“Yes.” Deacon went back-to-back with her without any further discussion, her wings pressed against the dark green of his trench coat, while Slayer padded silent and dangerous in front of them.
Weapons held with open aggression, they turned right off the main access path and onto another that spilled them into the small clearing with a natural dip that turned it into a miniature amphitheater. Elena’s nape itched with the certainty of the eyes on them, instinct verified by the fresh lines of scent in the air, but no one appeared out of the deep pools of shadow between the trees.
Watery blood. A lot of it.
“Ellie.”
“I smell it.” If someone was dead inside the Theater, he or she hadn’t been dead long enough for the carrion birds to have become aware of the feast, the area devoid of the sounds of their feeding. Either that, or the birds had been held off on purpose, because beneath the snow-diluted blood, she caught the scent of disinfectant softened by lilies.
Shit.
“Deacon?”
“I have you covered.”
Shifting position, she made her way into the dip and to the gruesome sight that awaited. Sidney Geisman had lost his head. Literally. It was currently spitted on a crude wooden spear carved from a hacked-off branch, the vampire’s eyes orbs of bulging red and his tongue a grotesquely swollen black where it hung out of his mouth.
It was too cold for flies, the bloody snow below the head pounded into ice. The rest of the vampire’s body lay discarded a short distance away. She could see indications of arterial spray on the nearby trees, the blood having turned a putrid brown that nonetheless stood out to her enhanced vision. What interested her more were the multiple gaps in the pattern, as if this execution had had an audience that would’ve been sprayed with Sidney’s blood.
Breathing through clenched teeth, the cold paradoxically intensifying the miasma of scents for her, she stepped close enough to the head to read the note stabbed into Sidney’s forehead with what appeared to be a metal nail file. Inventive. The note consisted of a single word written in blood: DISEASED.
Oh, f**k. Fuckety f**k f**k!
Continuing to breathe through her mouth, she crossed to the body and began to check Sidney for any visual signs of disease. It didn’t take long to find the sores on his hands. They were small, barely formed, so the infection had only just dug into his cells when he’d been killed. Which meant either there was now another carrier in the city or—best-case scenario—Sidney had been hoarding bottled blood in anticipation of his escape.
Raphael?
When she heard only silence in response, she remembered he’d mentioned he might be leaving the city to meet one of his senior angels. Digging out her phone from the pocket where she’d stuffed it, she called Tower operations, using the direct line that meant she’d get either Aodhan or Illium.
It was Aodhan who answered. Not wanting to say too much over an unsecure line, she simply told him she needed him in the Blood Theater. He didn’t ask any questions, saying that he’d be there within minutes.
That done, she began to walk the scene to see how many useful scents she could identify.
Aodhan arrived with the encroaching darkness, his wings glittering brighter than the snow. She saw immediate comprehension on his face when she pointed out the note. The vampires in the city were turning on one another—if this continued, it could spiral out into indiscriminate paranoia, painting the city bloodred.
But that wasn’t the most immediate problem.
“Could the infection have passed in the arterial spray?”Aodhan said, softly enough that his words wouldn’t travel to the vampires who continued to watch from the shadows; those vamps would soon find themselves with nowhere to go, Aodhan having instructed a squadron to surround the area.
Elena looked again at the rusty brown that marked the trees. “Depends if enough of it got into the mouth, as well as through the mucus membranes of the eye. Low risk, since a drop won’t do it, but a risk nonetheless—the spectators and the executioners were standing damn close.” More than one had likely had an open mouth as they no doubt screamed at Sidney and cheered one another on. “I can track at least some of the people here in the last few hours, but given the way he was beaten”—she pointed out the vicious marks on the body—“it looks like it might’ve been a mob attack.”
A hardness to Aodhan’s expression she’d never before seen, splintered irises hauntingly white with reflected snow. “Find as many as you can as fast as you can.”
Having already isolated the strongest scent trail, Elena started the track, Deacon at her back. The intensity of the scent told her the vampire in question had run from the Theater probably at daybreak, his body and face covered with Sidney’s blood, a strange mélange of disinfectant and lilies entangled with the vampire’s own natural scent.
The odd thing was, he hadn’t run out onto the street, but scrambled deeper into Central Park. Where she found him ten minutes later. Covered in patches of dried, flaking blood the color of dirt, he sat rocking to and fro under the shade of an oak devoid of its leaves, its arms skeletal against the incongruously stunning starlit night.
“They killed him. They killed him. They killed him.”
Crouching beside the male, far enough away that he couldn’t lunge for her throat, Elena said, “Who killed him?” her tone nonconfrontational.
“They killed him. They killed him. They killed him.”
Elena tried again, even chancing a touch, but the vampire was trapped in some personal mental hellhole he couldn’t escape.
She and Deacon stayed with him only until he was picked up for transport to the Tower. Returning to the main site, now busy with Tower staff, Elena chose the next most promising trail. Thirty minutes later, she received a message from Illium stating a friend of Sidney’s had confessed to supplying him with food blood out of her own frozen supply. He drank a bottle from Blood-for-Less. Bottle dated within the period of the original donor-carrier.
Five hours after that, she’d tracked down three other vampires who’d watched and/or participated in Sidney’s bloody execution, but who hadn’t stuck around to experience the aftermath. One was terrified, one defiant, but it was the third who was the most problematic: he’d started to show advanced signs of the disease.
Stepping outside the bedroom where the vampire shivered so hard his teeth clattered, his mind lost in a febrile haze, she met Deacon’s eyes. “You should get back home. Sara will be waiting.” She would not risk his mind, his memories.