Huh.
“He had a job to check on up in Washington. Said he’d be back later this week.”
I frowned. He had just called me this morning. “Did he say where, exactly?”
“No. Why?”
“No reason.” I pulled off my coat and hung it beside hers. I flicked my gaze toward her arm, then raised an eyebrow, silently asking what those bruises were about. She hurriedly pulled her sleeve down and ignored me.
Weird.
“Tell me about Sven. Crow, stay here in the lobby and don’t break any more of Ordinary’s rules. And take off that ridiculous hat.”
He popped a hash brown in his mouth. “This hat is going to catch on. I promise you that.”
“Don’t promise me that.”
“Umbrella hats are going to be all the rage.”
“Oh, I’m already feeling the rage.” I flipped my fingers in what I hoped was mime for “kill it with fire.”
Myra walked with me over to my desk. It was out of the way, but I still had a view of the lobby.
“Why is Crow here?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you after you fill me in on Sven. You found him in the shed?”
I sat at my desk, the take-out coffee cooling between my palms. She pulled a chair over so we could both keep an eye on the lobby and Crow, yet still lean in close enough we could keep our voices down.
“I went out there because Apocalypse Pablo said the door was open and he’d kept it locked. When I got there, the lock was broken off the shed door. Too much rain to see any footsteps—it’s practically a swamp back there behind the gas station. I didn’t see blood, no scuffs. Plenty of mud but it’s been raining non-stop.”
I took a gulp of coffee, nodded.
“The shed has an old tractor in it, some tools, but I could finally see a streak of mud through the dust on the floor that led to the back corner. I found him under a blanket. Shot.”
“Still bleeding?” Cut a vampire and chances were he wouldn’t bleed. Kill a vampire, and chances were the thick, slow blood that moved sluggishly through his veins was going to make an appearance.
“Shot through the middle of his forehead.”
The horror of what she was saying clamored there in the back of my brain, but I didn’t have time for it right now.
I liked—had liked Sven. He seemed to fit into the town and the vampires here with ease, and had made friends with pretty much anyone he met.
I didn’t know anyone who would have wanted him dead. But he had come here after living a full, and probably overly-long, life outside this town. I didn’t know what had happened in his past, what he had done, what had been done to him in the years before he decided to move to Ordinary.
It was agreed that Old Rossi took care of vetting the fangers who became a part of Ordinary. I knew he was very thorough in checking their backgrounds.
I trusted Old Rossi as my father had before me and my grandfather had before him. Old Rossi knew which vampires to bring into Ordinary, and which to keep far, far away.
But I’d never had a vampire show up dead inside the town’s boundaries. Outside the town’s boundaries either for that matter.
“One bullet is not enough to take down a vampire.”
She rubbed her thumb over her middle finger, a nervous habit I hadn’t seen her do for a while. “It wasn’t just the bullet.”
“Okay?”
“There were symbols drawn on his chest and both palms.”
“What kind of symbols?”
“I’ve never seen them before.”
That wasn’t a good sign. Myra was the daughter Dad had bequeathed all of his books and journals to. She had been steadily reading her way through them for over a year.
“What were they drawn with?”
“Blood.”
“Excuse me?”
This was a vacation town. A sleepy beach town where little kids built sand castles and our highest repeat crime was expired parking meters. We didn’t do corpses covered in weird symbols drawn in blood.
“Blood,” I said.
“Blood. Looked like it to me. If it isn’t, we’ll know soon. I had the body delivered to Old Rossi.”
“Not the morgue?”
“You think someone other than Old Rossi would know more about this? How to kill a vampire with only a bullet and some squiggly lines?”
She was right. Old Rossi had been in town for several hundred years. Back when it was just a spot where gods had chosen to vacation and creatures had decided to settle. As I understood it, he had been born mortal and done a stint as a soldier. I didn’t know which war.
The story of how Rossi had been turned had only been pried out of him once, by some great-grand so far in my past I’d lost count of how many generations back. That story had been passed down in oral tradition, details lost over the years. By the time my father heard it, then passed it on to me, the names and dates had all been blurred by voices long dead.
The Old Rossi I knew was the same man my father and grandfather knew. To all outward appearances, he was a middle-aged, easy-going hippy sort of guy who ran naked meditation sessions and crystal-powered yoga raves.
He had, as far as I knew, left his long-ago-past life in his long ago past.
Rossi would know every way a vampire could be killed. Myra was right to have sent Sven’s body to him.
“Have you heard from him yet?”
“He wants to see you.”
I took another drink of coffee. “At his place?”
“You’re not going alone.”
“I won’t. But we have something else we need to deal with.”
“Crow?”
Thunder rumbled and a hard flash of yellow sunlight broke the clouds before being swallowed down.
Crow crumpled the paper bag and tossed it in the lobby garbage can. He walked a slow circle inside the small lobby, umbrella hat tucked under his arm, then stopped in front of the windows so he could stare out at the storm. His hands were shoved in his coat pockets, the beanie still tight on his head. I didn’t think he’d run off, but I wasn’t sure what he’d do now that he was officially on all the gods’ shit lists.
“He lost the powers.”
Myra blinked. Her eyes were wider than mine, a lighter blue beneath the straight dark bangs of her pin-up style. Whereas I had more of a runner’s build like our dad, she had inherited all of Mom’s curves. Even our unflattering uniforms couldn’t hide her figure.
I tended to tan under my freckles, but she had pale skin. Right now she went down another shade.
“He lost what powers?”
Crow, in the waiting area, snorted. I threw him a glare, but he was still staring out the window. He rocked up on the toes of his feet then down, up and down, in a nervous movement that looked like he wished he could run out of here.
Not on my watch.
“The gods’ powers.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
She stared at the lobby, lines pulling between her eyebrows. “How the hell did you do that, Crow?”
“Not on purpose. Not consciously either, which pisses me off, you know? What a great trick this would be...well, is, I suppose. But I didn’t think of it. It’s irritating to be out tricked.”
“How did you even...how does anyone lose all the powers? That’s never happened. That shouldn’t even be something that can happen.”