“I don’t know.” Ben whispered.
“His chest. Look at his chest.”
Ben blinked and blinked, his gaze scanning over Sven’s body, flitting across his face, neck, chest, unable to rest.
“I don’t see, can’t see anything else. A bullet. Just a bullet.”
Ben was so distressed I was about to tell Rossi to let him go. I didn’t understand what was going on, exactly, but I liked Ben and I didn’t like seeing him looking so cornered and panicked.
“Do you see blood?”
Ben was visibly trembling now, his thin T-shirt soaked with sweat. Still, he stayed where he was, his gaze searching the dead vampire.
“No. No blood.”
Holy crap. I could see the blood clear as day. Obviously Old Rossi could see the blood too. But Ben was not lying. Even I could see that.
“Thank you, Ben.” Rossi’s words were gentle, light and laced with the vampiric tone that both hypnotized and soothed. “That is all I need. I’m sorry to distress you. Get a drink of water and rest. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Ben nodded woodenly, swallowed again several times and then all but fled the room, closing the door so quietly not an egg rattled.
“Okay, so Ben can’t see the blood,” I said.
Old Rossi had pushed up to sit on the edge of the couch, elbows propped on his thighs, fingers linked together, thumbs pressed against his mouth. He nodded.
“And that blood plus that bullet killed Sven.”
Again, he nodded.
“So there’s a way to kill your kind that isn’t stakes, garlic, or solar power.”
“Garlic is a myth. Although severing our heads works quite well. And so do the blood arts.”
“Technical ichor?”
“Ichor techne. An art many centuries old. An art I thought burned, hidden, buried with the devils who first developed it.”
Two ways I could take this conversation: ask about the devils who had developed a way to kill vampires I had never heard of, or find out who might have found that art to use now. And why on Sven. So I guess that was three ways.
“Did you know them?”
“The devils? Yes.”
I waited. “Could they still be alive?”
“One of them is.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
Not what I expected. I wiped some of the sweat and rain off of my face and rubbed my palms on my jeans.
“Okay.” I took a second to process that. “Okay. I’ve never asked about your past, and Dad didn’t tell me anything more than we have noted in the family records. I’m going to assume you think this,” I spread fingers toward poor Sven, “is tangled up with your past life? Lives?”
“It is.”
“I’m going to need more than that if I’m going to solve this problem.”
“Is that what you’re going to do, Delaney? Solve this problem?” The fangs were starting to show, his usual hippy-chill attitude peeling away to give me a peek at the animal inside.
“I understand you take care of your own and the threats against them. But this is murder and I am the law in this town. Even if we buried Sven’s death under a convenient story of him leaving for brighter horizons, we know someone killed him.
“They left him like that so we could find him. So we would know what they did to a citizen of our town. That won’t stand with me. And it shouldn’t stand with you.”
He watched me with that damned steady gaze, the look that made me wonder how many of my fears he was cataloguing to use against me later.
“It wasn’t a threat.” Rossi said.
“Really? Because it looks like a threat to me.”
“It was an invitation.”
The biscuit and bacon I’d eaten earlier turned in my stomach. “Is that what the symbols mean? Some kind of invite?”
“No. The symbols are Sven’s plucking apart, his undoing, his final death. His body is the invitation.”
“To what?”
“War.”
I let that sit between us for a couple seconds. Someone must have closed a door too hard somewhere in the house because the egg shells on their glass pedestals shivered and chimed.
“All right. What war? With whom? Over what? And if other vampires can’t see this ichor techne, then was it an invite to you or to someone else, someone non-vampiric?”
“I was a mortal man many years ago, Delaney. When Rome seemed to rule the world.” A shadow crossed his eyes, but it was not the black of killing. I thought it might be memory or regret.
I couldn’t imagine looking back at memories from so long ago. Rossi had to be over two thousand years old.
Holy crap.
“This has something to do with Sven’s death?”
“I was a soldier,” he continued. “No different than the men beside me. Until we faced an army from the east. We were slaughtered, left broken and bleeding. Their soldiers defeated us. Overwhelmed by numbers, we fell.
“But it was that night, as the wounded got on with the business of becoming the dead that the true enemy arrived. Devils, demons with fangs and a hunger for blood. There were only two of them. Impossibly tall and pale.
“They moved through the wounded, searching, sniffing. I had fallen near another soldier. Near my brother-in-arms. My friend.”
He practically spat that last word.
“I don’t know which of us made a noise. Maybe it was me. That’s...” He shook his head. “Too long ago. But they heard and they came sniffing our way. We were both drawn up and feasted upon. They drank our blood. It was horrifying. Painful. Until it wasn’t. Until we begged for it.”
“Vampires,” I said to break the silence.
“Our makers. My maker.”
“Are they still alive? Do you think they’re behind this?”
“They are not behind this.”
“What about your friend? The other soldier.”
“Lavius is dead.”
“Are you sure?”
He just gave me a long look.
“Then what does this have to do with Sven?”
“Only Lavius and I knew of the ichor techne.”
“You must have learned it from someone. Knowledge gets written down, passed down. Who taught you about it?”
“No one. I created it.”
“Before you were a vampire?”
“No. Many years after.”
Which meant he must have used it to kill vampires. I didn’t know why a vampire would need some fancy way to kill one of his own, and really, that was beside the point.
“Did you have records of it here? Or anywhere else in the world?”
“No. I’ve made sure the art was wiped clean from history, and not even mentioned in the myths.”
Well, he’d done at least part of that. I’d never heard of it before, and I was in the know about the creatures in the world.
“So Sven being left with this drawn across his chest is someone telling you, specifically, they’ve found your old weapon? Other vampires can’t see the markings...how does that work?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you created this blood art thing.”
“Yes. I created it. And it has always been visible to me, to mortals, to creatures including other vampires. I do not know how it has been changed to hide it from vampire sight. I do not know why.”
“Totally ruins your reputation.”
“What reputation?”
“Of being a know-it-all.”