if there’s just blood?” Marcus asks, cutting the man off.
The officer is clearly one who is used to dealing with Marcus because he doesn’t easily get intimidated; instead, he starts walking toward the kitchen to where I see why they’re sure there’s a body.
Sitting on the table is a head, no body in sight.
“Interesting,” Marcus says. “Let’s see where this body might be. DeGray and Karsyn, stay together. It smells like they went out the back door.”
Marcus starts walking as I follow after him while Finn surveys the area before hurrying after us.
“So we have a targeted kill,” Finn says.
“Not too many people have the stomach to sever a head then carry it back to the house,” I say as we walk into the backyard. DeGray is to my left as we fan out so we’re not all walking the exact same path. I can smell blood in the air and see areas where the killer had paused long enough for blood to accumulate on the ground. We follow it out back to a field that leads to the woods.
Marcus stops and turns to DeGray and me. “Stay within sight of me. The death might have happened hours ago, but it doesn’t mean the attacker is gone.”
He’s been much stricter after losing one of the detectives who’d gone off into the woods looking for evidence and was killed by his partner. I doubt any of my partners would be interested in my death… besides maybe Marcus, but he’d still rather be safe. While it is a requirement that we stay in pairs, vampires seem to always have their own ideas of rules. They think they’re strong enough to wander off alone, but that could also be caused by the lack of surplus people.
The wind is whipping around us, but instead of helping, it’s pushing the smells away from us, so we have to move slower than usual in case we miss something.
“You guys are so weird,” Finn says. “You’re all just walking around sniff-snorting the air like a pack of rabid dogs.”
“We’re not dogs,” Marcus says as Finn starts loudly sniffing as he walks.
“We could just leave him out here,” I suggest.
“You just want to keep me for yourself, don’t you, Alexei?” Finn asks. “You want to ravish my body!”
I snort because that’s not something I want to do. What I do want to do is focus on work.
“Karsyn, if you even look at my…” Marcus hesitates, which is rare when he gets onto this threatening thing. “I have something.” Of course it’s not surprising he caught the scent first since he’s over twice my age. We follow him as he speeds up and moves into the trees. And there, right under the undergrowth, is the body with no head.
The area around it seems to have been trodden down, like there was enough of a fight to flatten the brush.
“Do you have any other scents?” Finn asks.
“No, we’ll search the area, but the fight seems to be pretty one-sided,” Marcus says.
“But there was enough of a fight to mess up the area,” I note as I look around. A sapling has been snapped in half, telling me a body had been thrown against it at some point. There’s blood and dirt on the vampire’s jeans that don’t follow the same pattern as the blood from his throat.
So now we have a dead vampire who was attacked in his home and chased out into the woods where they must have caught him and beheaded him. That’s not an easy feat.
I take out my work phone and pull up the database that will get me the information I need as Marcus, Finn, and DeGray scan and assess the area.
I type in the address and see that a man by the name of Ronald Diver is the only current resident. The picture provided matches with the victim. Going off the appearance of his file, he was a pretty clean-cut citizen. It looks like he filed everything correctly, which is required for vampires who want access to blood. He worked a normal job with nothing that stands out or causes any red flags.
But of course that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there, it just means that on the surface, he seems like the ideal citizen. I trace his lineage down to when he moved here about fifty years ago; before then, he’d lived in England which is where he’d been turned.
I face the others. “His name’s Ronald Diver, nothing stands out on him. He works