“Trouffle?” Jean mumbled through a mouthful of whipped cream.
“Yeah, trouble,” I said. “Sven’s been murdered. Bullet through the head wasn’t enough to kill him but the blood symbols on his body were. Apparently Rossi came up with the blood-kill thing over a thousand years ago. He calls it ichor techne. He didn’t explain how it’s done, but he did say it’s only used to kill vampires.”
I wrapped both my hands around my cup and stared down into the liquid blackness.
“And?” Myra asked. “What aren’t you telling us?”
“He said it was Ryder’s blood on Sven.”
They both stopped moving. Stopped chewing, stopped everything. Well, except for staring at me.
“You think he’s telling the truth?”
I sniffed, and rubbed at my eyes. Suddenly I wished I could just curl up in the booth and ignore this day had ever happened.
“I don’t know why he would lie about it. He was angry. He has every right to be angry. I’m angry.”
Jean reached across the table and patted my hand. “Ryder doesn’t have anything to do with this. He might be stupid sometimes, but he’s not a killer.”
The image came back to me of Ryder bursting into the station a few months ago when I was held at gunpoint by a woman. Ryder had handled his gun, and the high-charged situation, like a natural.
Maybe not like a killer, but like someone who knew how to deal with one.
Jean had always sort of idealized Ryder. She’d always thought he should be my handsome prince who would sweep me off my feet.
I didn’t think she’d gotten over him dumping me yet.
“Rossi says it’s his blood. We have to assume he has some tie to Sven’s death. Did we get labs back on that bullet hole?”
Myra speared an apple chunk and used it to wipe up some of the melted ice cream. “It’s a clean shot. 9mm bullet. There were no other bullets at the scene.”
“Any prints?”
“Nothing clear enough. No boot prints, even though it was muddy out by that shed. Any tire tracks would have been run over by other vehicles using the gas station and washed out by the rain.”
“So we’ve got nada,” Jean said.
“We’ve got a dead vampire and a pissed off vampire,” I said. “Rossi was holding a meeting. I told him to let his people know Ryder isn’t to be messed with.”
“What if he’s trying to throw you off?” Myra asked.
“Rossi?”
She nodded. “What if he just wants you to think Ryder was involved?”
“Why would he do that? Ryder and I aren’t dating. We’re barely working together. What would Rossi get out of casting suspicion on him?”
Although, now that I thought of it, Old Rossi had warned me about trusting Ryder before. And Ryder had made a point to tell me that Old Rossi wasn’t who he seemed to be.
Maybe something had happened when Ryder was younger and he still held it against Old Rossi. Or maybe Ryder had done some stupid kid thing that irritated the vampire.
Could it just be an old grudge?
“Do you two know if Rossi and Ryder get along okay?” I asked. “Are there any hard feelings between them?”
Jean licked banana cream off the tines of her fork. “Don’t think they really run in the same circles. Clean-cut Ryder and free-loving Rossi? There aren’t a lot of social situations that would have put them in close contact over the years. Except the festivals and things like that.”
We had four festivals a year in Ordinary. If you asked me, it was four too many.
“There’s one more weird thing about this,” I said.
They didn’t seem at all surprised there would be more weird things. This was Ordinary, after all.
“The other vampires can’t see the blood markings on Sven.”
“Are you sure?” Myra asked. “Can they smell them?”
“Yes, I’m sure. He brought Ben in to prove it to me. I’d never seen Ben so close to a panic attack. He told Rossi all he could see was the bullet hole—he said it was a silver bullet by the way.”
“Silver bullets kill werewolves, not vampires,” Jean said.
I nodded. “Still, any kind of bullet is still a bullet.”
“Okay,” Myra said, compiling all that data into organized subsections in that methodical mind of hers. “Ryder should be back in town tomorrow. We can talk to him then, see if there’s anything that points to him being involved with Sven’s death. Maybe I’ll drive by his place tonight, see if he got in early.”
“No, I’ll do it,” I said.
“Delaney,” Myra started.
“Let me. I know you and Jean have been trying to keep him out of my way, and I appreciate that. But I’m the chief here, and I’m the one who talked to Rossi and promised him I would check into Ryder.”
“I’ll come with you,” Jean said.
“No, you’ll go back to the station, or home with the calls forwarded, okay? Let’s just keep everything about this as normal as possible.”
“Dead vampire is not normal,” Myra muttered before sipping her coffee.
“I know.”
“How about the god power?” Jean asked. “Did you hear anything else about that?”
I shook my head. “Which reminds me, where’s Crow?”
“I took him home,” Jean said.
I groaned. “Really?”
“There wasn’t any real legal reason to lock him up, and it’s not like he’s going to leave town without his power.”
“He could,” I said.
“Sure. But the gods in town would stop him before he even got one foot outside city limits. So I took him home—well, not his home.”
She looked far too pleased with herself.
“Jean,” Myra said. “What home? If I find him at my place, in my kitchen—or in my bed— I’m going to throttle you.”
“Shit. Why didn’t I think of dropping him off at your place? I have a key and everything.”
“Jean,” I said.
“Oh, take it easy. He’s staying with Bertie.”
Bertie was the town’s only Valkyrie. She appeared to be a slight, bird-like woman in her eighties. While she was that, she was also the creature who made it her job to drag warriors off battlefields to their final resting places whether they liked it or not.
No one had ever put up a fight against Bertie and won.
It was no surprise Bertie was also the head of the community center, and pretty much ran all the behind-the-scenes events and gatherings that were hosted in Ordinary.
Those four festivals? All Bertie’s doing. Honestly, I couldn’t think of better hands, well, talons, in which to leave Crow.
“Okay,” I said. “I give. That’s brilliant. How did you get Bertie to agree?”
“I told her we’d each volunteer our time—no more than eight hours—at the next event she needed hands for.”
Myra groaned and thunked her head on the table.
Dramatic? No. Not at all. The last time I’d gotten roped into owing Bertie a favor she’d forced me to judge a rhubarb contest.
Rhubarb.
Tastes like a demon’s butt, no matter how much chocolate or alcohol is added to try to hide it. I thought giving ourselves over to Bertie deserved a little, no, maybe a lot of head thumping.
Jean, however, looked like she was enjoying torturing us. “Doesn’t matter how much brain damage you give yourself,” she said to Myra. “She’ll still find you something to do for eight hours.”