Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

His smile, his eyes, his whole face was shining with happiness. He liked that he'd gotten that much reaction from me. Part of me was happy, and part of me was confused. I kept thinking I knew how many people I had in my life, how many I wanted in my life, and how many were occasional fun and food, and then one of them would do something like this, and I'd want more than just fun and games. Damn it.

Nathaniel took him by the arm and pulled him away. "We'll do more kissing later. I want to see Ireland."

Dev laughed and let himself be pulled away. I saw Detective Sheridan watching us and knew that there'd be no misunderstandings now about her attraction to this particular tall, blond man. Good. Fortune came up to me, smiling and shaking her head. "I can't follow that. Let's just shake." She meant it, but she also had come up to get her kiss. She was one of the women in our lives and in our beds, so . . . I rolled my eyes at her, but offered her a kiss. I had to go up on tiptoe for her like I did the men, but our kiss was light and not serious by comparison. Fortune's heart belonged to Echo, whom she was leaving in my care while she saw Dublin for the first time and helped guard the others. But she had asked for a kiss good-bye, which meant the acknowledgment of the relationship mattered to her. Sometimes it's not about romance; it's about belonging, about knowing that someone cares for you enough to kiss you in public and say, This is mine. Or at least I'm thinking of making it mine. Acknowledgment was important to Fortune and to Dev, to Devereux. Wasn't it weird that I liked him better with that name attached to him? Dev seemed unfinished, like a nickname for something longer, and since it was short for Devil, which I was never going to cry out in a moment of passion, Devereux made me happier. Maybe Shakespeare had been wrong, and a rose by any other name wouldn't be as sweet?

I was actually sad to see Nathaniel and Dev go without me. It would have been nice to go out holding hands and being all romantic tourist with them. But I had a job to do, so I joined Edward in the room where we'd look for clues. Nicky helped me place Echo and Damian in their lightproof bags at the sides of my chair and then he went out into the hallway with Domino, Kaazim, and Jake to be good bodyguards. Socrates and Ethan had stayed with Magda at headquarters. Socrates thought it would be a good idea to show some of Nolan's people the speed of a regular lycanthrope. He and Ethan were good, but they were slower than Magda because they weren't Harlequin or sleeping with me and Jean-Claude. Though they were going to leave that part out and just say it was age and practice that made her even faster than them.

Flannery got to wait out in the hallway with my guards, because he was there to partner, or back up, or even keep an eye on his boss. Nolan got to join us in the room this time; whoever had his back was pushing hard that he get involved in things. Pearson and Sheridan didn't like it, but they took it like the professionals they were when the top brass above you force people into your investigation. We settled down with pictures of horrors spread on the table, a fresh map of Dublin on the corkboard, and people bringing in actual paper for us since I didn't have an iPad or a computer with me to read things on screen. My iPhone was good for a lot of things, but reading detailed forensics wasn't one of them. I looked at the first victim with their throat torn open and thought, I really don't want to be here. I wanted to be out in the sunshine with Nathaniel and Dev and Fortune and even Donnie and Griffin. They both seemed pleasant and would probably be good tour guides for the city. I promised myself that I would get a few days of vacation in here with my people before we flew home. I would, damn it, but first we had a mystery to solve. Why were vampires spreading through Dublin for the first time in their history? Why was the fairy magic of the city's land fading? Why wasn't Damian's old master policing the new vampires or destroying them? Had she really lost that much power, and had she lost it because we'd killed the Mother of All Darkness? How did we find the vampire who had started all this in the city, if it wasn't M'Lady? How did we find the vampire that seemed to be enjoying tearing people's throats out? How did we keep more of the families of Dublin from joining the Brady family as the new undead? We had so many questions; what we needed were answers, and that was why I didn't get to play tourist. If we solved the mystery, caught all the bad guys and girls, and saved Ireland from its first-ever plague of vampires, then I could be a tourist; until then it had to be all business for me, because if I didn't do my job more people would die. Was it weird that I still thought of the Brady family as having died, even though they were vampires now? I was in love and engaged to Jean-Claude, but looking down at the new vampires in the children's room today, I'd still thought, dead, murdered, not undead, and alive. Even when your murder victims can come back to "life" at sunset, it doesn't always change the fact that they had their lives taken from them. Being made a vampire against your will was still murder in the United States; it'd be interesting to see how Irish law handled it. It takes a while to get used to the thought that your victim can give testimony in their own murder trial. It would be up to Irish courts and politicians to decide if being turned against your will was considered murder here; all I knew was that back home Edward and I would have had warrants of execution on the asses of every vampire involved in this, as I looked at the photos of fang marks, torn throats, and a few bodies just torn apart--killing whoever had done this totally worked for me.

62

HOURS LATER WE had the map covered in crime scenes and locations. Sheridan had stayed to help us color-code everything, though I was certain they had a map somewhere that had all of this already marked. I'd actually asked, "Aren't we duplicating something you've got in your murder room?"

"We don't call it that," she'd said.

"Sorry, but whatever you call it, haven't you done this already?"

"They want to see if you find a pattern they've missed," Edward said. "If they give you their map, then you'll be looking at what they think is important."

I gave him the look that deserved. "We're wasting time duplicating effort."

"No, truly, Marshal Blake, we want your opinion without our bias."

I'd let it go, but I didn't buy it. I was pretty sure they just didn't want me to see all their evidence, just in case I turned out to be an evil necromancer after all.

They even let me pick the colors that went with each thing I wanted to mark. Fine, whatever. A color of flag for the homes of bite victims that had survived and were still not vampires, plus the places they were attacked if it was known in a different color. Flags for victims that hadn't survived but didn't rise as vampires. Flags for people who did rise as vampires. Flags for bodies that were so dismembered that even the police weren't sure if they were vampire victims, or if they had a serial killer on their hands. They were pretty sure it was just vampires indulging in their newfound strength, because of the timing and the fact that you had to be more than human-strong to tear a body apart like that.

Those were the pictures I looked at the longest, because it was rare for vamps to tear a body apart like this. Even as I was looking at them in pictures, my mind refused to "see" them for what they were at first. It was the mind's way of protecting itself, of protecting us from seeing something so horrible that it would leave a psychic wound, almost literally. But it was part of my job to look at things that most people never had to see. I couldn't afford to look away, because there was something wrong with the scene. Something just didn't ring true for a vampire-related crime scene.

I spread the pictures out on my part of the table and forced myself to try to make sense of them. I'd really started to want to listen to my brain when it said, Don't look. We don't need another nightmare in here, but I knew that if I flinched I might miss something, and part of me would always believe that something I missed would be the clue that would solve the case. Solving the case meant saving lives, so I looked down at the pictures. I wasn't sure at first if it was one body or two. I saw one shoulder with an intact arm, but no hand. A hand with no arm, so probably a match. Even through all the blood, I could see that the fingers were thick and the

hand big enough that I was pretty certain it was a man's hand. The arm looked big enough that it helped me feel fairly confident that it was male. There was a lower half of a body near it that seemed intact and to match in size, so one dead male. I looked at the other bits in the blood, trying to make them into the missing parts of the upper body, but I couldn't do it. I wasn't sure if the parts were just so torn up that I couldn't put them back together from just pictures, or if there were parts missing. If there were missing bits, then this wasn't just vampires, because the one thing they couldn't do was eat solid food. The man's body was one of three that looked like they'd been torn apart. None of the bodies had a visible head in the mess, but there were enough pieces scattered that the head could have been crushed and scattered among all the other gory bits.

"You seem fascinated, Marshal Blake," Pearson said.

I glanced up at him. "I'm trying to do the serial killer math, and I can't get the body parts to match up. Did you find all the parts to the man's body at the scene?"

Pearson did a look with everyone in the room, including Edward and Inspector Luke Logan. Inspector Logan was medium height, dark, and average looking. He paced a lot, and the room wasn't big enough for it. He'd joined our merry little band a couple of hours into it all. There was already a good-size table covered in pictures and reports, with chairs for five, and the board on its stand with the map. Plus the bags with Echo and Damian in them were tucked up beside my outside leg and the back of my chair. A sixth person would have been a tight fit for the room, but a sixth person who paced energetically and liked to talk with his hands . . . I was rapidly understanding why no one else liked him.

"What was the look for?" Nolan asked from the other side of Edward, which put him at the end of the table. I guess I wasn't the only one on the outside of that knowing look. It pissed me off that Edward was hiding things from me, but when didn't he? He liked his secrets too damned much. He and I would talk about it later, in private.

"I told you she'd spot it," Edward said.

"Spot what? Why is it important that Blake can't find all the body parts?" Nolan asked. He looked at the pictures in front of me.