“Glass of stout for me and a burnt milkwood for my friend.”
I butted in before the bartender turned.
“No milkwood. Just a water.”
We took our drinks to a booth and I sat back to soak in the atmosphere. A dozen men and women were digging into beers or plates of greasy breakfast. We were only a few small steps from the shadows of the square but the mood was undeniably different. The music coming through the speakers was a few beats faster. The clientele looked just as aged and just as frail but somehow, they weren’t as broken. Everybody in the village had become old and gray. The difference here was: the Humans had expected it.
No one had cheated them of their youth. They’d spent it of their own accord and the creases in their skin and creaking of their bones had arrived right on schedule. When Father Time knocked on their door, they might not have greeted him with open arms but at least they’d known he was coming. For the other poor suckers across the way, he’d snuck in under the cover of night and robbed them in their sleep.
“You have a picture of him?” Fen asked.
I took the photo of Rye out of my pocket and slid it across the table. He examined it without expression.
“And the girl?”
I handed him the picture of the smiling Siren and he laid them out, side by side. Fen looked at them in silence for a long while. I drank my water and he sipped his beer.
“I see no way,” he said eventually. “These days, even a young Vampire is relatively weak. They’re starving, Fetch. A girl like this could fight off a dozen without breaking a sweat.”
“It’s no act? You’ve seen one under pressure?”
He looked like he wanted to hit me.
“The vegetable you just played your little game with is named Joseph Henry Carmine. He broke a leg two years ago trying to take a piss. Perhaps you should shift your gaze back towards your own kind.”
There was bite in that remark. So, the stoic Fen Tackman had feelings after all.
“Don’t worry, I’m doing that. For the moment, how about you humor me? If they don’t want the blood, then we have no motive. Let’s focus on means. They’re not strong but they’re smart. Are you telling me it’s completely out of the question that a Vamp could make a young girl disappear? If he wanted to?”
Fen twitched. There was something on his mind. I leaned in.
“Tell me,” I said.
He took a sip of beer that emptied his glass by a third.
“The Blood Race is perhaps the highest order within our broken world. Before the Coda, there was no faction I placed more trust in than The League of Vampires and their members in The Chamber. They accepted their curse and managed it admirably.”
“But…”
His eyebrows tilted inwards like flippers on a pinball machine.
“But.” He sipped again. “The League was only formed two hundred years ago. Before that, the Blood Race was a very different group of beasts indeed. In the real old days, every living creature was fair game. For the most part, hunting was carried out when required. A single kill for a single meal for one lone predator. That was fine for an individual but not all their species lived alone. In areas where large groups of Vampires resided, they would supplement their hunting with other means.” He was on a roll now. The thrill of the puzzle overrode any qualms he had about helping me. “Traps. Utilized mostly, but not exclusively, in rural areas. This was obviously phased out when the League was formed but, in the context of your little game, every Vampire more than two centuries old would, in theory, be practiced in these arts.”
I took a thoughtful sip of my cloudy water.
“Thanks.”
“Does this help your case?”
“If it does, do you want me to tell you?”
He finished his beer.
“No. Thank you.”
18
I went back to the teahouse. The place where two Vampires had been crumbled into dust and one currently unidentified victim had been melted into a puddle of pink goo.
The back door to the storage room was only guarded by police-tape and that terrible smell. The bodies were gone but everything else was where I’d left it. I didn’t need to look around for long. With new information in my head, the evidence was obvious. This wasn’t just a murder room. It was a trap. The thick ropes had been used to restrain whatever creature the melted mass used to be. The metal pole had skewered it and then something had been used to melt the mysterious creature into the watery mess.
The Vampires had lost their lives during the attack, but the ambush had done the job. Whatever creature they’d caught was strong enough to require a whole fruit basket of hardware, but they’d succeeded in turning it into pink porridge. It was the kind of revelation that feels good until you realize it doesn’t get you anywhere.
The sun was coming in through the hole in the roof. In the old days, that’s all it would have taken to kill the Vamps. I had a feeling that however their enemy finished them off, it was something far more brutal.
My mind went back to the first night with the cops and the slime and the piles of sand. No. Not just sand. Sharp fangs that decided to stick around once the rest of the body was gone. Ash and burned cloth but no other bones and no other teeth. It hadn’t seemed so strange before, but now something about it started to sing. The song got clearer as I made my way uptown.
The police station was in a better part of the city than it deserved to be. Some smart mind in the department built the jail down near the slums but kept the offices up on higher ground. It cost them the manpower of shuttling crooks back and forth but it put the cops in a better neighborhood without disturbing the more respectable locals.
I’d never entered that building of my own volition before. Usually, I was dragged in by my heels when they needed my face to mop the interrogation-room floor.
The station was a Dwarven-built sandstone block of pillars and narrow platforms. The doors and windows were thin and tall, stretched long like the tired faces inside. The second floor had a balcony that was built under the pretense that it helped the cops keep watch. In truth, it was only used for cigar smoking and back-slapping when the boys in blue brought home a little extra evidence that never got logged.
A cop was a cop was a cop. Like pieces of fruit; there’s good ones and bad ones but once you smash ’em into jam they’re all the same.
I walked into the building full of pigs with their cuffs and their sticks and their rule-book brains. Those that didn’t know me stared me down and those that did stared harder. The receptionist told me that Richie was on his break so I took a seat in the foyer and waited for him to show.
He came through the doors half an hour later with a large cup of coffee and a sandwich. His tired face was sprouting untrimmed hairs that would burst balloons.
“Got time to talk, Sergeant Kites?”
“Nope.”
“Then you sure don’t have time to say no to me all day.”
He grunted, turned, walked back out and I followed.
It was raining again but it hadn’t gotten heavy.
“Dunkley’s or The Runaway? I’m not going all the way down to The Ditch this time,” he said.
“No drinks necessary. I just have a couple of questions.” He turned back around and a drop of water hit his forehead. “How did you manage to ID the vamps?”