Evidence. An indication of House involvement. How many? Was there a struggle?
Our line of amateur investigators picked our way up the sidewalk over broken concrete, brown glass, and plastic soda bottles. The small porch at the front of the house creaked ominously when Catcher stepped onto it. After waiting to be sure it wouldn’t collapse beneath him, we followed. I risked a glance through a slender, dirt-smeared window. The room was empty but for the skeletal remains of a massive chandelier, all but a handful of its crystals gone. It seemed an oddly appropriate symbol of the house’s current condition.
Catcher pushed open the ancient door. The smell of dampness, decay, and blood spilled onto the sidewalk. I breathed through my mouth to avoid the temptation, however minimal, of the blood.
We trundled into what had once been a foyer and spun our flashlights around. There was rotting mahogany beneath our feet and flocked velvet wallpaper around us, marred by ripping peels, water stains, and slinking trickles of water. At the other end of the room, a gigantic stairway curved up to the second floor. Piles of wood and congealed paint cans were stashed in a corner, the rooms dotted here and there with threadbare pieces of heavy furniture. The building had been stripped of mold ings, light fixtures gone, probably to be sold off. I didn’t see any blood, although the smell of it hung in the air.
“Choose your adventure, vampires,” Catcher advised in a whisper. “East or west?”
Ethan looked toward the rooms on the east side of the house, then toward the stairway in front of us. His head lifted as his gaze followed the rising staircase to the second floor.
“Up,” he decided. “Merit, with me. Catcher, first floor.”
“Done,” Catcher responded. He turned to Mallory and tapped a finger against his right temple, then his chest, then his temple again.
Mallory nodded. Must have been some kind of secret sorcerer code. She squeezed my hand, then followed him to the left.
The two of us alone in the foyer, Ethan glanced at me. “Sentinel, what do you know?”
I lifted my own gaze to the stairway and closed my eyes. Vision gone, I let the sounds and scents surround me.
I’d felt the stirrings of magic before—when Celina had tested me, when Mallory and Catcher fought and at my Commendation, when I’d basked in the flow of it, the air thick with the lambent magic of dozens of vampires.
Here, there were no currents. If any magic remained in the house, it was minimal. Maybe a tingle here and there, but nothing strong enough for me to separate, identify.
The house was equally silent of living things, but for the downstairs movements of Mallory and Catcher, the steady sound of Ethan’s heartbeat, and the disturbing scurry of tiny slithering things beneath our feet and in the walls.
I shivered, squeezing my eyes closed and forcing myself to ignore the ambient sound.
I focused on scent, imagined myself a predator, primed for the hunt (full though I may have been of salmon and asparagus). The tang of blood was obvious, in such quantity that it floated like a cloud of invisible smoke, flowing down the stairs and through the room, overlying the smells of mildew and standing water. I stood quietly for a moment, ensuring that I had control of myself to continue to investigate, ensuring that she was sufficiently locked down to preclude her mad rush to the second floor, to the blood.
In the silence, the quietness, I caught something else. Something above the mustiness and dust and blood.
Something animal.
I tilted my head, instincts piqued. Was it prey? Predator?
It was faint, but it was there—a trace of fur and musk. I opened my eyes, found Ethan eyeing me curiously. “Animals?”
He nodded. “Maybe animals. Maybe shifters who aren’t skilled at masking their forms. Good catch.”
He beckoned me with a hand and headed for the stairs. Fear and adrenaline making me unusually compliant, I followed without comment, but switched our positions at the landing. In appropriate Sentinel manner, I took point, keeping my body between his and whatever nasties hid in the dark. He stayed close behind as I used my flashlight to guide our way across the glass-strewn floor. Moonlight streamed through dirty windows, so we probably could have managed the exploration without the flashlights. But the tool in my hand was comforting. And since I was in the lead, I wasn’t about to turn it off.
Typical of an older home, the upper floor contained a maze of small bedrooms. The smell of blood grew stronger as we passed through the rooms on the right side, the wooden floors creaking as we progressed, the beam of our flashlights occasionally illuminating an abandoned piece of furniture or a puddle of dirty liquid being fed from a rust-colored stain in the ceiling.
The faint smell of animal lingered, but it lay beneath the other scents in the room. If a shifter had been here, it was in passing. He, or she, hadn’t been a key player.
We kept moving through the tiny bedrooms to the back of the house until we reached the room at the end of the line. I paused before entering it, the smell of blood suddenly blossoming into the hallway. Adrenaline pumping, I locked down my vampire and circled the beam of light around the room. Then froze.
“Ethan.”
“I know,” he said, stepping beside me. “I see it.”
This was where they’d congregated. The floor was littered with random trash, soda cans, and candy wrappers. A mirrored bureau stood along one wall, our reflection warped by the effect of time on the mirror’s silver backing.
Most importantly, three dirty, stained mattresses lay in various spots around the room. The blue-and-white ticking that covered them bore obvious bloodstains. Large bloodstains.
Ethan stepped around me and used the beam of his flashlight to survey the room, wall to wall, corner to corner. “Probably three humans,” he concluded, “one for each mattress, one for each spill of blood. Maybe six vampires, two per person, one at a wrist, the other at the neck. No bodies, and no signs of struggle. Blood, yes, but not obscene quantities. They appear to have stopped themselves.” There was relief in his voice. “No murders, but nor did the humans receive whatever benefits they imagined they’d get.” His voice had turned dryer at the end; clearly not much of a fan of the would-be fanged.
“Benefits,” I repeated, swinging the beam to where Ethan stood, free hand on his hip, gaze shifting between the two mattresses that lay closest together. “When we were in your office, you mentioned something about becoming a Renfield?”
“A human servant,” he said. “Offering protection to a vampire during daylight hours, perhaps interacting with humans on the vampire’s behalf. But we haven’t had Renfields for centuries. A human might also imagine they would be given the gift of immortality. But if a vampire was to make another”—he paused and kneeled down to inspect the middle mattress—“this is not the manner in which such act would occur.”
I checked out the other mattress, the circle of blood upon it. “Ethan?”
“Yes, Merit?”
“If drinking is so problematic, so risky to humans, why allow it? Why not remove the risk and outlaw drinking altogether? Make everyone use the bagged stuff? Then there’s no politics to allowing the raves. You could outright ban them.”
Ethan was quiet long enough that I turned back to him, and found him staring at me with eyes of pure, melting quicksilver.
My lips parted, the breath stuttering out of me.
“Because, whatever the politics of it, we are vampires.” Ethan parted his lips, showed me the needle-sharp tips of his fangs.
I was shocked to the core that he let me see him in full hunger, shocked and aroused by it, and when he tipped his head down, silvered eyes boring into me, I swallowed down a rise of lust so thick and swift it tripped my heart.
The sound of my heartbeat, the hollow thud of it, pounded in my ears.
Ethan held out a hand, palm up, an invitation.
Offer yourself, he whispered, his voice in my mind.
I gripped the handle of my katana. I knew what I wanted to do—step forward, arch my neck, and offer him access.
For a second, maybe two, I considered it. I let myself wonder what it might be like to let him bite. But my control, already weakened by the smell of blood, threatened to tip. If I let my fangs descend, if I let her take over, there was a good chance I’d end up sinking them into the long line of his neck, or letting him do the same to me.
And while I wasn’t naïve enough to deny that I was curious, intrigued by the possibility, this was neither the time nor the place. I didn’t want my first real experience in sharing blood to be here in the midst of industrial squalor, in a house where the trust of humans had so recently been violated.
So I fought for control, shaking my head clear. “Point made,” I told him.
Ethan arched a brow as he snatched back his hand, clenching his fist as he regained his own control. He retracted his fangs, and his eyes cleared, fading from silver to emerald green. When he looked at me again, his expression was clinical.
My cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
It had all been a teaching point, then. Not about desire or bloodlust but an opportunity for Ethan to demonstrate his restraint. I felt ridiculously naïve.