Bruiser whipped his head to the house. “From inside,” he said.
I didn’t ask how he could smell as well as I could. He was Onorio. There was a mountain of stuff I didn’t know about him yet.
Bruiser took point and Eli fell in behind me, keeping me in the middle. Keeping me safe. I might have objected to the positioning, but it wasn’t sexism. At the moment, they had way better toys than I did. My nine mil in a two-handed grip, I scanned the area, the house, the high places where a shooter might hide.
The solid-wood front door was closed but unlocked, the knob turning easily in Bruiser’s fist. He took the left side of the door, Eli the right. I stood out of the way, feeling useless with my single nine mil and no backup mags. The smell of death was coming through the edges of the mail slot on the artificial, air-conditioned breeze. Bruiser and Eli met gazes and Bruiser shoved the door open. The two men rushed inside, split up, and stopped. Eli motioned me in.
Pinkie was sprawled on the horsehair sofa, her suit jacket folded neatly beside her. It was burgundy today, her blouse a pale pink, like her name. The pearl buttons of her shirt had been unbuttoned, the silk pushed aside, now lying curved around her rib cage, which rose high and rounded, with small, tight breasts lying far to the sides, easily visible beneath the paler pink, child-sized camisole. The exhaustion that had been dogging me welled up inside like magma in a volcano. The breath I took was jagged and harsh.
Her lipstick wasn’t smudged. She was smiling. Pinkie looked almost peaceful. Or as peaceful as a human can look without a throat. One shoulder and the side of her face had been burned to the bone. Her dyed pink hair had been singed and the stink still tainted the air along with the stink of bowels released in death, the slightly sweet smell of blood going bad, and the overriding reek of burning vamp. And still Pinkie’s expression was relaxed. Almost happy. A lot like most of the faces of the fifty-two people in the kill bar.
Bruiser bent over her body and inspected her throat, though I had no idea what he could possibly be looking for. He pulled two silver stakes and took them in one hand, like chopsticks, which made a totally inappropriate and half-hysterical giggle well up into my throat. I swallowed it down, but the exhaustion was so strong that I knew it wouldn’t be long before I did something thoroughly crass. Or fell asleep on my feet. Carefully, Bruiser lowered the stakes into Pinkie’s throat and pulled out two long black threads.
I realized he was both collecting trace evidence and testing for vamp blood. If vampire blood was present, it would burn and stink in the presence of the sterling. The familiar smell sizzled into the room. I had no idea how vamp blood got on Pinkie. I couldn’t imagine a scenario—
“Hair,” Bruiser murmured. “He couldn’t drink so he ripped out her throat and buried his neck in the flow. He left behind his own blood and hair.” Bruiser pulled out a roll of small paper bags from a pocket, removed one, and put the roll back. He inserted the hairs into the bag and sealed it. I just stared at the body. Why had Santana come here? What had he hoped to gain?
Pinkie hadn’t been dead long. Maybe only as long as since dawn. If I had known about the property in the name of Jesreal St. Anna, Royal Santana, and others, and if I had been smart enough to put two and two together with Joseph Santana as a possible way that a long-lived vamp might cling to property between generations, back in the day when they were still in the vamp closet, I might have been there when he came calling. Pinkie might still be alive. I might have saved her life. Or maybe he’d have killed me dead instead of Pinkie. Might. Maybe. But at dawn, I was too busy bandying words back and forth with the chief suckhead to think, to use my brain, to keep people alive.
I shoved my shame deep inside along with all the other guilt and anger and fears and misery I didn’t want to look at. So deep I’d never have to look at any of it again.
Bruiser said, sotto voce, “By the smell, I’d say that he’s no longer on premises, but I could be wrong. And others might be here.”
“Understood,” Eli said, just as softly.
They were talking about Dominique. And more humans. We moved through the lower level, little of which I had seen, making sure we were the only ones there. Every closet, every cabinet, every place a vamp on fire might have gone to lair by day. There were plenty of null spaces, wide gaps between walls, their presence hidden by the old-fashioned architecture: behind the kitchen wall, access was through the pantry. In the floor of Pinkie’s bedroom closet, we found access into a coffin-sized hidey-hole. A long, narrow room on the back wall of the house could have hidden ten standing vamps in a pinch, with access from upstairs via a brass fire pole of all things, and access to outside through a trapdoor in the floor.
Upstairs was more of the same, though all the bedrooms were as neat as pins and currently unoccupied. Except for Santana’s old room. The door was hanging open at an angle, the upper hinges ripped clean away, screws showing pulverized wood. The straps had been replaced and were now twisted and stretched, torn in two. The place had been trashed, the bed torn apart, the armoire tossed across the room, and the dead vamp on the floor stamped into ashes and shattered bones, boot prints clearly seen in the rotten cloth. The Son of Darkness had been in a rage. And though the stench wasn’t as bad as it had been before he ripped into Pinkie, he was still on fire. Smoldering, maybe.
I held up a hand and stepped inside the open door, breathing shallowly, then deeper, trying to separate the smells of the day from the weaker, dryer scents of a hundred years ago. I really should have shifted into a bloodhound before we came there the first time. Any chance of ever determining a scent pattern was gone now, buried beneath the stink of burning vamp and pheromones comprised of toxins from both anger and severe pain. I shook my head and waved the guys in. They made sure the SoD wasn’t hiding under the bed or in the bathroom, and then holstered their weapons as they studied the room.
“He tore the satchel with the old papers in it to pieces,” Eli said.
“Soooo. He came back for it, not knowing that the contents were ruined. And when he found that it had been destroyed, he had a temper tantrum.”
“He took the stake with his blood on it,” Eli said.
I bent over the pile of vamp dust and toed a bone fragment away. “The remains of the crystal that contained his arcenciel is crushed,” I said. “He came back looking for something.” I dialed vamp HQ and was put through to a sleepy Leo. When he answered, his voice was nearly purring, thick and rough with sleep.