how that was possible with all the humidity I couldn't have said. I breathed in and scented something peppery and astringent, the faint herbal scent of vamps on the breeze from the woods, the odor itself dry and desiccated. Beneath it was the tang of decaying blood, and a trace of magic. Witch magic. I moved into the trees. The signature of power tingled faintly along my arms. Shade from the trees above me closed out the sun and some of the heat, shadows darkening the ground.
The scent of it pulled me north, along an overgrown trail just wide enough for my feet.
A rabbit trail, according to Beast. She sent me an image of a rabbit and flooded my senses with the remembered hot taste of blood. "Thanks for that," I murmured to her,
"but I prefer my protein skinned, gutted, boned, cooked, and seasoned." Beast hacked in amusement.
Not far into the woods I found a patch of saplings in a circle of older trees. It looked as if it might have been a ten-foot-round space once, maybe five years ago. Kneeling, I ran my hands over the bare ground, between the roots of the young trees. I found a broken white shell. Traversing the outskirts of the circle, I scuffed the ground, finding more shells. This had been a blood rite circle involving both witches and vamps, and I bet that it was used as the first resting place of one or more new rogues. Whatever was going on now had been happening for a lot longer than I'd been told. Maybe a lot longer than the vamp council knew.
I found two other old circles in the forested land around the vamp graveyard, one younger than the first, one older, which I had missed on my first pass and caught on my second. Back at my bike, I marked their locations on my map, with the approximate length of time they had been abandoned, my guesstimate based on the age of the trees.
A city girl might not have been able to tell that part, but I had been raised in the country, and the children's home had used the earth for more than just a playground and parking.
We had grown a lot of our own vegetables, and had once reclaimed a patch of land to increase the size of the garden. I remembered the backbreaking work of tree-clearing. I knew how long it took forest to steal back land left fallow too long.
I stood in the edge of the woods, wondering if there were more such sites in the trees. It wasn't impossible. But Bruiser was waiting. Patiently. Which made me feel guilty.
He was still beside his car when I walked back, his butt against the high gloss, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses against the light. Unlike me, he wasn't sweating in the heat and humidity. I wondered if his ability to withstand temperature changes was a result of the blood sips he got in return for being a blood meal to Leo, or if it was natural to him.
No way to ask and be polite, of course, though if I hadn't needed something from him, I might have asked anyway. I grinned at the thought and he cocked his head. I waved it away and said, "I don't guess you'd consider giving me access to the security around this place so I can come back anytime I want."
His lips twitched in what might have been a smile and he shook his head once, an abbreviated but unequivocal no.
"Okay. I ran across some things in my research into vamp attacks that you can help me with instead." Bruiser's brow lifted a bit, as if he was amused that I'd put him into the role of assistant. "How about out-clan and devoveo?" I was pretty sure I knew the answers, but in my business, "pretty sure" was worth roughly zero. I needed to know for dead certain.
The heavy-lidded look slid away. "Where did you come across this information?"
Bruiser was my best source of all things fangy and I knew I had to give to get, but not this time. I hated negotiation. "My source" - if the NOPD woo-woo files could be described that way - "is confidential. I want to know what they mean."
Thoughts flickered deep in his eyes. After a moment he cocked his head and seemed to come to a decision. "Devoveo is the state of the young rogue. The ten years of insanity when they have to