Kiss of the Vampire(4)

“George says based on rigor mortis she’s been dead about an hour. No more than two.” Dante rubbed his jaw. “He went into some mumbo jumbo about how it’s different with a vampire ’cause they’re technically already dead. My eyes glazed over after about the fifth time he said ‘Adenosine Triphosphate.’”

Nix shot him a look of commiseration. The assistant ME was a verbose little shape-shifter who loved the sound of his own voice. Especially when he was able to trot out long, complicated words. She was amazed he hadn’t gone into more detail with her, but maybe he figured he’d already given the information to Dante, so why bother? “So once we have a suspect list we’ll want to check alibis between the hours of two thirty and five thirty, just to be sure.”

Dante nodded. “Hey, can you…” He looked around and lowered his voice. “Can you smell anything?”

Dante was always discreet, and Nix was forever grateful. She took a deep breath and held it, pushing past the scent of blood for other odors. The sounds around her faded as she focused on her olfactory sense. There was a light smell of vamp, some lingering aroma of shape-shifter, but nothing recent enough to support or discount their involvement. There was something else there, though, a smoky odor lingering just beneath everything else, something…like demon.

Nix stilled. Why in the hell would demons have attacked a lone vampire? As far as she knew there had been no blood feuds called. And most demons wouldn’t dare strike out on their own without sanction from their leader. Of course, there was always a possibility that a few had gone rogue and were having fun like in the old days, ganging up on a vampire who’d been foolish enough to venture out on his or her own—but she didn’t think that was what was going on. The scent of demon would be a lot stronger if that were the case.

She drew another breath. While her sense of smell was better than a full-blooded human’s, it wasn’t as good as a full-blooded demon’s. And nowhere near as good as a vamp’s or any of the shape-shifters. But even she could tell there was something wrong here. The demon scent was too faint. If actual demons had been here, the odor would be much stronger. Maybe it was residual from earlier in the day. But still, it troubled her. It wasn’t enough to definitely say demons were involved, but it was too much to rule them out.

“The strongest smell is of humans,” she murmured. “I’m no bloodhound, though, and I can’t tell older scents from the current ones,” she added with a glance at the technicians working the scene. She kept her voice low. “All of the pret scents are so faint, my first assumption is that the attackers were human. It’s just too difficult to sort out all the other smells.” Plus if vamps fed on humans just prior to the attack, they’d have an overriding odor of human on them. She said as much to Dante.

His low sigh drew her attention back to him. His eyes looked tired and soul weary, like most of the other human cops she knew. Poor guy. He looked a little pale, the lines around his mouth testament to the strain he was under and the confusion he was trying to sort through.

“What is it?” she asked.

He scrubbed the back of his neck with a big hand. “It’s just…all this.” He drew a deep breath. “Here we were, going along for thousands of years thinking we were at the top of the food chain. We gave names to things we didn’t understand, like vampires or werewolves or goblins. And then to find out we weren’t kings of all we surveyed, that these things were real, just not in the way we’d imagined them.”

“What do you mean?” Nix crossed her arms and stared at him.

“Vampires aren’t vampires, shape-shifters aren’t shape-shifters. They’re all just a bunch of interdimensional squatters.”

She grinned. His metaphor was accurate. “Technically they are vampires. They have fangs. They don’t eat, they drink blood.”

“But they’re not reanimated corpses like in the legends. That’s what I mean.” When she started to correct him, Dante waved her off. “Okay, okay, I realize that the entities that turn into what we call vampires can only take over dying or newly dead bodies, so I suppose that makes them reanimated corpses. But…you know what I mean.” Frustration colored his deep voice. He gestured toward Amarinda. “She’s not human. Not really. She’s an alien possessing a human body. And in just under two years even more entities will come through the rift and nobody knows how to stop them.”

“It’s not like it’s going to be the end of the world,” Nix said slowly. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the next Influx. She was part demon, so the fact that more prets were going to come through the rift didn’t frighten her. If anything, she felt a little sad for all the humans who were going to be possessed by strangers, completely unable to do anything to prevent or avoid it. Thousands of families would become dysfunctional overnight. “We’ll adapt.” She hoped that was true.