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?”
His shoulders relaxed with relief. Not a complicated question apparently.
“They’re ivory, Fetch.”
I didn’t get it.
“What?”
“The teeth.”
“Vampires have ivory teeth?”
“They do now. Just the canines, not the rest. Only took a few weeks after the magic was shattered and the hollow fangs dropped out of their mouths.”
“So, they’re fake?”
“Replacements. Only one dentist in town does them so we got the matches back in a few hours.”
I thought about the sack of bones in the wheelchair downtown and wondered if Fen knew the fangs weren’t real.
“What does a Vamp who doesn’t drink blood want with pointed teeth?”
Kites shook his head like he was talking to a child.
“Imagine you live for five hundred years and then your proudest feature falls out of your face. It’s cosmetic, that’s all. Cheap and easy. The doc measures it up, carves a little piece