Companions (8 page)

"Everybody that's had a look so far has tossed their cookies."

"Wimps." She stepped up to the torso propped against the wall. "Heart missing?" she asked.

The tech looked up in surprise. "How'd you know?"

"Lucky guess." That explained the burned meat smell. The killer had destroyed the heart. Wise move.

"You've seen something like this before, Crawford?" Raleigh asked.

She grinned at him. "Oh, yeah." She pointed at the victim's several severed pieces. "There's this game chicks play at wedding showers, called Maenads, where we run around ripping guys to shreds. You should have been at my place yesterday."

Raleigh shook a finger at her. "You know I don't want to hear about that girly stuff." He grew serious.

"You know something I don't about this case?"

Sort of. Maybe.
Well, she knew who — what — the victim was, at any rate. "Nothing," she said to her partner and friend, looking deeply into his eyes. "Nothing at all."

He believed her because, of course, she wanted him to believe her. She hated that she was able to do that to him. She could deal with Raleigh on this investigation, but he was the least of her problems. She looked around. There were people everywhere. How was she supposed to control a situation involving a vampire's murder when so many mortals had already seen the thing? It was only going to get worse. Wait until the coroner had a look at the corpse. This was not her job. She should just leave it alone. She was not the goddamned Enforcer of the City.

She wanted to spit on the damned corpse. She was not going to get involved in Enforcer business. She said, "I'll take over interviewing the neighbors."

"Get in the car."

Ariel bridled exactly as she'd expected him to when she pulled over to the curb and spoke. It was past ten, and traffic on this street off Lake Shore Drive was sparse. Nobody, not even the building's doorman, was anywhere near the vampire on the sidewalk. Ariel brushed pale hair off his shoulders as his head went up proudly. He stared through her with eyes pale as ice cubes. A sneer curled his beautiful mouth.

The Enforcer of the City was not accustomed to being addressed with anything less than groveling respect. Selena couldn't recall ever having groveled for anyone. Showing respect to a
mere
Enforcer was out of the question.

Ariel was the most beautiful creature she'd ever seen. Tall and elegant, he reminded her of silver and mercury, and — What was that stuff? — mithril. Not only did his name sound like it belonged to an elf, he looked like one. Very Tolkienesque was Ariel.

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She'd left a message on his answering machine during the day. They were both surprised that he'd met her on the sidewalk outside his high-rise condo building. He hesitated long enough to give her a disdainful sneer, then slid into the passenger seat and slammed the door. The first thing he said as she pulled into the street was, "I should kill you for this, mortal."

She'd expected him to ask how she'd gotten his phone number. "You and what army of darkness, Tinkerbell?" she answered as she turned a corner.

She was terrified but had long ago learned not to let it show in her attitude or her surface emotions. Bad guys could sense fear. Vampires ranked high on the empathic scale, but she dealt on a daily basis with mortals every bit as nasty and sensitive to vulnerability as any bloodsucker. Her own lord and master was the only one she'd encountered since that first run-in with a nest that she let faze her. In fact — and she hated to admit it — not all vampires were bad people. Most obeyed their laws and kept out of mortals'

way. Some of the things they did, when properly regulated, even helped to bring a certain rough, peremptory justice to a dark and ugly world. She just didn't want to be one.

And no way was she letting them step over the line in her town.

"What do you want with me?" Ariel asked. "Officer."

"That's Detective Sergeant."

"Detective Sergeant."

He looked straight ahead out the front of the windshield, not deigning to glance her way. He did give her her due with a slight nod. "Detective."

"Hunter," she reciprocated. "I want you to identify a corpse," she told him.

He swiveled his head slowly to look at her. He lifted a pale eyebrow and drawled, "Is this an official investigation, Detective?"

"That'll be up to you."

That got his attention. "Who owns you, companion? Who dares to let you interfere with my — "

"Indignation doesn't become you. Stick to business, and I'll get out of your way,"

Jerk,
she thought.
Ought to be thanking me instead of bringing up the little matter of
—

She cut off the thought before Ariel could goad her into an emotional slip that would let him into her mind. Screw the strigoi and their dominance games.

Selena pulled into the alley she'd been looking for. It was a quiet, private place, at least since she'd rousted some gangbanger drug dealers out of it earlier in the evening. They wouldn't be back for a while, and the regular beat patrol car wouldn't be likely to come this way for another half hour at least.

She killed the engine and lights, popped the trunk, and took a flashlight with her when she got out of the car. Ariel followed her. He stood quietly back, hidden in the shadows, while she unzipped the body bag inside the trunk.

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He moved to stand by her shoulder when she shone the light on the corpse. Neither spoke for a few seconds. Finally, he said, "Where did you get that?"

"Stole it from the morgue."

"I… see."

Selena wasn't sure what he saw but didn't ask.

He made a slight gesture toward the head and torso. "How many people know about… him?"

"Quite a few. I can take care of some of the paper trail associated with your boy, here, but I can't put the whammy on that many people."

"That is my job," he conceded with one of his slight nods.

"Fine," she said. "Good." Selena played the light over the dead face. "Who is he?"

Ariel looked at her with his cool, pale eyes. "I have no idea."

"He's not a local boy?"

"He is not from any nest in the city."

Not a local boy. Shit.
Selena
knew
she shouldn't have gotten involved. It was none of her business —

except that it was a homicide, and that was her department. And now it looked like it was more complicated than she'd thought. The plan had been to take the body to the Enforcer of the City and leave the trouble for him to deal with. A simple plan. She'd figured it for a simple crime of passion. Signs indicated that somebody who knew and hated the victim took out their rage in a nasty, thorough way.

Vampires claimed they couldn't kill each other, but Selena knew anyone could kill anyone if sufficient motive, means, and opportunity were present. She hoped this was a vampire-killing-vampire case. She wasn't going to let herself think about the other possibility while Ariel was around. The other way was too complicated.

Complicated crimes among the strigoi tended to call for a specialist.
The
specialist: Istvan. Meanest Mother in the Valley. Her Steve.

Shit.

"Local strig?" she asked hopefully. "Territorial war between some new boys in town?" The strigs were technically loners, living outside the protection and laws of vampire society, but that didn't mean the local Enforcer wasn't aware of most strig activity in his town. Any good cop would know potential troublemakers.

"Possibly."

"Any nest have a safe house off Oak Street?"

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She didn't blame him when he didn't answer. He reached past her and closed the body bag, his long white fingers elegantly graceful against the shiny black plastic. He took the body out of the car trunk as if it weighed nothing and put it over his shoulder, then turned a very frightening, stern glance on her. "This is my case from now on, Detective. Thank you for your help." Then he disappeared, leaving a momentary white blur in the corner of her eye as he moved with the swiftness of his kind.

It was not, she noticed after a moment's reflection, anywhere near as fast as her boy Steve could move.

She wondered why that was and pulled out of the quiet neighborhood to drive through heavy traffic on the way home to Evanston. She knew Enforcers were different than regular vampires, almost a breed apart, and that Istvan was different even than regular Enforcers. What she didn't know, and he'd certainly never bothered telling her, was why and how. It had become habit to try not to think about anything to do with the monster in her life. Cop's instincts told her that might not be wise right now, not when she'd just risked her own career to clean up a mess that had spilled over from the world she pretended didn't exist.

"It's not pretense, it's a survival tool," she muttered as a driver using a cell phone cut her off. She hated using her own car, and she hated people who used those things while they drove! "Idiots. Where was I?"

Oh, yeah, telling herself she didn't pretend vampires didn't exist. It was only Istvan, her boy Steve, she tried to pretend didn't exist. Tried and failed utterly.

She hated admitting that, not because she loathed personal failure but because she dealt with people who lied to themselves all the time, and they were stupid. Murderers were especially good at mental gymnastics that convinced them that they had a right to take life, that it was the victim's fault they'd been killed. And sex offenders: God, sex offenders were the worst at finding anyone to blame but themselves for the sick lives they led. And what was a vampire but an immortal rapist-murderer?

And she was one of them.

"Now there's a chilling little admission." Selena glanced in the rearview mirror to look herself in the eye.

Somehow that ritual helped reassure her of her current humanity. At least she could see herself in the mirror. She remembered how she used to check her teeth to see if they were getting pointy and brushed and flossed five or six times a day after she was first bitten. She supposed she'd nursed some crazy hope that good dental hygiene would save her from the fate that awaited her.

A largely unknown fate, she admitted, after two years of lurking around the outside edge of strigoi life.

She didn't know what it was like to be a vampire, and she had only a warped and fragmented notion of what it was like to be a companion — from fellow dissatisfied companions, at that. She sometimes suspected that her aunt knew more about vampires than she did. And Steve — Istvan, the Meanest Mother in the Valley — what did she really know about him?

Did it matter for a murder investigation she'd just turned over to the vampire police department? Her instincts told her it did. Her instincts, she pointed out to herself, were screwed up by hormones, or pheromones, or blood loss from last night's little romp with Fangboy the Magnificent. And was he really hung like a stallion, or was it some sort of vampire hypnotism that made her think he was? And did it matter, considering the force and frequency of the orgasms the illusion — or possibly reality — induced in her?

"Yes, damn it!"

Reality mattered. Controlling her life mattered. And why the hell had she turned over the case to the Enforcer in the first place? She banged a fist against the steering wheel. She and Raleigh had taken the
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call. It was their crime scene, their case. For some reason, she'd reacted like a vampire's pet blood donor instead of Detective Sergeant Crawford. The tendency to want to please and obey the master race that was built into the relationships the biters had with the bitees was really sick and disgusting and so damn hard to fight. Hard to even notice unless you worked very diligently at it. All the time.

Selena sighed. Now that it was done, she didn't know whether taking the body to Ariel was the right thing to do or not. What she hated was that her reaction had been a knee-jerk protection of a community she wanted no part of, and that she had not understood her response until it was too late. They'd gotten her again, and she'd done it to herself. For better or worse, she'd let the initiative go. She tried not to think about it anymore on the rest of the drive home.

Okay, I'll bite. Selena typed the E-mail message to DesertDog's ICQ. She was thankful she'd found him on this early in the evening and glad she'd exchanged instant messaging information with at least some of the chat group. DesertDog was just the person she wanted to talk to after a day spent making sure the corpse missing from the morgue wasn't traced back to her. She typed, What happened in Denver?

Was there a chainsaw involved?
she wondered.
Were you?
She considered asking but restrained herself and sent the message with only the one question.

After a considerable wait, the other companion responded, One of Them was found dead in a downtown park. Sloppy job.

How do you know about this?

She'd checked with Denver Homicide, but there'd been no reports of heartless, headless corpses. She wondered if Steve knew about this. He'd said he was heading west. Again, there was a lot of lag time before DesertDog sent a reply.

A friend told me.

Your friend?

Wait.

Yes.

Nighthawk clan?

The loop members avoided direct questions about their own personal demons, but Selena was sick of generalities. Oddly enough, DesertDog answered immediately.

Yes.

So she wasn't the only pet person of an Enforcer in the dissident group. She was not surprised. Bet you're happy to get that off your chest, she wrote.

Yours? Was DesertDog's answer.

My chest?

Be happy to talk about your chest, but I asked about your lover. Got a Nighthawk sucking on you?