Keri Arthur - Deadly Desire

I could smell the blood as soon as I got out of the elevator. In the pristine whiteness of the foyer, the scent seemed to hang around like some gigantic cloud of doom.

I followed my nose and discovered Cole and his team hard at work.

"Don't you guys ever sleep?" I said, stopping several feet behind a kneeling Cole.

"Not lately we don't." His voice was little more than a tired growl. "Though if you could catch at least one of the murderers we're after, our lives would be much easier."

"If it was that easy to catch these bastards, they wouldn't need us guardians. You guys could do it."

My gaze went past him to the body slumped across a sofa. He was naked, his flesh almost as pale as the white leather couch. He was also very hairless. His chest, his arms, even the top of his head-which lay at the base of the sofa like some forgotten ball-was as smooth as alabaster. It was creepy looking in death, and I very much doubted it would have been that attractive in life. But then, the Goth look was apparently making a comeback, so what did I know?

I flared my nostrils, sucking in and sorting through the differing scents, this time finding the touch of roses winding in between the scents of blood, death, and that intensely "wrong" scent that had been present before.

"It's definitely connected to the other two vamp murders," I said.

Cole glanced at me. "You can smell the same scents?"

"Yeah." I nodded toward the piece of china he held in one hand. "You found something?"

"A thumb print. It probably belongs to those who live here, but we might get lucky for a change."

I snorted. The chances of us getting lucky right now were about as good as the chances of me ever having kids. "Where's the girlfriend?"

"Second bedroom down the corridor," Cole said, returning his attention to the broken vase. "Her name is Anna."

"Ta." I turned and headed that way. The first bedroom was obviously Shore's. In was masculine in design-all brown leather, dark wood, and a bed that came complete with black satin sheets. Why anyone would prefer them over Egyptian cotton I'll never know. I knew from experience that everything just slid around too much on satin.

I paused to smell the room. That "wrong" scent was stronger in here, just as it had been in the bedrooms of the other victims. It had to be a clue. We just had to find the key.

I continued. The second bedroom was definitely more feminine. The walls were a very pale gray, and the furnishing a mix of white leather and linen, with hot pink accents.

A thin, pale young woman with fiery red hair and large breasts looked up as I entered, her blue eyes red rimmed and mouth trembling. "I don't know anything," she said. "I really don't."

"Anna?" When she nodded, I couldn't help adding, "How old are you?"

"Seventeen." She sniffed. "Almost eighteen."

I was betting her eighteenth was farther away than what she was admitting. Hell, I'd be surprised if she was even seventeen. She just didn't look it, despite the almost weary light in her eyes.

I sat down on the white cane chair nearest to the bed, then reached out psychically and lightly linked to her mind. Not so much to read it-not exactly, anyway-just enough to tell whether her vampire had placed her under some sort of geas. After all, she was human and young, and while the age of consent was sixteen, vampires weren't legally allowed to have a relationship with anyone under the age of eighteen.

Not that it ever stopped them.

Sifting through the layers of her mind did indeed reveal a male imprint, so he'd definitely been messing with her thought processes. Which meant she'd have to go to the Directorate for deprogramming. I might be strong enough to do it myself, but it wasn't something I actually knew how to do. I could control or read minds right up there with the best of them, but undoing the damage others had done was work for a specialist. And that wasn't me.

But I'd been right about one thing-she wasn't seventeen. She was barely even sixteen.

"How long have you been living here?" I asked.

She sniffed and wiped a pale hand across her nose. "Nine months. He treated me very nicely."

He'd have to, given she was underage when they first became lovers. The vampire community might look the other way when it came to sex and youngsters, but only for as long as there was nothing that could draw attention to themselves or their community. A mistreated underage lover would certainly do that. "And you were lovers?"

"Of course. Me and Mandi both were."

"And is Mandi also human?"

She nodded. "Her room is the next one along."

"But she wasn't with you when you found the body?"

"No." A sob broke through. She squeezed her eyes shut, but tears leaked out regardless. "How could someone do that to him? Why would someone do that to him?"

"That's what we're trying to find out," I said softly. I reached across and took her hand in mine. Her flesh was cool, the tips of her fingers almost blue. It made me want to ask just how often Shore had been feeding off her. "Were you and Mandi his only lovers?"

She shook her head. "We couldn't be. He had a voracious appetite."

Most vampires did, I thought with an inner smile. But some of us were more capable of handling the situation than others. "Can you remember seeing anyone new in the last few days? Anyone who you thought acted strangely?"

"No. I mean… He had new lovers all the time, but there was no one I'd consider strange."

"But how many of those new lovers appeared within the last week?"

She frowned. "Maybe two? There was a Rita, and I think the other one's name was Vicki. Vicki Keely, actually. Marty introduced her to us. She was young."

I frowned. "How young?"

She shrugged. "Maybe fifteen, sixteen? She looked nervous, too. Like she didn't want to be there."

Which suggested she wasn't under any sort of vampire "persuasion," because second thoughts wouldn't have shown. "If we brought in an artist, would you be able to give us an image of them both?"

She nodded. I squeezed her hand, then released it and sat back in the chair. "Do you know where he met the two women?"

She shrugged. "Probably at one of the strip clubs. He used to enjoy going to those."

Her tone suggested she didn't approve and again a smile twitched my mouth. Humans had such strange ideas when it came to sex. I mean, here she was, barely legal, knowingly sharing her vampire lover with other women, and yet she turns up her nose at him visiting strip clubs? What was with that? "Do you know which ones?"

"No. I'm not able to get into them for another couple of years."

She might be under a geas, but it wasn't as complete as her vampire had presumed, because the legal age for getting into strip clubs was eighteen.

"So he never mentioned a favorite?"

She frowned. "There was one. Man Hard, or something like that."

"Man Hard? Really?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I told you, I never really listened when he was going on about the clubs."

"So did he ever bring home women from those clubs?"

"The strippers? Yeah, a couple of times. He seemed to like them showing us how to strip. Like we don't know how to take clothes off or something."

"Compared to a professional stripper, you probably don't."

Her blue gaze flashed up to mine. "I strip better than any of them bitches did. And I was built better."

I resisted the urge to tell her there was more to life than boobs and stripping, and said, "So, did either of the last women he bought home strip for you all?"

"No. He just shuffled them into the bedroom, like. One of them was a screamer, though."

I barely managed to contain my smile. "Which one was she?"

"Vicki. The reluctant one."

Who obviously wasn't so reluctant in the end. "And she worked at Man Hard?"