Chapter 21

After a few more days of training with Alizya, Kris called her. He needed my help. He had another case where a vampire was involved and he suspected that they weren’t drinking human blood. Alizya agreed to let me go though I got the feeling she wasn’t happy about letting me leave.

When Kris pulled up to the house and sent me a text message for me to come out, I practically ran at the car. I didn’t even stop to tell Alizya goodbye; I just ran out the door.

“Slow down, I need you sane for this. You’re the best tracker I have right now and I need to clean up or catch this rogue before Warren tries to take over.”

“I’m sane. I’m just excited to be out of prison. Is Leo going to be there?” I replied quickly as I sat on my hands to further hide my excited energy.

“He’s there now. We’re going to meet him and he should have a good idea of what we’re going into by then.”

I nodded to keep in the excited squeal that wanted to jump out of me at the thought of getting to see Leo again. I missed him.

Kris pulled right up to the yellow police tape and shut off the engine of his car. “Don’t do anything weird until we get clear of the humans. They should let us through because they know me but I don’t need any problems from you. Understood?”

“I’m not stupid,” I complained.

He gave me a look and I sighed as I took it in.

“Fine. Best behavior. I am a human-robot. I promise.”

“Good. Now let’s get in there,” he grumbled as he got out of the car and practically slammed the door closed.

I stayed on his heels as we were let under the yellow tape and into an area around another pub that had been sectioned off. This scene was different from the first though. From the street, nothing but the large window of the pub had any damage and there were way more humans around moving in and out of the pub’s main door.

“Kris, over here!” Leo called from near the door where he was using a laptop computer on the hood of a car.

I held back the urge to pounce on him as we walked calmly over to him.

“What do they know?” Kris hissed.

“They’re thinking it might be a robbery. There are several humans dead and a weapon. I haven’t been able to look closer to see if the corpses have any recognizable marks…” Leo explained, rubbing his neck as a subtle hint at the marks he was talking about.

Kris nodded. “We’ll send Raven in and find out where our guy went. Hopefully we can catch the bastard this time. I’m tired of his games.”

Leo sighed. “They know that you brought an expert so she should be good to go. Be careful, Raven but go ahead.”

I nodded, doing my best to focus on the job and headed to the door to take a deep breath. Immediately, the smell and the destruction became recognizable as vampire work. I realized that the broken glass from the window was scattered all the way to the other side of the street. Much too far for any normal robbery or human activity. There was also the smell of gunpowder that hung in the air just above the smell of a lot of human blood.

I should have been tempted by the smell of the blood but I suspected that the human blood was the reason I was chosen for the job in the first place. Any other sane vampire would be too distracted to function well.

Bodies were slumped in odd positions around the expanse of the pub. A few in the booths along the wall, one near a table, one just as you walked through the door. Their blood ran and pooled like some kind of weird painting across the floor. I stepped over a hand that had been torn free of its limb and picked my way deeper into the establishment. No one had come out through the front alive; that much I could already see in the scene around me.

The smell of gunpowder was stronger toward the counter but the coroner was already beginning to ruin the smell with chemicals. My clues would be gone in a few minutes if I wasn’t careful.

I surveyed the floor again from a different angle, now standing by where the gunpowder smell was strongest. Shell casings from a shotgun had rolled into hiding places near table and chair legs and into dark corners.

Then another smell wafted at me as someone walked past.

The vampire had been shot.

I swallowed and moved deeper into the pub toward the bathrooms and the back door. That’s where I found the body of the bartender, still wearing his white apron, a liquor bottle smashed into his skull. In my distraction of looking at the body, I almost missed it, but there was the shotgun next to the bartender and pointing at the back door.

I went out carefully, finding a scent and knowing that I should have grabbed one of the boys at that point but the trail was still warm and I didn’t want to let go. His boot prints in blood led me to a parking lot out behind the row of buildings. Glass crunched under my boot and I found where the trail was too thin to do much more.

That was it.

With a sigh, I knelt down and stuck my finger in the blood. It was still warm, a trait that a vampire’s blood couldn’t have. Would our criminal take a human hostage?
I went back through the pub intending to go tell the boys what I had found but I paused at the counter again and looked up at the mirror behind the liquor bottles that remained. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to look at it but a moment later I was watching the scene unfold around me like I had been pulled into a movie.

It had been a calm night, people drinking, chatting and laughing in small groups around the pub’s dimly lit space. Then someone came in and everything went tense.
It was a large man dressed mostly in black with a gun up his sleeve and a bag over his shoulder. His eyes locked on to a vampire sitting in the back corner instantly and I realized that this hulking black figure was a hunter and he was the one who opened fire on the vampire.

The vampire had tried to use the humans as meat shields as he moved toward the door but the hunter paid them no attention and shot shell after shell until he had to pause to reload. It was in that pause that the hunter realized that the male vampire had been trying to distract him while a blonde female vampire tried to escape out the back.

The bartender tried to intervene as the hunter went for the female only to fall dead on the floor, bottle in his head. The male tried to bargain with the hunter for the life of the female but his pleas fell on deaf ears as he reduced her to ash and turned the shotgun to the male.

The male was shot in the shoulder then immobilized and slung over the hunter’s shoulder like a sack of flour only to be taken out the back door.

“Are you okay, miss?” a paramedic asked me, touching my shoulder as I came out of the vision.

I blinked a couple times then turned to give him a tiny smile to tell him that I was alright. With a quick glance down at my boots, I realized I had stepped directly onto the ash that had been the female vampire. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do for her.

Back with the boys, I leaned against the car Leo was using to work on and waited for them to finish their conversation.

“Did you find anything?”

“We should go somewhere quieter before we talk about what I saw,” I mumbled, “But, yes. I did find something.”

They both nodded and Leo scooped up his computer.

“I parked around the corner,” Leo announced as he led the way to his car where they waited expectantly for me to spill the details.

“It’s not our vampire but a hunter did take a vampire hostage.”

“What?” Leo blurted in disbelief.

“The vampire tried to draw the hunter away out the front but the hunter got to his girlfriend near the cash register. There’s only one set of prints out to the parking lot but the blood trail is mixed. I can smell vampire blood but I definitely tasted human blood when I touched a footprint.”

“Let’s get back to the Nest,” Kris instructed. “Then you can tell me how you got all of that from looking at some blood splatter. I’ll meet you two there after I check out with the humans.”

I nodded and smiled at Leo, excited that I got to ride with him instead of Kris. As Kris walked away, Leo snaked an arm around my waist and pulled me in for a long overdue kiss that I didn’t want to stop.

When it did, though, he held my face to kiss my forehead then touched his forehead to mine. “I missed you, Raven.”

I smiled, “I missed you too.”