stinging eyes. “That was where the female found Isobel hanging from a hook on the ceiling. Her throat had been . . . cut. She was stiff, I was told. Cold. The—ah, the one who found her called the other friend. Together, they removed her from the scene. There are so many humans at that club, as you know. They couldn’t leave her, especially with the dawn coming.”
“Of course they couldn’t.”
Helania glanced down at his phone and watched the numbers go up for a little bit. “I will never forget what the knock on our apartment door sounded like. Four a.m. Knocking. I knew something bad had happened because no one ever came to see us. Isobel always went out. Anyway, I went to check the peephole . . . there was a female on the other side and she was crying. I opened the door, and she all but collapsed into me. It took her three tries to get it all out, and I don’t know whether that was because I couldn’t hear right or because she couldn’t speak right. The next thing I knew, we were driving across town. I don’t even remember what kind of car it was, but good thing she had it, as we were both too upset to dematerialize.”
Glancing up from the phone’s counter, she focused on Boone’s face. “I could smell my sister’s blood in that car. It was what they had used to move her.”
Boone squeezed his eyes shut and cursed. “I can’t even imagine.”
“I just kept thinking, she can’t be dead. She can’t be dead . . . she can’t be dead. It just seemed—I mean, Isobel was the most alive person I knew. How could anyone like her not be breathing?”
Helania folded the handkerchief and dabbed at her face. As she breathed in, she caught the whiff of a delicate smell, as if the square of fine cotton had been handwashed in something as gentle as it was expensive.
She continued, “It was a proper house that we went to. A nice house, not as fancy as this by far, but set back from the road with lots of bushes and an attached garage.” She blinked and saw the place clear as moonlight in her mind. “It was clean inside, and the furnishings were all new and fresh. Isobel . . . she was on the floor in the living room, wrapped in white. A sheet, it was. Like a mummy. They had laid her out on the hardwood floor. The scent of her blood was more intense, and even wrapped up like that, I could see a red stain spreading on the back of where her neck was.
“Her friend, the one who found her, and I washed her for the Fade Ceremony. The other friend hung back and watched. At nightfall, the three of us took her out to a state park that has a lot of very hidden places in the woods. It was early June, so the ground was soft. The friend who found her and I had shovels. We dug down ten feet. It took us hours. We put her there. I don’t know who cried more.” Helania held up her palms. “I tore my hands apart.”
Boone leaned in. “You have scars.”
“I wanted to remember Isobel.” Helania drew in a long and slow breath, and stared at her right palm. “When I got home, I put my hand in salt water. As a tribute.”
She traced the network of ridges that crossed where her lifeline was, running her fingertip over the remnants of all those blisters. As a vampire, any wounded skin on her body didn’t merely repair itself but regenerated, so that ordinarily, she could never find any traces of any injury.
If you were to bring a wound or broken area of flesh into contact with salt, however? You had those scars for life.
“I just wanted to honor her in some way.”
“Of course you did. How could you not?”
Helania looked him. “That’s the reason I’ve been going to that club. Why I watched that female the night before yesterday. Why I checked on her. I need to find out who did this to Isobel, and I don’t want them doing it to anyone else—and I’ve already failed once, or you and I wouldn’t be talking.”
Boone frowned. “Listen, Helania. I’m not saying you can’t handle yourself—I stared down the barrel of your gun, remember? Just please don’t be a hero at the expense of your own safety.”