I put it all together. Young Master Pellissier would have been Leo. Who was having his humans tear HQ apart looking for records about Joseph. Gotcha.

And Pinkie wasn’t kidding. Maybe a television magician could have gotten through without leaving a trace, but no normal human or vamp could have, not unless the film and fiction writers were right when they suggested that vamps could turn into smoke and slide under doors and through cracks. From the hallway, the door was padlocked, three metal strips screwed into the woodwork of the jamb and through rings set in the door; each ring had a lock, besides the one in the door itself. Over the years, the wood had swelled from the Louisiana humidity, and the house’s foundations had settled, pulling the framework out of plumb and sealing the door tighter still.

Pinkie pulled a ring of keys from a pocket and held them close as she read the labels. Starting at the top, she unlocked each padlock, bending back the metal strips as she worked. The metal wasn’t overly pliable, and it groaned as it was bent, but tiny little Pinkie was a lot stronger than she appeared.

When the door was unlocked, she indicated that it was ours to open. Eli slipped in front of me, knelt, and pulled a small light, checking all around the edges for . . . I had no idea, not in such an old room, but Mr. Paranoid didn’t heal as well as I did, so I let him take whatever precautions he wanted. Once he was assured it was safe, he stepped back and I took the old metal knob in my hand, feeling the lines that had been etched or pressed into the metal when it was made, leaves, I thought, or a fleur-de-lis. Then I thought about a shotgun set up to fire when the door opened, and I stepped to the side. Eli and Pinkie both stepped to the other side, as if reading my mind. I twisted the knob, which made a dry, creaking sound, made much worse as I pushed on the door, swollen into place, wood against wood. I set my shoulder to it, the door groaning like a human dying, still thinking about the possible shotgun. But no gun went off.

The smells that rushed out of the dark, overheated room were mice, damp, mold, old wood, rotten linens, old blood, and . . . dead vamp.

CHAPTER 11

A Sleepover with My Bestie, Adrianna

Death, even old death, has a smell.

The vamp skeleton was lying on the floor beside the bed, her head a few feet away.

“Holy Mother of God.” Pinkie crossed herself and took a step back. I took two steps in and closed my eyes to get a better scent pattern of the dead and of the room. I breathed in through mouth and nose, but making no noise. Not a true, catlike, flehmen behavior, just some good breaths of the sealed space, and I found that I could identify varying scent signatures of several people—vamps and humans—who had spent time in the room. There was no recent sign of Joseph Santana or anyone else, just old, old, old smells.

Once I was satisfied of that, and of the scents I had taken in, I opened my eyes and gestured Eli in. He stood to my left, the open door to his side, his body positioned to cover the hallway, the room, and me. Security was second nature to him. Together we studied the dead vamp and the scene before us.

She had met true-death wearing a long, vertically striped blue dress with a high waist, ribbons, lace, and a locket pinned to her chest. Her head had met true-death wearing long blond hair up in a bun, and a perky hat. The mice had been at it all, and her hair had been a nest for more than one family of rodents. Said nesters had eaten the soft parts of the vamp, but surprisingly, most of her bone structure and tendons were still intact, if dried out and brittle looking.

When Acton House had been retrofitted for AC, this room hadn’t been included in the renovations. Room 201 had a door that would open out onto the front gallery and tall, narrow windows, all sealed shut, which accounted for the heat, all with shutters, which were latched closed from the inside.

More critter nests were between the shutters and the window glass. Yet more had taken the best location inside—within the pillows and mattresses on the four-poster rice bed. The bed was hand carved and had been made up with silk sheets and feather pillows, faded and disintegrating, but probably the height of style and comfort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Curiously, I didn’t sense any mice in the room now, but maybe the heat had driven them out. Maybe the room was their winter home. I suppressed a grin, which I knew Pinkie would consider unseemly.

The floor was wood; the walls had been papered. Moldy shreds of pink roses and darker pink stripes were falling in curls where the walls weren’t blood splashed. There, it was brown and dried and had been partially eaten by mice. The rugs were gnawed and threadbare but had once matched the wallpaper in color tones. A bedside table held a hurricane lamp, a carved ivory and wood pipe, and a book, along with the ubiquitous rodent droppings.

A turn-of-the-previous-century bathroom stood open and looked as awful as the rest of the suite. The chifforobe doors were closed and warped, a key dangling from a chain on one little knob. A pair of shoes lay in a corner near a small overturned chair. A tea cart was beside the chair, its contents splattered with blood. From the spatter I could tell that the teapot had been broken prior to the beheading.

Eli pointed to a place on the wall where no blood marked the wallpaper. The killer had likely stood there and taken the blood spatter with him when he left. Great lot of good that observation did us. Any clothes and trace on the killer would have been long gone by then, and the blood silhouette wasn’t over-helpful except to suggest height, which had been average.

I moved farther inside and pulled my cell phone, taking photos and sending them to myself and to Alex. The days of memorizing a crime scene and drawing it out on pads of graph paper were long gone. So were pads of graph paper, probably.

To the side of the dead vamp I saw a gleam and carefully stepped around her outstretched skeletal left hand to get a good photograph. The shiny thing was a quartz crystal, the kind found in nature, but this one had been a really spectacular specimen before it was busted. I had seen one in this condition before. They were used by master vamps and by witches as cages for arcenciels. The sentient, shape-shifting dragons of light were from another plane, beings who could slow or bend time the way I could, but much better. The master of such a creature could force it to bend time or could borrow its magical ability to that end if he knew how, making the master an unbeatable adversary. But if the dragon creature got free, its bite was dangerous at best and could be deadly if untreated, even to vamps.

And oddly, Bruiser had mentioned arcenciels as part of his research, research initiated by Leo, who had been in this room on the day that the Son of Darkness had been hidden from the world. Leo had surely seen the shattered crystal that day, but I knew for certain that he’d had no idea what it had been used for, because an arcenciel had bitten him not long ago, which was when we had all learned the nature of the creatures and their poisonous bites. At some point after being bitten, the Master of the City had mentally added the busted crystal in this room together with the existence of arcenciels and with the condition of the Son of Darkness so long ago, and sent Bruiser searching.