What I wanted was a cool cloth. What I got was to continue down the green hallway, making little bloody footprints behind me. I scanned the floor and there it was, footprints going away from the body, back down the hall towards the first guard.
"Dolph?"
"I see them," he said.
The faint footprints walked through the carnage and down the corner, away from us. Away sounded good, but I knew better. We were here to get up close and personal. Dammit.
Dolph knelt by the largest piece of the body. "Anita."
I walked over to him, avoiding the bloody footprints. Never step on clues. The police don't like it.
Dolph pointed at a blackened piece of cloth. I knelt carefully, glad that I was still in my overalls. I could kneel in all the blood I wanted without messing my clothes. Always prepared, like a good Boy Scout.
The woman's shirt was charred and blackened. Dolph touched the material with the tip of his pencil. The cloth flaked in heavy layers, cracking like stale bread. Dolph poked a hole through one of the layers. It crumbled. A burst of ash and a sharp acrid smell came up from the body.
"What the hell happened to her?" Dolph asked.
I swallowed, still tasting vomit at the back of my throat. This wasn't helping. "It's not cloth."
"What is it, then?"
"Flesh."
Dolph just looked at me. He held the pencil like it might break. "You're serious."
"Third-degree burn," I said.
"What caused this?"
"Can I borrow your pencil?" I asked.
He handed it to me without a word.
I dug at what was left of her chest. The flesh was so badly fried that her shirt melted into it. I pushed the layers aside, digging downward with the pencil. The body felt horribly light, and crisp like the burned skin of a chicken. When I'd plunged half the length of the pencil into the burn, I touched something solid. I used the pencil to pry it upward. When it was almost at the surface I put fingers inside the hole and pulled a lump of twisted metal from the burned flesh.
"What is it?" Dolph asked.
"It's what's left of her cross."
"No," he said.
The lump of melted silver glinted through the black ash. "This was her cross, Dolph. It melted into her chest, caught her clothing on fire. What I don't understand is why the vampire kept contact with the burning metal. The vampire should be nearly as burned as she is, but it's not here."
"Explain that," he said.
"Animalistic vampires are like PCP addicts. They don't feel pain. I think the vampire crushed her to his chest, the cross touched him, burst into flames. and the vampire stayed against her, tearing her apart while they burned. Against any normal vampire, she would have been safe."
"So crosses can't stop this one," he said.
I stared at the lump of metal. "Apparently not."
The four uniforms were looking at the dim hallway, a little frantically. They hadn't bargained on the crosses not working. Neither had I. The bit about not feeling pain had been a small footnote to one article. No one had theorized that that would mean crosses didn't protect you. If I survived, I'd have to work up a little article for the Vampire Quarterly. Crosses melting into flesh, wowee.
Dolph stood up. "Keep together, people."
"The crosses don't work," one uniform said. "We gotta go back and wait for special teams."
Dolph just looked at him. "You can go back if you want to." He glanced down at the dead guard. "It's volunteer only. The rest of you go back outside and wait for special teams."