She was disgusted that the man was easily scared off by the slightest mention of Karen's bridal shower.

"What about women?" she asked him.

"What about them?"

Raleigh was a big man, with amber eyes, skin like satiny dark coffee, James Earl Jones's voice, and a diamond stud earring she'd given him for Christmas two years ago that he's started wearing when they worked tactical out of narcotics. His wife did not approve of the earring. That he wore it now told Selena that Raleigh and the missus had been fighting again.

Being a cop was very hard on marriages.

Raleigh told her communication was the key, especially after a couple had a disagreement.

Of course, the last time she'd had a fight with Steve, he'd threatened to not only break her neck but to
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have her for lunch. She'd laughed in his face — and bitten him that time. Hadn't heard from him for a long time after that, except for all those hang-ups on her answering machine. Calls she'd had traced to pay phones all over the country. He never bothered answering his cellular phone when she called. Damn caller ID, anyway. They'd both been fighting playing this stupid noncommunication communication game with each other for two years.

"What about women?" Raleigh asked again, pulling Selena out of a brief fantasy about what marriage must be like for vampire cops who bothered dealing with their mates at all.

Since she didn't want her thoughts to go in that direction, she went back to teasing Raleigh. "If there are things men aren't meant to know, how about women? What are women not meant to know?"

"Women are goddesses. Women know everything."

"Hmm." Selena tilted her head to get a better look at him over the top of her computer screen. Their desks in the Area Three squad room were set back to back, so piled with shared work and possessions it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. "Goddesses, eh?"

He nodded.

"Sounds like your diversity training took."

Raleigh tugged on his earring. "I have it from a higher authority." He grinned. The look in his eyes made Selena reconsider her earlier thoughts. Maybe Raleigh and Sharifa had come to some sort of amicable compromise over his choice of jewelry. She'd been told that there was a certain amount of give and take to a successful marriage. A proper marriage was supposed to be a win-win situation, right?

And she wished she'd get her mind off marriage. And Steve. And the unfinished conversation in the companions' chat room last night.

Since the morning briefing, she and Raleigh had settled down to catch up on paperwork. She looked around the room now, restless, pinned in by the solid walls and the everyday duties of her not-all-that-normal daylight world. "Too quiet," she murmured. She glanced at the clock on her computer screen. She yawned and stretched aching muscles. "Hasn't anybody gotten murdered yet this morning?"

A few seconds later the call came in, and she had her answer.

"This is interesting."

The beat cop who was the first person on the scene had the usual understated, unimpressed attitude of a street veteran. There were a lot of ways to define
interesting.
Considering the blank face and lack of emotion in the voice of the patrol woman, Selena assumed that
interesting
in this case meant grisly and disgusting.

They were standing at the entrance of an alley in a nice neighborhood of row houses not too far from Oak Street Beach. The midmorning sun shone down from a clear sky on red brick buildings with blue painted moldand on the bright blooms in a row of first-floor flower boxes. But for the police on scene, the squad cars, coroner's wagon, and the gathering of curious bystanders being kept well back from the alley, this was a peaceful, quiet place. Selena took out her pen and notebook, ready to start her crime scene log.

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Raleigh gestured beyond the yellow tape strung up by the crime scene unit. "Let's go have a look."

Selena tried to clear her mind of all suppositions before seeing the body. A dead body found in an alley did not automatically constitute murder. Her job right now was to look at the body and physical evidence and to interview witnesses, not to make assumptions. Despite the beat cop's oblique warning that what was waiting ahead of them could be a suicide, it might be a death caused by accident or natural causes.

Her training told her to be objective. She smiled slightly, cynically. Objectivity was for rookies. Her instincts knew it was a murder.

While it was a fact that anyone could get killed anywhere at any time, there tended to be a pattern for the types of bodies found in different settings. This was not the sort of neighborhood where Selena expected to find a dead hooker or crack addict, though maybe one had been dumped in the alley. It could happen, but most murders were easy to solve. People murdered people they knew and got caught.

Most murders really were crimes of passion, or of at least immense stupidity brought on by overwhelming emotion.

She was only a few feet into the alley before she smelled burnt flesh. Then she saw the head, a pale visage sitting in a puddle of congealed blood. The mutilated torso was a few feet farther back, propped up against a brick wall. There was a lot of blood and flies. The victim certainly didn't belong in this part of town. At least not at this time of day.

"Definitely interesting," Raleigh said.

And certainly a crime of passion, Selena decided. You had to really be pissed off at someone to do that much damage to them. And you knew how hard they were to kill.

"Nice clean cuts," the beat officer said. "What do you think? Chainsaw?"

DesertDog had mentioned using chainsaws once, in explicit detail, in one of the companion cabal's more heated discussions. Shit.

Raleigh made a noncommittal noise. Selena noted that the photographer was finished with pictures and approached a forensics technician. She bummed a pair of plastic booties and once her shoes were covered, she gingerly stepped up to the unattached head.

Raleigh was there before her, not as fastidious with his footgear as she was. "Male," he said. "That the whitest white guy you've ever seen?"

"No." She took a careful look at the pavement and the surrounding buildings. "Not dumped here. Too much blood."

The beat cop said, "So far, nobody we've talked to heard a thing."

No,
Selena thought.
Most wouldn't, if the killer didn't want them to.
The Force had a strong influence over the weak minded, and all that crap. She had a certain skill at it, but —

"How fresh is he?" Raleigh inquired.

"Rigor's set in," the forensic tech said. "From that and the flies, I'd give a rough guess of four to twelve hours."

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Selena put away her notebook. She checked her watch and glanced at the position of the sun in the sky.

It was her guess that somebody dragged the body outside soon after dawn. She didn't think any vampires lived in this neighborhood, but there could be a safe house around here somewhere. "Any neighbors recognize him?" She didn't.