“Actually, no, Neens, he didn’t ask about you.”
Her lip curled into a disgusted glower. “Whatever. So what did he want?”
“A vampire was murdered.”
Everyone at the table—except me—sucked in a collective breath and I suddenly found myself very interested in my food.
“I can’t believe you’re just telling us this now, Sophie.”
“Who was it?” Vlad wanted to know. “Did Dixon tell you what happened?”
I looked up and directly into Alex’s eyes. They were fixed on me—not accusing, but not pleased, either. “Um, I forgot. Well, I didn’t forget forget, it just kind of slipped my mind.”
“So what happened?” Vlad repeated.
“Do you know Octavia?”
“Ugh. I hate her,” Nina groaned. “She’s all prim and proper and ‘oh, I’m Victorian, you should be prop-ah’ and crap. It’s like seriously? Get an afterlife. In this century.”
“It was Octavia who was killed.”
Nina’s coal-black eyes went wide and even darker than normal. “Oh. That’s awful. That poor woman!”
“Uh, question?” Alex raised his chopsticks. “Aren’t vampires—you know, you guys”—he used his sticks to motion to Nina and Vlad—“immortal?”
“No one is truly immortal, Alex,” I said on a sigh, stealing Dixon’s quote.
He cocked his head. “Well, actually . . .”
“But you’re dead. You’re, like, super dead. Heavenly dead,” I explained.
“So are they!” The chopsticks waggled between Nina and Vlad again, launching a hunk of combination fried rice across the table.
“What the hell is heavenly dead?” Vlad wanted to know.
Nina groaned. “Can we not argue who amongst us is dead or more dead or the absolute deadest or,” she paused, scrunching her nose, “heavenly dead, whatever that is, and just get on with it? What happened to Octavia? How was she killed? Does Dixon know anything?”
I picked up a napkin, began peeling off strips and rolling them into little balls. “She . . . was beheaded.”
“Beheaded?” Nina breathed.
“Holy crap, is that even possible?” Alex asked.
“It’s one of the only ways to truly kill a vampire. Wooden stake through the heart.” Vlad counted off on his fingers. “Fully engulfed in flames, or . . .” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Beheading. Do they know who did it?”
I shook my head.
Alex wiped his hands on a napkin and rested his elbows on the table. “Not to be insensitive, but isn’t it pretty difficult to do? I mean, you’ve got extra strength, right?”
Vlad’s tongue snaked over one of his fangs. “Yeah. It wouldn’t be easy.”
“Could a human do it?”
“It’s unlikely.”
Alex glanced at me. “Do you think this killing could have anything to do with the Sutro Point homicide?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I mean, that was—you know, breathers, and this was—”
“A werewolf could kill a vampire,” Nina said quietly.
“What was that?”
“A werewolf. Super strength. Chip on its shoulder. A werewolf could kill a vampire.”
“And probably a Kishi demon, too,” I added. “A Kishi demon could kill a vampire. Or a Wendigo, maybe.”
Alex swung toward Nina. “Why would a werewolf kill a vampire?”
“They’re unstable,” Vlad said simply.
“Actually,” Nina said, “it’s pretty unlikely that a werewolf would go after a vampire—or vice versa.”
“Despite what popular media would like you to believe.” Vlad had to put in the VERM’s two cents.
“So the whole vampires-hate-werewolves thing is made up.”
“Not exactly,” Nina said, blinking at Alex.
“It’s just blown out of proportion. The majority of us have no problems with them. They’re fine. They retrieve, roll over, fetch slippers. . . .” Vlad grinned and poked a fang into a second blood bag.
“What else did Dixon say about the murders?” Alex asked, dipping the stubby end of an egg roll into a dish of hot mustard.
I fidgeted, then stuffed my mouth with a mammoth bite of chow mein. “Um, not much,” I said finally, trying my best to get my food down my rapidly closing throat.
“‘Not much’ like he doesn’t know about it, or ‘not much’ like he had nothing to say about it?”
“Dixon has something to say about everything,” Nina groaned.
Vlad’s eyes flashed at his aunt. “Dixon Andrade is a very well-respected man.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” Nina answered. “Well-respected men can be total windbags, too.” She shot Vlad a sweet-as-pie grin—or at least it would have been sweet as pie if her fangs weren’t tinged fresh-blood red.
I pushed the food around on my plate, my internal dialogue arm-wrestling over what I should and should not tell Alex. “Dixon thinks that the person responsible for the vampire death may have been a werewolf, too.” The words came out in a solid chain before I had the chance to stop them. My admittance felt like a betrayal, a silver bullet in Sampson’s heart, and silence blanketed the table.