Frostbound Part 6

An officer stood in the living room, making a sketch of the placement of the toppled furniture, the body, and the severed head. With no camera or sketch pad, Lore had to remember what was there: a floor lamp toppled, a small bookcase capsized, paperbacks everywhere, pictures askew. Mich.e.l.le Faulkner had fought back.

Lore tensed as someone b.u.mped into him. There were too many people, and no one was dusting for fingerprints yet, tweezing up bits of thread or vacuuming the carpet for evidence. He supposed even more personnel would arrive to tramp through the place.

To a h.e.l.lhound, it was a stupid way to investigate. The first and most obvious tool was a good nose, and now there were too many scents crowding out any trace of the killer. The only thing Lore could tell for sure was that h.e.l.lhounds and vampires were the only nonhumans who had been there in recent history.

His other sense-the one that gave him premonitions-was jangling with a sense of wrongness. The place stank of violence and terror.

"Where's the drawing?" Baines asked a young officer standing by the window.

"There." The man pointed to the living room wall.

With a ping of annoyance, Lore wondered how the h.e.l.l he'd missed it earlier. Then again, it didn't exactly stand out-just more blood on a b.l.o.o.d.y wall.

"Well?" asked Baines.

Lore stepped closer. The symbol was crudely done, and at an awkward height. The blood was turning a rusty brown, soaking into the bland off-white paint. He estimated the distance to the floor. "It looked like whoever drew it knelt, scooping up the blood from the carpet with his fingers."

Baines nodded. "So, what does it mean?"

Lore's first impression was of a meaningless splodge. If he squinted, it reminded him of a pup's drawing of the summer sun. Or a squashed spider. Or a head with crudely drawn hair. What had the cop been thinking? Gang symbols had more style. "Honestly, I can't tell."

Baines shrugged. "It was worth a try."

Lore straightened, fixing the childlike scrawl into his memory. As he took one last look, he noticed there was a tiny squiggle disturbing the bottom smears. "There's something written beneath the blood. It's almost covered up."

Baines quickly bent down, bringing his nose nearly to the wall. "It's in pencil."

He pulled a penlight from his pocket and shone it directly on the small printed letters. The writing was ragged, the letters uneven. It reminded Lore of his own awkward penmans.h.i.+p.

"Vincire," Baines said. "Latin. Something about binding, I think. It's been years since I studied it."

"Latin?" Lore thought about the fire, dark sorcery, Talia, and the dead body mere feet away. "What kind of a binding?"

Baines didn't answer. He straightened and looked out the window. "Huh. The snow's started coming down in earnest."

Lore followed his gaze. Fat flakes were twirling through the beams of the streetlights, the wind gusting them into spirals. A brief moment of wonder seized him. So that's what snow looks like. He'd seen pictures, but never the real thing.

"I dreamed that it would snow." In the dream, something was chasing him. The snow was so deep, he couldn't run. There had been no choice but to turn and face his enemy.

Prophecies came in dreams. They were the gift and burden the Prophets sent to the Alpha of the pack. The problem was deciding what was a prophecy and what were the aftereffects of the three-day-old pizza he'd left in the fridge. It seemed this time the dream was a warning.

"The snow's a nightmare all right," Baines grumbled. "Roads'll be h.e.l.l by morning. No one here knows how to drive in this s.h.i.+t."

The detective turned away from the window, then stiffened. He was looking at a desk with a laptop pushed into the corner of the living room. Lore recognized the detritus of a thinker's profession: highlighters, sticky notes, bits of torn paper used as page markers, and more books than any one person could reasonably read. A teacher, perhaps? A stack of papers sat on one corner of the desk. The t.i.tle page of the top one said Paradise Lost.

Lore wondered how anyone could sit still long enough to read that many books.

"What did the missing cousin do for a living?" Baines addressed no one in particular, raising his voice to be heard by all.

The answer came from the young cop who'd pointed out the blood on the wall. "Rostova's a sessional tutor at the university. She's got a master's in education and a bachelor's in Western literature."

Baines gave a low whistle. "So she knows Latin?"

"I guess, maybe," the young cop replied.

Lore understood why Baines had asked. There was a Latin dictionary sitting on the desk. The detective s.h.i.+fted some of the other books stacked on the desk. "Beginning Latin Translation. Virgil's Aeneid. Pride and Prejudice. Anna Karenina. A DVD of Hugh Grant's greatest hits. Good to have balance."

A ripple of puzzlement pa.s.sed over Lore. He could usually sniff people out. But with her endless shopping bags, glittery cell phone, and ridiculous heels, Lore would never have guessed Talia was a teacher. She didn't put out the smart girl vibe. But then she didn't put out the knife-fighter vibe, either.

She was deep in hiding, and better at it than anyone had guessed.

Maybe someone had found her out, and gone after her. If so, why?

Or maybe Lore was entirely wrong, and he had a murdering fiend chained to his bed.

He looked out at the snow, watched it gusting down the cold, dry street like handfuls of sugar. It was starting to stick to the gra.s.s.

Baines came to stand beside him. "If this keeps up, the city's going to be shut down by morning."

"That will make it hard for our killer to run."

Baines snorted. "You'd be surprised how well they usually hide in plain view."

Chapter 8.

Tuesday, December 28, 11:35 p.m.

Downtown Fairview

Darak tasted the evil that hung in the air and ached to smash it.

Pluto's b.a.l.l.s, some idiot went and got himself a spell book.

Wasn't that just dandy?

Who the h.e.l.l in this backwater has that kind of power? For a pinp.r.i.c.k on the map, Fairview was just full of surprises. Vampires standing for public office. Entire prison dimensions. And his personal favorite-invisible evil that set stuff on fire.

Come for the election, stay for the magic of ma.s.s destruction.

Darak heaved himself to his feet, stiff from crouching on the peak of the cathedral roof like an oversized gargoyle. He dusted away the snow that had collected on his sleeves and scanned the horizon while he took a slug from his flask.

The dark leathers he wore kept out the wind, but the cold seeped through seams and zippers. One of the old Undead, he could ignore it. What bothered him more was the smoke-not the comfortable scent of a hearth fire, but the reek of a burning building. The acrid stink had drawn him to the highest point he could find, and now he could see the source-a glowing maw of flame to the southwest, unnaturally fierce and bright.

Who or what had caused it? Only one way to find out. Go to the source.

Darak balanced on the roof's ridgeline, walking toe to heel along its length. Pride made him careful. Vampires could fly, but at close to seven feet and three-fifty, Darak was not exactly aerodynamic. Control was important, unless he wanted to drop like an anvil.

When he reached the roofline, he jumped, a streak of shadow against the black sky. The air rushed to meet him, snow stinging his cheeks. He landed lightly enough, boots skating on the frosty sidewalk. Pulling himself upright, he began walking toward the fire.

Darak and his blood-sworn kin were Undead, but they bowed to no queen or king. It had taken them two millennia to gain enough strength for true freedom, and they'd done it by force of arms. The honest way.

Darak didn't like magic or the people who used it. Weapons were far more reliable. Nevertheless, it took a cartload of power to start a blaze like that.

Power was interesting.

He stopped walking when he came to one of the telephone poles that dotted the street. An election poster jostled for s.p.a.ce with ads for lost cats and ska-goth fusion bands. Darak read the poster with a sense of bitter amus.e.m.e.nt.

Elect Michael de Winter

Equality and fairness for all citizens of Fairview!

Choose a candidate with centuries of experience!

It's time for an interspecies perspective.

The vampire candidate. Like many, Darak's crew had come to watch the election.

Michael de Winter was backed by the vampire queen, Omara. Her goal was equal rights for the nonhumans-but a lot of vampires were nostalgic for the good old days of crowns and scepters. After all, vampires survived by feeding on the weak. A desire for dominance was natural.

Bottom line: Did the queen want to reign over more than vampires? Half the humans were ready to riot, so apparently they believed the worst. Meanwhile, Omara's vampire enemies waited and watched for an excuse to topple her throne.

Who said politics wasn't a blood sport? Among vampires, politics often ended in war-and that meant innocents would die.

Not okay.

That's when Darak and his brethren voted with cold steel.

He turned away from the poster and began walking toward the fire once more. Yes, it had taken true power to set that blaze.

Maybe Darak could use the fool with the spell book. If election fever turned bad, they might need an extra weapon in reserve.

Or maybe he'd just tear off the fool's head.

That sort of thing was his specialty.

Tuesday, December 28, 11:40 p.m.

101.5 FM.

"Good evening and welcome back to CSUP. For those just joining us, tonight's program is all about the special bond between lover and beloved, hunter and prey. Where do the two intersect, and what does the battle of the s.e.xes have to do with the battle between species?

"It brings us, my dark faithful, to the topic of slayers. These days, it seems as if any cheerleader with a stake can get into the game, but I'm not talking about the wannabes or even those oh-so-scary mercenaries who accept a bounty on our lives. I'm talking about the crazies, the ones who kill from a sense of devotion.

"There are human tribes from Eastern Europe called the Hunters. They don't kill for sport or for money. It's a family tradition handed down from parent to child since the dawn of written history. To them, killing us is the purest act of love for their own kind.

"They're the ones I worry about when I turn out the light."

Tuesday, December 28, 11:45 p.m.

Lore's condo