of it. It was like Valentina’s pictures; the mind didn’t want to see it. The human mind is pretty good at protecting itself and will sometimes just refuse to compute all the data in a vain effort to save the rest of the mind from what the eyes are seeing. But it was my job to look.
Nicky said a soft, “Wow.”
Damian got up from his chair and walked away from the screen. I couldn’t blame him; if I could have walked away before my mind made sense of it all, I might have. But I kept watching until I could see body after body scattered like broken dolls on the dirt floor. The bodies were torn apart, not by claws and fangs, but strength. The vampires had torn them limb from limb, spraying blood and internal organs like some meaty, bloody jigsaw puzzle. I was happy not to be able to smell it. Because once you perforate the lower digestive system it’s not just blood and that thick hamburger smell, but also the outhouse smell. Death, this kind of death, has no romance to it. It was slaughter.
There were more bodies piled around a central coffin that was on a raised dais between two huge candelabras that were still burning, though the wax was low. They’d set up lights in the corners of the room. The light was pitiless, shining off the blood that was still drying, showing the internal organs in huge bloody strands.
The bodies were piled in pieces almost to the lip of the open coffin. There were bodies lying on the body parts as if they’d been placed there. “Pause it,” I said.
Nicky did what I’d asked. He and I both leaned toward the screen, trying to make sense of it all. “God, I think those are the vampires.”
“How can you tell?” he asked.
I understood why he asked; the intact bodies were covered in as much blood and gore as the pieces. “They’re not torn apart, and see there, one of them has fangs showing in her mouth. It’s like they bedded down on the mound of their dead. Also, if they were victims that intact, they’d have been moved for medical attention just in case they weren’t dead.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Nicky asked.
“No,” I said.
“You want me to hit play again?”
“No, but do it anyway.”
He didn’t even ask me to explain. I think my newest pet sociopath wasn’t enjoying the show, either.
The camera rose and aimed at the figure in the coffin. Blood pooled around it as if the body were floating in the blood. How had they even gotten that much blood in the coffin? It was if they’d hung the dead over it and drained them, but nothing in that room had been thinking enough to do anything that organized.
“Gives a new meaning to disorganized killer,” Nicky said, and his voice held a note I hadn’t heard in the year he’d been with us: impressed, and scared.
The corpse in the coffin looked old, like they’d found a badly decayed body to put in the blood. Then I saw the fangs in the gaping skull and knew this was the master. He’d been blown apart with a shotgun so that the top of his head was missing, but the jaws were still intact. His chest had been shot up, too, so that the thickening blood pooled into the ruin of his heart.
“I didn’t think vampires decayed like that just from being shot up, even when they die,” Nicky said.
“Most don’t,” I said.
Damian was behind us. He said, “Only the descendants of the Lover of Death rot like that.”
“When they’re dead,” Nicky said.
Then I had a bad, bad thought. I scrambled my phone out of my back pocket and dialed Marshal Finnegan’s number. He answered on the first ring. “Blake, that was fast.”
“I know that you have to film evidence before you torch the place, but tell me the vampire executioner did torch the place already.”
“Morgan killed the Master of the City. Took his head, took his heart. We’re already hearing complaints from the vampire lobby lawyers that we may have condemned all low-level vampires to certain death. Apparently without their master they may not wake up at dark, but we’ve found out that the lesser vampires that do wake up are usually fine. When the Master of the City goes crazy like this, kill him, or her, and the crazy goes with him. We try to spare most of the murdering vampires,