Oddly, there wasn’t a lot of blood, which was peculiar for a vamp who had drained three young men two nights before, though I wasn’t complaining. But . . . I leaned over and took a sniff. The blood smelled wrong. Though what the blood of a thrice-dead vamp should smell like I didn’t know. I remembered his eyes. The pupils had been wide and black, but the sclera hadn’t been scarlet with blood, but yellowed and sick-looking. Also odd.
I wiped my vamp-killer on the dead guy’s clothes and looked around the gym. The teenagers had been screaming at the top of their lungs when I dashed inside. They had fallen strangely silent when I whacked off the vamp’s head. There was a scent of shock and horror in the air, not surprising since a bloodsucker had walked into high school basketball and cheerleading practice and attacked. I looked around at the floor. Three humans down, counting the teenager Eli was helping to sit. The boy was nursing a badly broken right arm and was sweating and pale with shock, but his throat was intact. Eli checked the pulse of the male adult wearing street clothes, probably a parent. He was out like a light, but the nod Eli gave me assured that he had only fainted. The man in a high school polo shirt was also alive, though bleeding from the nose and mouth, unconscious. Probably a concussion. We’d gotten here before the rogue did more than break the kid’s arm and knock out the assistant coach who tried to intervene.
“You kids okay?” I asked the gymnasium at large.
“You’re Jane Yellowrock,” a scrawny boy in shorts and practice jersey said.
“Yeah.”
“You killed him,” a girl in a short skirt and cross-training sport shoes said.
“More or less. Yeah.”
“Thank you,” a tall, balding man said. He was weaving carefully through the players and I took him to be the head coach. He might have played B-ball himself once, before the years gave him a paunch and limpworthy bad knees. He stopped just beyond the body. “I’ve called police and an ambulance, but what do we do about”—he gestured to the trickle of blood and body—“the mess?”
“I’ll take the body and the head. The mess is yours.”
“Call a cleanup service,” the teenager suggested. “The kind that does crime scene cleaning. I saw it on a CSI rerun last night. It was cool!”
The coach’s mouth opened and closed, and he stared at the kid, who was clearly thinking that beheading a vamp was cool too. “Okay. I guess.”
I looked at Eli, the elder Younger. “Got a body bag?”
“We used the last one. New batch hasn’t arrived.”
“Got a shower curtain?”
“Three,” he said, pulling flat packages from a backpack-style gear bag that hung across his shoulders.
“Mr. Prepared.”
Eli sliced through the packaging and unfolded the shower curtains on the floor. They must have been running low at Walmart, because the shower curtains weren’t clear or white but brightly colored with tropical fish on them. “Cute. Nemo,” I said. Eli didn’t respond. I started to make another crack and Eli said, “Don’t.” So I didn’t. But I did snicker slightly.
Together we rolled the body onto the first Nemo curtain, the stink of long-dead vamp not quite as horrible as I expected, as if the decomposition had been halted during the two hundred years in the ground and the stench had slowed with it. The body’s shoulders and elbows thumped on the plastic, and that was when I focused on his clothes. Davide Berkins had been buried in his butler’s suit: dove-gray pants and jacket, white shirt, and black tie. He was still wearing the tattered remains. But . . . They were Clan Pellissier colors.
With my toes I pushed aside the torn shirt, exposing a poorly executed anchor tattooed on the vamp’s chest, marred by bullet holes. I met my partner’s dark eyes and he gave me a fraction of a nod. Everything about this situation was hinky. We both knew it.
His dark skin catching the light of the overheads, Eli secured the vamp’s limbs with duct tape and then we wrapped the body in the second shower curtain. And then a third. And duct-taped it all once again. The plastic shroud still leaked, but it was better than nothing. And the tape hid some of the embarrassing fish.
Grasping the head by the hair, I extended it over the white plastic garbage bag Eli held open. With the fingers of my other hand, I flipped Davide’s fangs down from the roof of his mouth to inspect them. Over two inches long, strong and thick, but curved more than a regular vamp’s. Even more odd, the vamp had overlarge canines on the bottom teeth too. The teeth were more like an attack dog’s than a vampire’s. The vamp-tooth pattern on the throats of the sailors who had died had been curving, with bottom teeth punctures, confirming this was the killer. The bite pattern and the uniform explained how the MOC had known the name of the rogue we hunted. Davide had been a scion of Leo’s uncle when Amaury Pellissier was the blood master in charge of New Orleans.
I let the teeth go, but the hinge in Davide’s mouth didn’t fold back up and the fangs stayed down. I tilted the head to get a better look and his hair ripped through his scalp, sending the head swinging, throwing bloody spatter. I dropped the head and it landed in the bag with a plasticized squish. Eli tied the orange bag-ties in a knot. I tossed my hip-length hair out of the way, hefted the shower-curtained body over my shoulder, and stood. As a skinwalker-no-longer-in-hiding, I could let my true strength show, and I’m a good bit stronger than a human.
Body hanging behind me, bloody fluid splatting softly on the wood floor and the back of my boots, I looked around the gym and realized I was being filmed by a couple dozen cells. Just ducky. The sounds of multiple sirens echoed through the night, drawing nearer. I wanted to be long gone by the time the cops arrived. “Ummm . . . Thank you for your forbearance,” I said to the room, and skedaddled, Eli right behind me.
Out in the damp night air, Eli beeped open the back of the armored SUV and said, “Forbearance? Babe.”
“I know. I had a brain fart.”
He was almost smiling, which, for the former Army Ranger, was tantamount to a belly laugh. “Forbearance,” he muttered.