Cause of Death Unnatural - By Eliza Ford Page 0,1

all part of the officious rank-pulling, she thought. The bodies must have really bothered him. “I called him two hours ago,” Robert grumbled. “You think he might pay some attention to his boss.” He tugged at the cuffs of his jacket. “I'm heading back to the lab, Em. If you see him, tell him I'm going to kick his ass.”

He stalked off. Em watched him go and admired the elegance that Robert seemed to bring to everything he did. Even tantrums.

She sighed. There goes the weekend.

The pounding in her head seemed to kick up a beat as she turned back to the bodies. She pressed three fingers of one hand to the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes.

This was the problem with being partly composed of dark matter. The dark energy that flowed through Em's being didn't mind inhabiting human space, it didn't mind that she enjoyed hanging out with humans more than her own kind, it didn't even mind that she was half human herself, that she ate food and drank vodka and loved salsa dancing with a dozen drunken mates. What it did mind was sharing this town with the new dark matter being who had caused this mess in front of her. The being who was trespassing on her patch.

It wasn't one of the clan, this newcomer, that much was clear. Em was just over a thousand years old, and her father was lord of the clan. Em knew everyone in the Family despite it stretching over half the northern hemisphere, and she could recognize any member's signature mental touch. Like a fingerprint, or a pheromone, every dark matter being had an individual pattern of energy, a shape that defined their existence in the plane they preferred to inhabit. It was only Em who preferred to live in human space.

The Family, the clan, were the oldest beings on Earth, and their dark matter proclaimed their superiority over all other creatures both dark and human. Sure, there were plenty of common vampires, werefolk, other creatures half dark matter, half mortal, but the Family looked down on them all.

Em, being part human, had learned to live with the contempt of the clan, although with her father as lord, no one had ever dared show that contempt in front of him. Em had a unique position in the Family - honored and slightly feared for her father's sake, sneered at for her human mother's sake, held in awe for her ability to manipulate dark matter and often forgotten for her habit of living in the mortal world.

She'd found a place in one of the mortals' crowded cities. Humans had amused her at first, but a few hundred years later she had learned to love them. They had an endearing way of evoking feelings in her, feelings like love and hope and determination, and other delicious things like fear and suspicion and hate. A human soul was delectable, but Em had learned to live on more mundane flavours these days, with an occasional pint of blood, of course.

Forensics had seemed the perfect way for her to live in a human city. She could clean up the little messes made by the lower vampires before the authorities found them, and when she couldn't get there quick enough, in the lab she could hide those tell tale signs and make a blood killing look like a regular shooting. Whenever she felt the urge, a cull of the lower vampires provided some exercize, some entertainment, and kept her senses keen. And living surrounded by so much human death she felt she had learned a lot about human life, and she liked what she'd found there. Humans had a strength she admired.

The three dead men on the road in front of her hadn't been killed by any of the lower vampires, that much was clear. The common vamps were messy and ate like animals, but they certainly lacked the imagination for a kill like this. These victims looked like they had been mauled by a company of pit bulls. Pit bulls with talons like knives and teeth like ten inch daggers. But the energy signature said there was just one killer at work here.

Em was confused. She'd felt a new presence in town a few weeks ago, and she'd thought she'd known exactly who it was - one of her father's consorts, a ghastly woman known as Alina, someone Em had hated for a few hundred years or more. Em had felt Alina's