account.
After leaving the scene of the fire, Lore had found the pup and made him explain himself again. And again. Lore was taking his time to invent an appropriate punishment for stealing the campaign money. He was still too angry to think straight, and it wouldn’t hurt Helver to stew a little.
Unfortunately, the young idiot hadn’t had anything useful to add to the story. No sight, sound, or scent of an intruder. Lore guessed the fire had been ignited from a distance. Definitely sorcery, probably necromancy. Maybe a warlock, demon or vampire. Big, thick spell books required the patience of an immortal.
He walked behind Baines, taking in the scene. It was crowded with officers and hot with all the lights in the place turned on. The brightness showed everything in lurid colors. Lore had watched enough crime dramas to know they could tell a lot from the way blood splattered during a murder.
The walls and ceiling had a lot to say.
Hellhounds knew death intimately. They were predators, and they’d been preyed upon in the prison where Lore had grown up. He’d seen enslavement, torture, and cruelty for the sake of pleasure, and yet the sight of Michelle’s body made his chest burn with sadness. She’d been a slight woman, her shattered body reminding him of a fallen bird. Slashes seamed her skin where she’d tried to fend off her attacker. The neck was a gory mess, clumsily hacked apart. Lore prayed she’d been unconscious by the time that happened.
The vampires executed their own with swords. Those wounds were, by comparison, precise. Lore guessed the killer had used something that required a lot of cuts—a dagger or a knife.
The camera kept flashing, the bursts of light setting Lore’s nerves on edge.
The police had left the head where they had found it, apart from the body. The eyes were half-open, the lips slack. Lore turned away from the waxy face. It was far too much like Talia’s.
An officer stood in the living room, making a sketch of the placement of the toppled furniture, the body, and the severed head. With no camera or sketch pad, Lore had to remember what was there: a floor lamp toppled, a small bookcase capsized, paperbacks everywhere, pictures askew. Michelle Faulkner had fought back.
Lore tensed as someone bumped into him. There were too many people, and no one was dusting for fingerprints yet, tweezing up bits of thread or vacuuming the carpet for evidence. He supposed even more personnel would arrive to tramp through the place.
To a hellhound, it was a stupid way to investigate. The first and most obvious tool was a good nose, and now there were too many scents crowding out any trace of the killer. The only thing Lore could tell for sure was that hellhounds and vampires were the only nonhumans who had been there in recent history.
His other sense—the one that gave him premonitions—was jangling with a sense of wrongness. The place stank of violence and terror.
“Where’s the drawing?” Baines asked a young officer standing by the window.
“There.” The man pointed to the living room wall.
With a ping of annoyance, Lore wondered how the hell he’d missed it earlier. Then again, it didn’t exactly stand out—just more blood on a bloody wall.
“Well?” asked Baines.
Lore stepped closer. The symbol was crudely done, and at an awkward height. The blood was turning a rusty brown, soaking into the bland off-white paint. He estimated the distance to the floor. “It looked like whoever drew it knelt, scooping up the blood from the carpet with his fingers.”
Baines nodded. “So, what does it mean?”
Lore’s first impression was of a meaningless splodge. If he squinted, it reminded him of a pup’s drawing of the summer sun. Or a squashed spider. Or a head with crudely drawn hair. What had the cop been thinking? Gang symbols had more style. “Honestly, I can’t tell.”
Baines shrugged. “It was worth a try.”
Lore straightened, fixing the childlike scrawl into his memory. As he took one last look, he noticed there was a tiny squiggle disturbing the bottom smears. “There’s something written beneath the blood. It’s almost covered up.”
Baines quickly bent down, bringing his nose nearly to the wall. “It’s in pencil.”
He pulled a penlight from his pocket and shone it directly on the small printed letters. The writing was ragged, the letters uneven. It reminded Lore of his own awkward penmanship.
“Vincire,” Baines said. “Latin. Something about binding, I think. It’s been years since I studied it.”
“Latin?” Lore thought about the fire, dark sorcery, Talia, and the dead body mere feet away. “What kind of a binding?”
Baines didn’t answer. He straightened and looked out the window. “Huh. The snow’s started coming down in earnest.”
Lore followed his gaze. Fat flakes were twirling through the beams of the streetlights, the wind gusting them into spirals. A brief moment of wonder seized him. So that’s what snow looks like. He’d seen pictures, but never the real thing.
“I dreamed that it would snow.” In the dream, something was chasing him. The snow was so deep, he couldn’t run. There had been no choice but to turn and face his enemy.
Prophecies came in dreams. They were the gift and burden the Prophets sent to the Alpha of the pack. The problem was deciding what was a prophecy and what were the aftereffects of the three-day-old pizza he’d left in the fridge. It seemed this time the dream was a warning.
“The snow’s a nightmare all right,” Baines grumbled. “Roads’ll be hell by morning. No one here knows how to drive in this shit.”
The detective turned away from the window, then stiffened. He was looking at a desk with a laptop pushed into the corner of the living room. Lore recognized the detritus of a thinker’s profession: highlighters, sticky notes, bits of torn paper used as page markers, and more books than any one person could reasonably read. A teacher, perhaps? A stack of papers sat on one corner of the desk. The title page of the top one said Paradise Lost.
Lore wondered how anyone could sit still long enough to read that many books.
“What did the missing cousin do for a living?” Baines addressed no one in particular, raising his voice to be heard by all.
The answer came from the young cop who’d pointed out the blood on the wall. “Rostova’s a sessional tutor at the university. She’s got a master’s in education and a bachelor’s in Western literature.”
Baines gave a low whistle. “So she knows Latin?”
“I guess, maybe,” the young cop replied.
Lore understood why Baines had asked. There was a Latin dictionary sitting on the desk. The detective shifted some of the other books stacked on the desk. “Beginning Latin Translation. Virgil’s Aeneid. Pride and Prejudice. Anna Karenina. A DVD of Hugh Grant’s greatest hits. Good to have balance.”
A ripple of puzzlement passed over Lore. He could usually sniff people out. But with her endless shopping bags, glittery cell phone, and ridiculous heels, Lore would never have guessed Talia was a teacher. She didn’t put out the smart girl vibe. But then she didn’t put out the knife-fighter vibe, either.
She was deep in hiding, and better at it than anyone had guessed.
Maybe someone had found her out, and gone after her. If so, why?
Or maybe Lore was entirely wrong, and he had a murdering fiend chained to his bed.
He looked out at the snow, watched it gusting down the cold, dry street like handfuls of sugar. It was starting to stick to the grass.
Baines came to stand beside him. “If this keeps up, the city’s going to be shut down by morning.”
“That will make it hard for our killer to run.”
Baines snorted. “You’d be surprised how well they usually hide in plain view.”
Chapter 8
Tuesday, December 28, 11:35 p.m.
Downtown Fairview
