Kim Harrison - A Perfect Blood

I’d been born a witch, but my blood kindled demon magic and the way the coven of moral and ethical standards saw it was that if it looked like a demon, did magic like a demon, and could be summoned like a demon, it was a demon. I couldn’t find fault with them. It had been a shock when I realized my blood didn’t invoke every witch charm, failing at the most complex because of the demon enzymes in it. Al, my demon teacher, was the same. I was a demon, like it or not. The first of a new generation thanks to Trent’s father. How nice was that?

The soft sound of pixy wings pulled me from my sour musings, and Jenks landed on my shoulder, his wings tinted blue from the cold. He knew where my thoughts had gone just by looking at me. “I don’t smell any burnt amber,” I said, and Nina nodded. Her canny gaze looked wrong on someone so young.

“It wasn’t at any other sites, either,” she said. “That’s why we thought of you.”

Ivy cleared her throat in reproach, and Nina broke eye contact with me to stare at her for a long, slow moment, the smaller woman quietly asserting her dominance until Ivy looked away. “All the victims had a large quantity of their blood drained from them, as you see here,” Nina said, turning back to the body. “The first victims showed evidence of being held against their wills: split fingernails, bondage marks, bruises, cuts, contusions. They resisted their capture and restraint. Evidence points to one to six days’ worth of torture. The moulage was old, but we’re fairly confident that none of the victims was killed where we found them.”

The man before me looked worn, in the dry air his dead eyes starting to sink back. The moulage here was clean, too, or Ivy would have said something. I couldn’t see emotion imprinted on the world, but vampires could. Most moulages faded with the sun, but murder left a stronger impression that could last weeks or even centuries if the crime was heinous enough and the spirit desperate to continue life. It was the source of ghosts—most times.

“Where were the others found?” Ivy asked, and Nina aggressively took the packet of papers from her, handing them back with a page of photos flipped open.

“The first victims were at an abandoned school,” Nina said as she looked down at the page, her jaw tense at Ivy’s subtle refusal to accept her authority. “It had been built on property that had once been a cemetery. Like this,” she said, her gaze lifting to the surrounding bare trees as if seeing it in another time. “It’s one of the ties between the crimes. The second victim, who we found first, was in the driveway of a museum.”

“Let me guess,” Jenks said snidely. “It was built on an old grave site.”

Nina inclined her head, smiling with her teeth hidden. “Cincinnati is riddled with abandoned churchyards. Bodies were moved a lot, and not always back into the ground.”

Brow furrowed, I thought of our own graveyard, attached to the church. I didn’t want a body showing up there, especially not one with hooves and horns.

I didn’t even know this man’s name, and I carefully stepped over a blood-soaked cord holding his, ah, hoof so I could see his back, forcing myself to look closer to try and make sense of this. A hint of a tail made my stomach clench. I’d caught a glimpse of the school photo before Ivy turned away, and it made me even more uneasy. The pentagram surrounding the body here was the same they’d used at the school. It was fairly common in the higher charms, but drawing it in blood wasn’t. Someone was playing at being a demon.

“The victims at the school were decomposing badly when we found them,” Nina said, distracting me, “but they had clearly been restrained. The second victim had been kept sedated. We don’t know about this man. The tests haven’t been run yet, but he’s clearly been held against his will.”

Jenks took off from my shoulder, his wings clattering in anger. “Decomposed!” he exclaimed, clearly disgusted. “In this weather? Just how long had they been dead?”

Nina ignored his anger. “The three at the school had been dead somewhere between eight and ten days. We know they went missing on the fourth, but we aren’t sure how long they were dead before we found them Tuesday.”

Tuesday? Like three days ago Tuesday?

“Tink loves a duck!” Jenks exclaimed. “What have you been doing? Sitting on your thumb and spinning?”

“Jenks!” I exclaimed, and the undead vampire let some of his anger show, Nina’s eyes squinting. The anger wasn’t directed at us, telling me he wasn’t happy with how the investigation had been handled, either.

“The best we can tell, they probably died between the eighth and the tenth,” Nina said.

I really wanted off this bandstand, but I didn’t want to look squeamish.

“Magic killed them, not blood loss,” she added, holding her breath when the wind blew and the man’s blood-caked hair moved in the breeze. “That came afterward. Apart from the girl at the school, they died from a transforming spell that wasn’t done properly. We can’t be sure until the necropsy, but if this man follows the pattern, his insides will be as deformed as his outsides. They died because their bodies couldn’t function.”

Jenks was a tight hum at my ear, and he was slipping a green dust. “Hey, Rache, you mind if I check the sitch with the local pixies? They aren’t hibernating yet.”

Nina stiffened. It was a slight movement that probably would have escaped my detection if I hadn’t been looking for it. The dead vampire thought it was a waste of time, but not breaking our eye contact I nodded. “Good idea, Jenks.”

“Back in a sec,” he said, and in a flash, he was gone. I wished I could fly away, too.

“Whose blood made the spells that did this?” I asked, starting to get a bad feeling. Three teenagers killed, then a few days later, a second victim, then a few more days, and then Thomas.

“What an interesting question.” Nina backed up to lean against the railing. “We didn’t catch on that fast—Ms. Morgan.”

Her stance said I knew too much. Maybe she was right. Maybe it just took a demon to catch a demon. “Whose blood twisted the spells that killed them?” I asked again, jaw clenching.

“At the school, they died from their own. The second victim died from a spell kindled with blood from one of the teenagers. We don’t know yet whose blood this man died from.”

My shoulders slumped as I exhaled, and Ivy, who was looking from the bloody floor to one of the photos to compare the glyphs, met my eyes, reading my worry. Crap, they were leapfrogging. Taking the blood from the last victim to capture and experiment on the next. I put a hand to my middle and looked at the pentagram around me, wishing I had enough guts to take my charmed silver off and see where the nearest ley line was. Close, I bet. Graveyards were often built on them. If Jenks were here, I could ask him.

“Our working theory is once the perpetrators harvest sufficient blood to play with, they simply use the blood of the previous victim to experiment on and torture the next,” Nina said.

Play. That was a good word. It was what I’d already figured out, but hearing it made me more nauseated yet. At least there’d probably be no bodies older than the ones found at the school.

“Experiment?” Ivy looked up from her pages.

Nina drew herself up into a lecturing pose, and I wondered if the vampire inside her had been a professor. “In each case, the blood has been modified. To what end, we don’t yet know.”

I didn’t know, either, and I looked at the body so I wouldn’t have to look at Nina. This man’s death had been painful, his body spending several days twisted somewhere between a human and a goat as his captors played with his blood. But why? This was just nasty. Whoever had done this had dumped him to create a sensation and get noticed. A perverted warning against black magic . . . or a way to get my attention?