Author: Kalayna Price

The hint of smoke had merely tainted the alley, but inside the damaged building it threatened to overwhelm my senses.

I wrinkled my nose.

Come on. Sift past the fire stink.

I drew another breath. Under the acrid smell of burnt wood I caught dried blood and the sour scent of something foreign.

A foreign scent that did smell a hell of a lot like the blood Biana had drained from me.

My vampire eyes adjusted immediately to the inky darkness of the inside of the club, but besides Degan and Nathanial, there wasn’t much to see. Charred wood, barely recognizable as tables and chairs, littered the large room. A darkened, hulking mass took up half the space, and I guessed it had been a bar at one time. Support beams, fallen from the floor above, broke the space as if a designer had decided to decorate with a post-apocalyptic theme. A few bottom steps remained from a wooden staircase, but the fire had consumed the rest.

I walked to the center of the room and turned a full circle.

“No body.” No blood pool either.

Degan pointed up, and I glanced at the dark, half-fallen ceiling. Okay. Second floor. But the stairs were burned to a crisp. Nathanial could fly us up, but unless Degan had climbed up via one of the fallen support beams, I didn’t see how he’d found the body in the first place.

The clanless stayed by the entrance, watching me. What, am I supposed to figure it out myself? I glanced at Nathanial.

He looked up, and then he was in the air. Degan started, his hand reaching for something in his pocket. He stared at Nathanial, who hung in midair between the two floors. Degan had known, in theory, that Nathanial could fly, but accepting something as possible and seeing the proof were very different things. I felt for him; we were throwing a lot at him, and all and all, he was taking it well.

“The body is up there,” Nathanial said, landing beside me.

He reached out, like he would pick me up.

I stepped back. “I’ll find my own way.” After all, if Degan could do it, so could I. Besides, unless the victim—or possibly the killer—could fly, they had to have found an alternate route upstairs as well.

I traced my steps back to the boarded window and knelt.

Charred bits of wood and ash covered the floor, clearly marking the outline of footprints. Lots of footprints. The boxy, dress-shoe prints were Nathanial’s and stopped right inside the entrance. The barefoot tracks were mine. There were also three sneaker impressions—one that left zigzagged impressions in the ash, one with diamond-shaped impressions, and one that was missing large sections of the impression, like the sneakers were worn. Occasionally I caught sight of another track, this one smaller, with a pointed-toe, but the person with the diamond-treaded sneakers had walked through those smaller prints, obscuring them.

Two of the sneaker impressions, and the small, pointedtoe impression, all walked a direct path like they knew where they were going. The person leaving the zigzagged sneaker marks had wandered the room, the tracks crossing themselves at times. I glanced at Degan.

“Let me see the sole of your shoes.”

He frowned, but lifted his feet. His shoes were old, the rubber missing from the sole in some places. So he’s the worn impression. He’d followed the direct route. I traced his steps.

The prints lead into a tiny alcove I hadn’t noticed earlier. A cast-iron spiral staircase hugged the corner, hidden from view if you weren’t standing in the alcove. Well, that answers the ‘how to get upstairs’ question.

I glanced back at Degan. “You walked straight to this stairwell. How did you know it was here?”

“Same way you did. Tracks.”

Fair enough. We’d both been raised in Firth, and, at least in my clan, tracking was taught as soon as we could crawl. I doubted whichever clan Degan had been thrust out of had been much different.

I took the stairs one at the time, using my good hand to support me. Nathanial glided up through the wreckage, settling somewhere in the darkness of the second floor. Once I reached the floor myself, it was easy to spot him. He wasn’t far from me, and neither was the nude body from the photo.

Nathanial knelt over the headless corpse—the second one in as many days. It was face down, that is, if it had still had a face. He lifted the man’s hand, examining it briefly before lowering it back in the dried blood surrounding the body.

Degan followed me up the stairs but stood off to one side, watching silently. The floor felt precarious under me, the fireweakened wood threatening to crumble under our steps, but it had held the vampire and his killer, surely it would hold us.

Nathanial stood as I approached. “What do you smell?”

I tilted my head back. The scent of rotting blood was stronger on this floor, but it couldn’t contend with the scent of smoke that coated the back of my throat. Under that, though, was another scent. Something sour and wrong.

I knelt beside the body, leaning close, and drew in a slow breath. “Degan’s right. The blood Biana drained from me and this body both smell tainted.”

Degan shook his head. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. The same handkerchief he’d used to collect a scent sample of my blood from the bathtub. He sniffed it. Then he knelt by the blood pool and compared the scents. “Not completely the same.” He held out the stained cloth to me.

I took it, obediently inhaling the scent. I smelled oiled metal, which reminded me instantly of Tatius and was probably part of the base scent I’d temporarily adopted from him; a trace of lavender clung to the back of my tongue—which was likely part of whomever Tatius had fed from.

Another jumble of scents rolled through my senses, some of which were part of my own base scent. Over it all hung a sour, musky scent thick enough to swallow. The smell made my tongue curl in disgust, but Degan was right. The scents were similar, but there was something slightly different about the blood drying around the body. Something extra, something more bitter than the scent in my blood.

I related all of this, and Nathanial nodded before returning to his perusal of the body. After parting the man’s thighs and examining the insides of his legs, he flipped him. Nathanial was strong enough to roll the large man, but it was still an awkward amount of weight. One of the corpse’s hands flopped to the side, falling against the floor with a sick plop.

“What are you looking for?” I asked as Nathanial continued his search along the front of the man’s body.

“He has no marks on him. No fang punctures, no cuts, no indication he struggled with his attacker at all.” Nathanial waved at the man’s hands.

The corpse’s nails were long for a male, but they were all unbroken and clean—no skin or blood under them that I could see. We couldn’t be certain about the wounds to the head that had been delivered to the Collector, but we had the rest of the body. A body with absolutely no defensive wounds.

I stood and walked a small circle around the body. “So, what, he just stood there and let someone cut off his head?”

“His heart wasn’t beating when his head was removed,” Degan said, sidling closer.

“How do you know?”

“You’ve hunted wild game,” he said, crossing his thick arms over his chest. “What happens when you cut a major artery?”

I frowned. “It sprays blood.” I glanced at the blackened but low ceiling over us, then at the floor around the body.

There was no spray—just the pool around the body, which had clearly flowed out of the neck. The blood pool wasn’t large enough to have covered all evidence of arterial spray during a beheading.

Degan was right. The vamp’s heart hadn’t been beating.

“Could he have been sleeping at the time he was killed?” I asked, looking at Nathanial. Vampires fell into a type of stasis during the day. The saying ‘dead to the world’ was a pretty good one. No movement, no consciousness, and very little in the way of a pulse. If the vamp’s heart had slowed enough, there might not have been enough pressure to cause a spray.

Nathanial shook his head and pointed to the wall. “The windows are not boarded on this level. During the day, sunlight will stream inside.”

“He could have been brought here. In a coffin maybe? If he was brought before full dark but while he still slept?”

Again Nathanial shook his head. “I know of this vampire. He was a master soldier. He was old enough and powerful enough to have woken long before dusk.” He bent over the body again. “Look at this.”

I moved to his side, but didn’t see what had interested him. He pointed to a spot just below the corpse’s hip, and I leaned closer.

Nathanial pointed to a small hole, not much bigger than a large pore. But vampires don’t have pores. “A needle mark?”

Nathanial said nothing as he leaned closer to the wound. I pushed to my feet. “You searched this place, did you find anything?” I asked, looking at Degan.

He pointed to a spot in the corner. “His clothes.”

I walked over and stared at the small stack of clothing. A stack of folded clothing. Complete with a pair of size-eleven sneakers on the bottom. What is the likelihood the killer undressed him after beheading him, then proceeded to fold the clothes and leave them in the corner? I grabbed the teeshirt on the top of the stack and shook it out.

No blood. Not even a drop.

Well, if the vamp’s heart had stopped, there was a chance the killer had taken the time to undress him before lopping off his head. I glanced back at the vamp and picked up the sneakers. The sole was made up of a diamond pattern. Just like the prints downstairs, the ones that went straight to the stairs.

I walked back to the dead vamp and glanced at the soles of his feet. Smudges of burnt wood and ash covered the pads.

He’d walked barefoot, and quite possibly undressed himself.

What the hell had he been doing here? I thought back to the prints downstairs, of the mostly obscured, small, pointedshoe impressions.

Small enough to be a woman’s.

“Okay,” I said, looking between the dead vamp and the stack of clothes in the corner. “So this vamp and likely a woman came here. One of them knew how to find the stairs. They came up to the second floor and he, at the very least, undressed. Was this a romantic encounter gone wrong?” I frowned at the neat stack of clothing. “But he took time to fold his clothes? Not a lot of heat in that. I mean, Nathanial you and—” I cut off, heat rushing to my face. You and I nearly shredded each other’s clothing earlier, was what I nearly said, and the knowing look Nathanial gave me made my blush burn hotter.