Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

The girl’s feet were hidden from view by the old wooden table, originally intended for staff meals and food preparation. But the blood smell was emanating from the area around her, and red had splashed the gleaming range and refrigerator on the south wall. She was standing squarely in front of the refrigerator.

The half-demon girl opened her mouth to speak, but Dahlia held up her hand. The girl closed her mouth instantly.

“Is any of this blood yours?” Dahlia asked.

The girl shook her head.

Dahlia and Katamori looked at each other. Dahlia didn’t have to look up far to meet his eyes. He waited for her instructions. She was the senior vampire. She liked this silent acknowledgment a lot. Dahlia said, “I’ll go right, you take left.” She didn’t know much about Katamori, but she did know that his reputation as a fighter was almost as formidable as her own.

Without a word, the slightly built Japanese vampire began working his way around the north side of the table, his eyes and ears and nose working overtime. The north wall featured huge windows, now black. The effect was unpleasant, as if the night were watching the scene in the kitchen, but Dahlia was not about to be distressed by any nighttime creepiness. She herself was the thing that went bump in the night.

She began circling the table to the south side. The stove tops and ovens, a stainless steel prep table with pots and pans on a shelf underneath, and an industrial refrigerator and a freezer filled the wall. A few steps revealed the crime scene. The half-demon girl was standing stock-still on the edge of the pool of blood that had flowed from the victim. Dahlia took in the whole picture, then began noting the details.

The corpse was that of the young man who had irritated her, the human donor she’d last observed having words with Don. The man’s throat had been torn out. Dahlia had seen much worse in her long, long existence, but she was irritated at the waste of the blood.

The half-demon girl had not a speck of blood on her, except for her shoes, which were red Converse high-tops, now somewhat darker around the rubber soles. Dahlia raised her delicate black eyebrows and looked across the room.

“Katamori?” she said.

“Lots of people have been through,” Katamori answered.

From this laconic response, Dahlia understood that he’d found nothing tangible on his side of the room, but that there were complex scent trails. That made sense. The north side of the kitchen was the natural route to take to get to the door on the far end of the long room. This door led into a mudroom with hooks for wet weather gear and gardening clothes. On the other side of the mudroom, a heavier door opened out onto the broad apron marking the end of the service driveway. All the humans who’d come to the mansion to donate earlier in the evening had both entered and left the mansion through that door.

“Please stay where you are for the moment,” Dahlia said to the half-demon, who bobbed her head in a series of sharp nods. Since the blood pool and the body took up the whole of the floor between the appliances and the table, Dahlia bent her knees and leaped over the table, landing lightly on her amazing heels on the other side.

She met Katamori at the end of the table, and together they looked back at the body. There was a series of bloody footprints leading away from the corpse, footprints too large to be those of the half-demon girl. These prints led to the first exit door, the door to the mudroom. Together, they examined it. There were no bloody fingerprints on the knob or the glass panes. Dahlia bent over to sniff the knob, then shrugged. “A bloody hand touched it, but that tells us nothing,” she said, and pushed the door open. Katamori tensed, ready for anything.

The mudroom was empty.

The two vampires stepped into the small space. The floor was covered with a rubber mat, and there was a bench running along each side. Underneath were stored a few pairs of boots, some of which had been there for forty years. A coat or two hung from the row of hooks mounted above the benches. At least one of the coats had been there for two decades, an elaborate black coat with a huge fur collar. “I don’t think anyone will return to get this one,” Katamori said, and pushed it with his finger. A cloud of dust rose up. Dahlia noticed that most of the hooks were similarly covered in dust. Only two of the hooks were shiny enough to indicate they’d been used recently.

The knob of the solid door that led to the outside was pristine to the eye, and when Dahlia bent to smell she got only a whiff of blood, a slightly weaker trace than that on the inner knob. “Left this way,” she told Katamori. “Let’s finish the kitchen, then we’ll report.”

They turned back into the kitchen.

Before they’d left, the humans had piled their plates and cups by the sink. Fainting humans were bad for business, so the agency had insisted the vampires take a tip from the blood bank in offering refreshments. Nothing to be found there; the victim hadn’t approached that area.

“What do we have so far?” Katamori asked.

“There’s a vampire smell in here, very recent,” Dahlia said.

“Besides the half-demon, I’m getting humans, a werewolf, at least two vampires.”

Werewolves. Dahlia’s mouth twitched. But first of all, she had to interrogate the only living creature in the cavernous room. “Demon girl,” she said, “explain yourself.” Now that Dahlia spared a moment to take in the half-demon’s ensemble, Dahlia’s eyes widened. The skinny creature, whose short hair was dyed a brilliant lime green, was wearing black Under Armour from top to bottom. Her red sneakers were a fine clash with the lilac miniskirt and a buckskin vest lined with fleece.

“I’m Diantha,” the girl said. And then she began a long sentence that was possibly in English.

“Stop,” Katamori said. “Or I’ll have to kill you.”

Diantha stopped in midword, her mouth open. Dahlia could see how very sharp the half-demon’s teeth were, and how many of them seemed to be crammed into her little mouth. Katamori would have quite a fight on his hands, and Dahlia found herself hoping it wouldn’t come to that.

“Diantha, I’m Dahlia. Our names are similar, aren’t they?” Dahlia said. She hadn’t tried to sound soothing in a century or two, and it sat awkwardly on her. “You must speak so that we can understand you. Maybe it will help you to be calm if we tell you we know you didn’t do this thing.”

“We do?” Katamori knew the reason, but he wanted Dahlia to spell it out.

“No blood on her, except on her shoes.” She didn’t bother to lower her voice. Diantha’s bright eyes were on her so intently that she knew the girl could read her lips.

“I’mtherunnerformyuncleinLouisiana,” Diantha said. She didn’t seem to need to breathe when she spoke, but at least this time she spoke slowly enough—at less than warp speed—that the vampires could understand her.