While Dahlia strode across the carpet to the cluster of demons, not the least hampered by her very high heels, she glanced back to see Cedric open the door to the hall leading to the kitchen. He stepped through at the same time as Taffy and Don. Glenda called, “Taffy!” and passed through after them.
Then Dahlia stopped in front of Melponeus, his fellow demons clearing the way for her with alacrity. Though Dahlia was a straightforward woman by nature, she was also incredibly conscious of her own dignity, and she didn’t care for the leering element in the smiles the demon’s buddies were giving her. Melponeus himself surely knew that. After the barest moment of conversation, he swept Dahlia away to an empty area.
“I apologize for my friends,” he said instantly. Dahlia forced her rigid little face to relax and look a bit more welcoming. “They see a woman as lovely as you, they can’t regulate their reactions.”
“You can, apparently?” Dahlia said, just to watch Melponeus flounder. He knew her better than she’d thought, because after a moment’s confused explanation, he laughed. For a few minutes, they had a wonderful time with verbal foreplay, and then they danced. “Perhaps later . . .” Melponeus began, but he was interrupted by a scream.
Screams were not such an unusual thing at the vampire nest, but since this one came in the middle of an important social occasion, it attracted universal attention. Every head whipped around to look east, to the wing occupied on the ground floor by the kitchen.
“Don’t move,” called Joaquin, to stem the surge of the crowd in the direction of the commotion. Somewhat to Dahlia’s surprise, everyone obeyed him. She found that interesting.
Even more interesting was the fact that Joaquin searched the crowd until his eyes met hers. “Dahlia,” he said, in lightly accented English, “take Katamori with you and find out what’s happened.” Katamori had been something of a policeman a couple of centuries ago.
Dahlia had to work to keep her face expressionless. “Yes, Sheriff,” she said, and jerked her head at Matsuda Katamori, a vampire who had an apartment near Little Japan. Katamori, who appeared just as surprised as Dahlia at being singled out, immediately glided to her side. They moved quickly to the door to the passage leading to the mansion’s kitchen.
It wasn’t a wide space, and the carpet had been installed to deaden sound, not to beautify. Both the vampires were alert as they moved silently down the passage to the kitchen. The swinging door had been propped open.
When the mansion had been built in the early 1900s, the builder could not have imagined that the kitchen would be used by non-eaters. The white tile floors and the huge fixtures had been maintained, even updated, once or twice during the century that had passed. When Cedric had bought the mansion at a bargain price (glamour had been involved), he’d left the kitchen as though it would still be needed to prepare a banquet. Normally, the stainless steel fixtures shone in the overhead lights suspended from the high ceiling.
Now the stainless steel was splashed with red. The smell of blood was overwhelming.
From where they stood just inside the doorway, Dahlia and Katamori couldn’t see the body because of the long wooden table running down the middle of the room, but a body was undoubtedly there. The only thing living in the kitchen was one of the half-demons, a skinny girl Dahlia hadn’t met before. The girl was standing absolutely still, very close to the corpse, if Dahlia’s nose was accurate, and her hands were up in the air. Smart.
Dahlia enjoyed the smell of blood, but she preferred her blood to be fresh and its source living, as did every vampire but the rare pervert. Once the blood had been out of the living body for more than a couple of minutes, it lost much of its enticing smell, at least to Dahlia’s nose. From the delicate twitch of Katamori’s nostrils, he felt much the same.
The girl’s feet were hidden from view by the old wooden table, originally intended for staff meals and food preparation. But the blood smell was emanating from the area around her, and red had splashed the gleaming range and refrigerator on the south wall. She was standing squarely in front of the refrigerator.
The half-demon girl opened her mouth to speak, but Dahlia held up her hand. The girl closed her mouth instantly.
“Is any of this blood yours?” Dahlia asked.
The girl shook her head.
Dahlia and Katamori looked at each other. Dahlia didn’t have to look up far to meet his eyes. He waited for her instructions. She was the senior vampire. She liked this silent acknowledgment a lot. Dahlia said, “I’ll go right, you take left.” She didn’t know much about Katamori, but she did know that his reputation as a fighter was almost as formidable as her own.
Without a word, the slightly built Japanese vampire began working his way around the north side of the table, his eyes and ears and nose working overtime. The north wall featured huge windows, now black. The effect was unpleasant, as if the night were watching the scene in the kitchen, but Dahlia was not about to be distressed by any nighttime creepiness. She herself was the thing that went bump in the night.
She began circling the table to the south side. The stove tops and ovens, a stainless steel prep table with pots and pans on a shelf underneath, and an industrial refrigerator and a freezer filled the wall. A few steps revealed the crime scene. The half-demon girl was standing stock-still on the edge of the pool of blood that had flowed from the victim. Dahlia took in the whole picture, then began noting the details.
The corpse was that of the young man who had irritated her, the human donor she’d last observed having words with Don. The man’s throat had been torn out. Dahlia had seen much worse in her long, long existence, but she was irritated at the waste of the blood.
The half-demon girl had not a speck of blood on her, except for her shoes, which were red Converse high- tops, now somewhat darker around the rubber soles. Dahlia raised her delicate black eyebrows and looked across the room.
“Katamori?” she said.
“Lots of people have been through,” Katamori answered.
From this laconic response, Dahlia understood that he’d found nothing tangible on his side of the room, but that there were complex scent trails. That made sense. The north side of the kitchen was the natural route to take to get to the door on the far end of the long room. This door led into a mudroom with hooks for wet weather gear and gardening clothes. On the other side of the mudroom, a heavier door opened out onto the broad apron marking the end of the service driveway. All the humans who’d come to the mansion to donate earlier in the evening had both entered and left the mansion through that door.
“Please stay where you are for the moment,” Dahlia said to the half-demon, who bobbed her head in a series of sharp nods. Since the blood pool and the body took up the whole of the floor between the appliances and the table, Dahlia bent her knees and leaped over the table, landing lightly on her amazing heels on the other side.
She met Katamori at the end of the table, and together they looked back at the body. There was a series of bloody footprints leading away from the corpse, footprints too large to be those of the half-demon girl. These prints led to the first exit door, the door to the mudroom. Together, they examined it. There were no bloody fingerprints on the knob or the glass panes. Dahlia bent over to sniff the knob, then shrugged. “A bloody hand touched it, but that tells us nothing,” she said, and pushed the door open. Katamori tensed, ready for anything.
The mudroom was empty.
The two vampires stepped into the small space. The floor was covered with a rubber mat, and there was a bench running along each side. Underneath were stored a few pairs of boots, some of which had been there for forty years. A coat or two hung from the row of hooks mounted above the benches. At least one of the coats had been there for two decades, an elaborate black coat with a huge fur collar. “I don’t think anyone will return to get this one,” Katamori said, and pushed it with his finger. A cloud of dust rose up. Dahlia noticed that most of the hooks were similarly covered in dust. Only two of the hooks were shiny enough to indicate they’d been used recently.
The knob of the solid door that led to the outside was pristine to the eye, and when Dahlia bent to smell she got only a whiff of blood, a slightly weaker trace than that on the inner knob. “Left this way,” she told Katamori. “Let’s finish the kitchen, then we’ll report.”
They turned back into the kitchen.
Before they’d left, the humans had piled their plates and cups by the sink. Fainting humans were bad for business, so the agency had insisted the vampires take a tip from the blood bank in offering refreshments. Nothing to be found there; the victim hadn’t approached that area.
“What do we have so far?” Katamori asked.
