woman claiming to be a consulting detective, but Sebastien's air of command cowed him. The intercession won him no points with Abby Irene, to judge by her sniff and the stiffness with which she set her carpet bag down inside the door. Or perhaps she was merely as displeased as Sebastien by the damage that had already been inflicted upon the scene.
The body had been removed, the bloodstained bedding stripped from a brown and sticky mattress. Abby Irene's nose wrinkled; Sebastien imagined she was grateful for the chill that pervaded the fireless room, minimizing the presence of flies and stench. By now there might have been maggots, in summer.
"Not a wampyr," Abby Irene said, settling her navy kidskin gloves finger by finger. "Even if one killed, it would not waste so much blood."
"'Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?'" Sebastien quoted softly, to see her smile. But she frowned, only, at the stained bed. "Still, it could be one of the blood. Those who kill, when it is not from desperation—they kill for pleasure, yes? There is no need, when the prey is willing."
"And some prefer unwilling prey?"
"Some do," Sebastien admitted. "Do you think a whore could be paid for blood?"
Her glance said, yes, of course. Just as a wampyr could be paid for the pleasure he could bring a mortal lover—paid in money as well as blood. "No one would sell that," she said. And then she reconsidered. "No, someone might just, mightn't they? If they needed the money badly enough to die for it?"
"So," Sebastien said, "what sort of monster eats rentboys?"
Abby Irene did not answer immediately. She paced the room, as if measuring dimensions. She selected her wand, and a silver dagger, and a glass rod, and cast circles and muttered and did things with mingled salt and ash. She poured water from a crystal flask into a silver chalice and made passes over it, while Sebastien stood, hands folded, calmly keeping one eye on the unwinding of the clock.
After an hour and a half, she approached the window and threw the shutters wide. Sebastien knew better than to interrupt as she leaned out, breathing the chill. It wasn't good to disturb her when her brain was working.
"I'm not sure it was a monster at all," she said at last. "Or even in any wise magical. I may be here under false pretenses."
"You're not a Crown Investigator any longer," Sebastien reminded her gently. "Your jurisdiction extends to anything that takes your fancy."
"And that they'll pay me for." It might have been said bitterly. He wasn't sure.
She turned to him and scanned the room. "Stand against the wall again, please. I'm going to make one final check for magical residue. And then, when I find nothing—"
"You bow to my deductive skills?"
That netted him a sharply arched eyebrow. "Do you suppose anyone has claimed the bodies yet?"
* * *
No one had.
Both murdered men had been brought to the same mortuary, where they lay awaiting either their next of kin, or burial at the expense of their estates, which had been placed in escrow. They were far from the only bodies arranged in drawers and on marble slabs; the chill of the room lessened the stink somewhat, but Sebastien could see from Abby Irene's expression that the wretchedness of rot and cloying blood was apparent even to her merely mortal senses.
The morgue attendant was disinterested, and he was willing to accept Abby Irene's credentials. She had a signed writ from the chief homicide detective of the Metropolitan police—and, she explained to Sebastien, a verbal caution that it would not carry much water with the Chief Inspector, who seemed to prefer the murders handled quietly and with little publicity. Sebastien's suspicion of departmental politics and a white-wash were thus uncomfortably supported.
The bodies were slashed and disfigured, throats cut and faces, hands, torsos, buttocks, and thighs sliced open like badly butchered beef. Their investigation confirmed Abby Irene's suspicions: no trace of magic remained on either corpse, and there was no sign Sebastien could detect that a wampyr had been at them before death, for which he at least contemplated a silent sigh of relief, even if he did not breathe one.
"Well," Abby Irene said—tugging the stained sheet over the second boy smooth, tucking it about his shoulders with nervous darting gestures, "if we could identify a suspect, we could see if the corpses bleed at his touch. If a judge will still accept