S. Cedric - Of Fever and Blood

She had spent three months hunting down one of these monsters. A predator, a vampire who was well known but still managed to systematically escape justice with the arrogance of a prince of darkness. One night she decided to risk everything and went into his house without waiting for a warrant. She broke into his study and found images of children in his laptop, pictures that he was in too. If she had followed procedure and reported this to her boss, the man would have gotten two or three years in jail, and then he would have been out again to act on his bloody fantasies. So she reported nothing. She just waited for him. And when he got back home, she grabbed him and threw him out a window. The man fell five stories before landing on a parking meter that broke his backbone in two.

Her boss should have put her in custody. Any other chief would have done that, glad to be rid of a known troublemaker. Instead he put her on administrative leave while Internal Affairs completed its investigation. He saved her job. She knew full well he had done that for her.

It did not keep her from being mad at him, though. Not for putting her aside, but for sticking that Deveraux dumbass on her back-and for that, she was really mad at him. With that decision, her boss’s message was loud and clear. He showed her-and everyone else in the unit-that she was still needed, that she was still an excellent cop they could not do without. But he also clearly showed her that he did not trust her enough to give her free rein.

She had only herself to blame. What was done was done. It was not the first time. As long as she could remember, her life had been nothing but a roller coaster ride. She had gone down the hill before. And back up again, many times.

All that truly mattered now was that she could get back to work.

She was a cop. She felt like a cop. Deep inside. Catching killers, stopping the cancer that devoured humankind, that was the whole of her life. Piece by piece she’d given up on the rest of her existence.

With only eight years on the force, she had become the best quite simply because her commitment to her job kept her from dwelling on anything else.

It kept her from remembering.

Third floor. Homicide’s maze of offices. And hers, around the corner of a narrow hallway at the very back of the building. She absentmindedly nodded at two officers drinking coffee, their elbows resting on the guardrail.

“Eva, it’s been awhile,” Florian Benavente said.

“Not pretty, that carver thing, huh?” Chris Mangin added.

Eva went over to them. “No, it wasn’t. By the way, Chris, shouldn’t both of you be putting together the neighborhood interviews so we can get on this right away.

“We’re on it right now,” Benavente grumbled, crushing his empty cup.

“You’d better be. I’ll come see you guys later to pick up the report.”

She felt them staring at her as she turned her back and started walking back down the hallway.

When she reached her office, Eva didn’t know what to expect. She had been away for two months. Forever. But when she opened the door, she found that nothing had changed. Everything was just as she had left it, meticulously tidy, files where they belonged. Nobody had used the space in her absence. It seemed that nobody had even opened the door.

Pictures from her last case-the one that had caused her downfall-were still pinned to the wall, quietly waiting for her. Pedophile Ugo Falgarde was in half of those photographs. The others showed children he had abused. Now that his backbone was in pieces, the man would never abuse anyone again.

The office returned to its usual darkness when she shut the door. The room had no windows or skylights, just a few rays of light seeping through an air duct. There was just a lamp on the desk, which she used only when she had to. Her colleagues rarely spent time with her there. They found the darkness unnerving. Eva, on the other hand, found it delightful. She settled in her chair, removed her shades and closed her eyes, taking in the old musty smell and enjoying the return to her cocoon, where she had spent so many nights, as well as days.

Then she opened her eyes and cracked her knuckles.

Enough daydreaming. Let’s get to work, big girl.

She signed onto her computer and took down the Falgarde pictures. She replaced them with the pictures taken that morning. The faceless bodies of Barbara Meyer and Audrey Desiderio. On top of those photos she pinned photos of the inscriptions found at the scenes.

“THE DARK SONS HAVE RETURNED

NOW FEAST SCARLET”

Like something out of Nostradamus.

A grim prophecy, really.

Then she pinned up the photo of the circle.

It was the same circle with bars that the Salaville brothers had painted in their living room.

She had worked on those murders for months, trying to understand the meaning of the torn faces. She had completely missed the point. The Aztecs practices this kind of thing hundreds of years ago. They sacrificed victims to their gods, removing their hearts and cutting off their heads. But that was not the case here. There was no connection with the Celts either, though they had a tradition of peeling off the skin of their enemies, and leaving them nailed to wooden walls. There was no correlation whatsoever with what the Black Mountain Vampires had committed.

Maybe she had not looked into what was essential.

The folklore of the blood.

Opening her handbag, she took out the book that she had retrieved from her place, The Blood Countess .

One of the first pages featured the coat of arms of Hungarian Countess Erszebet Bathory. It was a dragon biting its own tail. And in the middle of its circle, three wolf’s teeth.

She tore the page out of the book and pinned it to the wall.

A circle around three horizontal lines. A dragon wrapped around three wolf’s teeth.

She returned to her chair and stared at the images. So similar. So obvious. The meaning so terrifying, if what she thought turned out to be true.

She wondered how she could explain it to her boss.

“Autopsies?”

Like his last name, Chief Rudy O was a man who liked to keep things simple and get straight to the point. He knew precisely what he wanted, and if there was one thing he hated above all else, it was the waste of even one second of his time. In his position, this was an asset.

Sitting across from him in the office that also served as conference room once a day, Inspector Jean-Luc Deveraux leaned over the table and handed him a stack of paper.

“First victim: Barbara Meyer. Nineteen years old, student. She was tied to her bed and stabbed sixty-two times. Most of the wounds were superficial. It was quite clear that her attacker was careful to keep her alive as long as possible while he tortured her.”

“How long?”

“Three days,” Deveraux said. “We think she was conscious until the end. The killer had the entire building to himself, since the only other tenant was away visiting her parents. He took his sweet time. He used a very sharp blade, possibly a surgical tool. Not a single messy blow, except the ones in the genital area. There, he seems to have lost it. The blade was driven with such brutality, the blow broke the pelvis. The skin on the face was peeled off at the very end, but while the victim was still alive. It was just before her carotid artery was cut. She lost a great deal of blood, more than a gallon, but less than two pints were found at the scene. We think that the killer took the rest away with him. That, and, uh, the girl’s face, of course.”

Rudy O was listening carefully.

“Just like in the Salaville case, last year.”

“Exactly.”

Eva Svarta listened intently, her face impassive behind the dark glasses.