Incense was burning, patchouli, I thought, in two burners, trying to mask the odor of marijuana. I didn’t smile, but it was a close thing.
I counted the people sitting curled up together like puppies needing comfort on the sofas and chairs, coming up with eleven. Because of the incense, I couldn’t tell by the smell, but two were vamp-pale. Vamps each needed a minimum of three humans to feed from, which totaled up at three humans apiece. The lair was running on a skeleton feeding crew. Which was funny. Sorta.
“Where . . .” Are her ashes? Where did she die? No. Wrong. “Ummm . . .” I floundered.
“All the bedrooms are upstairs,” Jocelyn said, wiping her nose with a wrist. “Blood-servants are on the second floor. Sonya’s, Liam’s, and Vivien’s are on the top floor.” She sniffed. “Sonya’s is the middle room.”
Wrassler jerked his head to me, indicating I was to check out the upstairs. I nodded back and headed up the narrow, curving stairs by the front door. Pulling back the slide, I off-safetied, my trigger finger off the trigger, along the side of the weapon. I paused at the top of the stairs, feeling P. Shooter coming up behind me, and letting my eyes adjust, hearing my breathing, and Shooter’s, slow and steady. Smelling everything. More blood and sex and humans and vamps and alcohol and more marijuana. Lots of marijuana, the smell overpowering all the others. In the fumes of dope, I could detect everything, but not parse the scents into the finer smells, like individuals and their previous locations. The kids had been partying.
“Downstairs?” I asked Shooter, sotto voce.
“Everything secure, all locked up for the day,” he murmured. He gave me the hand signal for I’ll go right and moved out. Using basic paramilitary procedures and hand signals, Shooter and I divided the place up, me taking the left half of the second floor. The rooms were tiny, like dorms that had been halved. They were cramped and messy, and the bathrooms were worse. There were only two baths on the second floor, one on the ground floor, for the nine messy humans. And no place for a killer to hide.
P. Shooter and I headed up the stairs to the top floor. Here there were three matching suites, each done up like a swanky hotel, lots of creamy Egyptian cotton, ebony king-sized four-poster beds, drapery that puddled on the black hardwood floors, the rare rug in large blocks of bright color, similar bright pillows everywhere. Squishy tan oversized armchairs and ottomans. The three baths were long and linear, done in white marble and black tile, everything sparse and very similar. Closets were free of hiding humans. Windows were actually doors, but all were locked and secured. Shooter and I met in the middle room.
In front of a long, beveled mirror on a stand was a heap of clothing. Tangled in the orange, pink, and shrimp floral dress were tiny gold sandals, two bracelets, a watch, a necklace, two earrings, and a heap of ash. It was brownish and white with granules of red. The brown for flesh, the white for bone, the red for blood, I guessed. I breathed in and out. Nothing had burned here. Nothing had bled here except for humans, and that some time ago. I smelled no magic, at least not over the mixed vamp/blood/weed/sex smells, already mixing with the patchouli rising from the bottom floor.
I knelt and sniffed again, short bursts of breath, my mouth open, the air scudding across my tongue and throat with a faint scree of sound. No. Nothing had burned. No smell of cremated human or roasted vamp. But the ash itself smelled like vamp—a thick and wiry smell that reminded me of cactus and hot sand. Something had turned a female vamp into an ash heap.
I pulled my cell and took pics of everything. When I was done, I pulled a wood stake and stirred the ashes. No bones. No fragments. Weird. I asked Shooter, “What’s protocol on this? Do I call the cops?”
He frowned, and I realized that he was one of twins from the council HQ, blond and lean and sorta scary looking now that I saw him armed. I hadn’t recognized him because his ponytail was tucked down inside the collar of his sweater, to keep an opponent from using it like a handle to control him, just as I had done with my own hair.
“The primo’s call. Except the primo’s new and won’t know, will she?”
“Wrassler’s call, then,” I stated, and Shooter grinned. “What?”
“Maybe I’ll have a nickname someday.” He holstered his gun.
“P. Shooter. P for Pellissier.”
“Yeah?” He nodded, thinking, securing all his weapons without looking at them, by muscle memory alone. “Can we drop the P? I haven’t used a pea shooter since . . . ever. And it sounds kinda wimpy.” He grinned again, displaying perfect white teeth, blue eyes bright and clear. He was pretty, buff, and deadly. My kinda man. If he hadn’t also been a human-shaped bag of vamp food. Ick.