***
“Well, that went rather well,” Amelia admitted as they left the bookstore behind, the lamplights casting soft light over the shadows of the streets.
Rachel frowned. “But what if he just wants to meet outside of the bookstore so he can harm you? He couldn’t lay a finger on you in there because of the anti-magick mojo, right?”
“I’m sure that’s not the case,” Shanna said. “He’s a good guy. I was just harsh to him.”
“I hope you’re right,” Rachel replied. “But working with vampires, I know that a guy can turn on a…” She let her voice trail off and her eyes widened. “Oh, my god.”
Amelia stopped and put a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”
Rachel turned to Shanna, looking pale. “I know what I was missing at the morgue. We have to go back.”
“What?” Shanna asked, but Rachel was already running up the sidewalk.
Shanna and Amelia gazed at each other for a moment before following.
They didn’t catch up with her again until they reached the morgue, four blocks away, where she only paused long enough to compose herself and get her breathing under control.
“What is it?” Amelia asked as they marched through the doors.
“I want to be sure before I say,” Rachel said, pulling her fake FBI badge from her purse. “Good thing I kept this thing on me.”
There was nobody in the front office, so Rachel led them back to the mortician’s office, which preceded the morgue. But there was nobody there either.
Shanna eyed a flickering florescent light at the back of the office. “Maybe there’s a meeting? Or dinner break?”
Amelia frowned. “It could very well be that the mortician was called out somewhere and the secretary stepped out for a moment. I wouldn’t be too concerned.” She glanced over at Rachel, who looked more worried. “Well?”
Rachel gestured for them to follow and led them down a hall to the morgue. “With any luck, he’s in the middle of an autopsy.” She pushed open the doors to a dark, silent room.
Shanna licked her lips. “That would have been asking too much, I think,” she whispered, as if she would wake the dead. She found a utility switch and the room brightened with harsh light. She glanced around, finding everything as it had been the last time, more or less. “So, what is it that you had to check?”
A door at the back suddenly opened and the mortician stood in the doorway, staring at them as if he were seeing a ghost. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, stomping toward them. When he noticed Rachel and Shanna, he stopped. “Ah. FBI again, is it?”
“Good evening, Mr. Hopper,” Rachel greeted with a smile. “Sorry to have startled you. We weren’t expected this time.”
“No problem,” Hopper grinned back. “I figured I’d see ya’ll again sooner or later. You must be here for the other one.”
Shanna exchanged looks with Amelia. “Other one?”
“Sure, sure,” Hopper said, stepping up the refrigerated doors. “Had another man drained of blood, throat slashed. Same as the other.” He paused. “That is why ya’ll are here, I presume?”
“That’s right,” Rachel agreed.
He nodded and opened a door, sliding out a body bag with a blast of cold air. “Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Close it tightly when you leave again?”
“Sure thing,” Shanna agreed, watching him leave. When he’d gone through the door, leaving them to themselves, she turned to Rachel. “Another one? Did you know about this?”
“No,” Rachel insisted. “It’s a coincidence.” She turned to look at the body bag. “But we may as well take a look. I can confirm my theory with this one just as easily as the other.”
“And what is this theory?” Amelia asked as Rachel unzipped the body bag, revealing a blonde man with the same wound as the previous one. Despite his throat having been torn out, Rachel was able to locate puncture wounds deep in the wound.
“Again, he was bitten by a vampire first,” Rachel observed. “The vampire fed from him, then ripped out most of his throat afterward.”
“To make it look like it wasn’t a vampire,” Amelia stated the obvious. “So what? We already knew this.”
“But why rip open the throat afterward then? Why not dig in from the start, instead of working so hard to preserve the person?” Rachel asked, circling the body.
“He hardly looks preserved,” Shanna commented, frowning down at the wound.
“Exactly,” Rachel opened the blonde boy’s mouth, having to fight with the jaw. She looked at Shanna, then sighed. “Where’s Hunter when you need him? Anyone have a tongue dispenser handy?”
Amelia glanced around and found one at a desk nearby, handing it to Rachel like a scalpel. “What are you hoping to find?”
“I’m hoping to be proven wrong,” Rachel said with a sigh. “Because if I’m right, this could be very, very bad.”
Amelia met Shanna’s eyes in question before they both turned back to Rachel, who was leaning over the man, having turned his head to face her. She stuck the tongue dispenser into his mouth and frowned as she pushed his tongue this way and that, before pushing it in further and pulling the dispenser out, covered in dark red blood, nearly black. She looked back at Amelia, with wide eyes. “I hate being right.”
Shanna looked back and forth between Rachel and Amelia. “What?”
Amelia looked at the blood with a frown. “Blood in his mouth and throat. That means that the vampire who fed from him also fed him his own blood.”
“Isn’t that how they turn people into vampires?” Shanna asked.
“Exactly,” Rachel tossed the tongue dispenser into a trashcan. “And someone’s hiding the fact that they’re creating vampires by slashing their throats open after feeding from them. Making damn sure that no one sees those bite marks.”
Shanna blinked. “But that’s what vampires do.”
Amelia turned to her. “But it means that whoever is slashing the throats of his victims isn’t doing it just to cover up the fact that a vampire has fed off of them.”
Rachel nodded. “If a vampire does rip open the victim’s throat like this, it’s in a frenzy to feed. Like you said before, he hardly looks preserved. And why preserve a person if they’re just going to be food and you have no intention of letting them live?”
“They’re mutilating the corpse so no one suspects what’s really happening,” Amelia said.
“If someone were notified that this was a vampire attack, they would see the wound and assume it was done to cover up what had done it. Like I had.” Rachel cocked her head. “If you’re going to make someone into a vampire, you treat them with care, you don’t rip out their throat like a hunk of meat. Whoever did this was clever, and very careful. They didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing. The bodies would be processed and buried, then they would quietly slip out of their graves, no vampire bites to indicate what they are, no one assuming they would have been changed into vampires themselves, given the state they were in. They could be building an army of undead without anyone being the wiser.”
“And their human wounds would heal after going through the change,” Shanna added, recalling Cameron’s flawless face after he’d become a vampire.
They all looked at one another for a moment.
“Who knows how long this has been going on?” Amelia murmured, shaking her head. “They were doing this right under everyone’s noses.”
They suddenly heard a thump from the next refrigerator over.
Shanna’s eyes widened and she looked to Rachel as they heard another thump.
“What is that?” Amelia asked, frowning.
Rachel rezipped the blonde man’s body bag and pushed him back into the refrigerator, closing the door tightly behind him. “That’s coming from the unit our other vampire victim is in.”
“Ah.”
Rachel dug through her purse and came up with a wooden stake a
nd mallet. She handed them to Shanna. “I’ll let you do the honor.”
Shanna stared down at the tools with distaste. “Gee, thanks.”
Rachel put her hand on the door and nodded to them before sliding it open.
With a snarl, the vampire, halfway out of his body bag, tried to snap at Rachel, who leapt back to give it room, before throwing herself forward and forcing his head back against the table with a thud. He grunted and opened his mouth to reveal his new fangs, which gleamed white and deadly in the light of the room. He tried to fight back, but Amelia aided Rachel in keeping him pinned down, taking point at his chest. Rachel nodded to Shanna and she held the wooden stake over his heart.
“Ladies, ladies,” the vampire suddenly cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about that. Let’s not do anything hasty. You know what I am, obviously. But I promise not to hurt you.”
“Sounds likely,” Amelia said dryly.
Rachel applied more pressure to his neck and he grunted again. “Tell us who did this to you.”
The vampire stared up into her face, clearly frightened, and if Shanna was honest with herself, she would admit that she was afraid of the vampire hunter at that moment as well. She seemed to be made of pure fury.
Shanna applied more pressure to the stake and raised the mallet.
“I…It was a woman,” the vampire sputtered. “A really pretty woman. I’d never seen her before. I don’t even know her name. She said she would call me when I was needed. That’s all I know, I swear.”
Rachel considered him for a moment. “What did this woman look like?”
“I…don’t really remember.”
“Hmm,” Rachel nodded to Shanna again.
“Wait!” he cried. “I mean, I remember a little. She was really pale, almost white.” He snorted. “Of course, you knew that. But she also had red hair. And the way she moved…she was like an angel of death, with flowing red hair. Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. But she stroked my hair and whispered in my ear, and I listened to it all, hook line and sinker. Didn’t even fight back when she slid her fangs into my neck, not even when I felt my life slipping away, and that’s the truth.”
“Anything else?” Rachel asked.
He shook his head. “No, but I gave you lots, right? Cooperating like a good vampire?”
“You were a big help,” Rachel agreed. “Emphasis on ‘were.’”
Shanna took that as her cue, and slammed the mallet down on the stake, which slid easily through his chest. She looked away as he transformed to ash. By the time she returned her gaze to him, she saw the same face as before, but it was no longer flesh and bone. Just dull gray ash, as if sculpted to look like a man.
“You didn’t have to actually kill him,” Amelia said, stepping back. “He could have been rehabilitated.
“I’m not taking any chances with these ones,” Rachel told her, ignoring Amelia’s frown. “We should do the other one too, before he has a chance to wake up and kill half the building.”
Shanna nodded in agreement. “At least we know we’re after a redhead.”
“It’s something.”
Shanna handed the stake and mallet to Rachel. “I’ll let you have the honor this time.”
“My pleasure,” Rachel said. She cocked her head. “Say, this is kind of similar to what happened on our first mission, isn’t it? Someone trying to raise an army behind La Faer Noir’s back? Those creepy mora vampires – remember them?”
“Yeah, I remember all right,” Shanna shuddered, recalling the monsters with their long tongues and toothless mouths, their sharp nails and shadows that moved on their own. “That time it was the vampire Scarlet Fever. She thought she’d be able to take over and reclaim the world for monsters, at their rightful place at the top of the food chain. Crazy bitch.”
“But you killed her.”
“Yep.”
“And what color hair did she have?”
Shanna opened her mouth and closed it, meeting Rachel’s eyes with sudden shock. “You don’t think…”
“This is her M.O.,” Rachel shrugged. “I’m just saying. You did kill her, right?”
“Yes.”
“You actually saw her die? Her body turn to ash?”
Shanna felt her chest tighten as she recalled the last moments she’d seen of Scarlet Fever. Her hair had been on fire, heavy burning beams had fallen on top of her. No way could she have survived that, not when fire was one of the few things that killed vampires. “I didn’t actually see her ashen body, but she’s dead. There’s no way she could have lived.”
“Well,” Rachel said, pulling open the refrigerator of the other corpse, “She must have had quite the admirer then.”