a vague professional comfort in knowing I’d been right, but set against the circumstances it was pretty minimal. We turned her face up the moment I was done, and Tara put the body back into the closest she could get to a restful position.
The next bit was going to be harder. Well, harder in some ways. I opened my mind to the Deepwild again and let my senses sharpen. Somewhere I heard my mother laughing—thinking about it, a skinned corpse on a bed of leaves was probably in the opening verse of her version of My Favourite Things. There was an overwhelming smell of blood and death and flowers, which knocked me back a moment, but pushing through it, I started checking for any traces the attackers might have left behind. I tried her mouth first—she was a werewolf and if she’d been defending herself at all it would have been fangs not fists. There was definitely blood on her teeth—I swabbed up a sample of it and sealed it in an evidence bag. I did the same with her fingernails. More blood. With the flaying it could have been hers but I didn’t think so, or at least not completely.
“I might have what I need,” I said.
“If you’re going to need to pay for a laboratory,” Tara told me, looking at my samples, “then money is no object.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing a lab would be able to help with.”
“Then what are you going to do?” She led me out of the conservatory into the crisp autumn air.
“Something that might look a bit weird and disrespectful.” I took the first swab out of its bag, let my mother’s power flow a little stronger, and very cautiously licked it. The taste of blood made my mother sit up and take notice fucking sharpish, but I’d braced myself for this, and whether it was the years of practice or the preservative effect of pickling my brain with alcohol for the past year or so, I found fighting her off easier than it had been. Still, the flavour of it, even that minute trace mixed with wolf-spit and mourning, ran through my body like a shot of neat absinthe. My hunter’s instincts rose and the voice of my heritage told me I had tasted a predator. Blood on blood on blood. “Vampire,” I said. I pocketed the teeth-sample and tried the one from the claws. The same—that reduced-down fortified tang of stolen life and centuries of darkness and murder. “She fought one. There may have been others and…” I rolled the sensation around my mouth like I was on some poncy wine course. “This is familiar. This is somebody I know.”
Tara growled that horrible bestial growl which reminded me that she was more animal than human on a bad day. “If it’s Julian Saint-Germain, she will die for it. Slowly.”
I put a hand on her arm. “No. I’d—I’d know if it was Julian, she’s … distinctive.” Wine and rose-leaves, eyes like lapis lazuli. One day she’d be out of my head.
“Douglas?”
That was more possible, but it felt wrong somehow. The Prince of Wands was an ancient being of terrifying power but he would have tasted different, like dust and stone and closed doors and secrets. “Give me a moment.” I shut my eyes and let the sense-memory take me. Every vampire’s blood was unique, a rich red distillation of everything they were, everything that drove them, and everything that had driven their progenitor, and their progenitor’s progenitor back down the centuries to whatever accident of dying had founded the bloodline in the first place.
This one was a creature of dark passion, hot hunger, jealousy that burned like quicklime. It was driven by love of a sort, but a love that came from the cold and the night.
“Fuck me. Patrick?”
“That child?” Tara’s voice was filled with a rage you only saw in mobsters and serial killers. “He would not dare.”
She was right, he wouldn’t. Although technically he wasn’t a child, he just acted like one. But for all I thought he was an unbearable little wankstain, he wasn’t the sort to go around murdering werewolves. He certainly wasn’t the kind to do something that felt so occult. If it didn’t have a problematically vulnerable teenager attached, he usually wasn’t interested. “It’s not just that he wouldn’t dare he … wouldn’t.” A thought hit me. “Oh my god, it’s her.”