Page 78 of Hospital for Immortal Creatures

“Did you know that according to Cosmopolitan, I have an eighty per cent chance of meeting the love of my life this week?” Zacharia said.

“I thought you meet her every week.”

“I guess you’re right.” The hybrid tossed the magazine onto a small table by the arch and faced the group of creatures. “If someone enters this wing, I will personally ensure they enter nowhere else ever again. You!” He pointed to someone in the crowd – Grigor, Viktor’s kid. “Stay here and don’t let anybody in. Clear?”

The young man strutted forward in his baggy jeans, explicit language T-shirt and heavily gelled hair, and took a guard-like stance. “At your service, sir!” He shot a threatening glance at the others.

Once they were further down the corridor, Mikhail asked, “Nobody knows what happened yet?”

“They suspect. By the way”—Zacharia ran his eyes up and down the manticore—“you look like shit.”

Mikhail frowned in response. His lower jaw hurt too much to explain.

On the fifth floor of the Hospital were the Blood Bank, Microbiology Department, and clinical laboratory. This part of the building was usually cramped with creatures from all other floors who came here to leave blood samples and other test materials or find out the latest gossip. It was notoriously known as the henhouse.

Now, the henhouse was dead silent.

Mikhail followed Zacharia through the door to one of the staff break rooms. Posters of creatures hung on the far wall. Immortals mingling with humans as Hollywood celebrities was not something Mikhail approved of, but he tolerated them, since these so-called stars had a large influence over their millions of fans, which had proven useful in certain situations.

There was a small kitchen island in one corner with a few cupboards and a fridge, two large couches and a coffee table. On the floor between the couches lay a female body.

Mikhail knelt beside it. Fine brown curls framed a face drained of colour; only a few drops of red speckled her skin and scleras. Her glassy eyes stared unseeing at the ceiling, and her blue lips had frozen while fighting for a lifesaving breath of air.

“I know her,” he murmured. “Chambermaid. Vampire.”

She wasn’t wearing her usual chambermaid uniform, though. Instead, she had on blue jeans and a white cotton shirt. The skin from the top of her chest up to her neck was bruised and torn in places. Mikhail leaned over the body to inspect the unusual angle of her neck.

“From what I’ve seen, I gather her neck was snapped, which probably paralysed her, and then the murderer suffocated her. The autopsy will confirm,” Zacharia explained.

Mikhail winced. She had certainly felt the excruciating pain of her broken vertebrae. An injury like that could be helped with therapy, surgery and rehab, but the killer hadn’t given her that chance. Strangulation was among the most torturous ways to kill an immortal creature.

“This is not your usual fray between colleagues.” Mikhail grabbed her wrist, turning her hand this way and that. She didn’t have any nail polish. The skin of her palm was hardened with blisters. Probably from the monotonous work, repeated over and over again, that hadn’t given them a chance to heal. “No evidence of self-defence, so everything must have happened fast. She probably knew her attacker.”

Mary Clare. That was her name.

“This floor is inaccessible to outsiders,” Mikhail said.

Zacharia slouched back on one of the couches. “And she doesn’t work here at all. So why come today?”

“Who told you about her?” Mikhail flipped the corpse over and observed the back, not sure what he was expecting to come upon. The cause of death was obvious. Suffocation. His lungs were suddenly heavy with an invisible weight and his headache returned.

“Elisanda Grace,” Zacharia explained. “She came in with some samples but the lab assistant wasn’t at his desk, so she went looking for him. She found the dead vampire instead. Unfortunately, there’s no surveillance footage in this area to corroborate her statement.”

Mikhail had never considered cameras in the Hospital hallways. His building was known as one of the safest places in the world. “What did Elisanda say? Did she notice anything suspicious?”

A poster on the wall caught Zacharia’s attention. “No. She claims the hallway was oddly quiet for that time of day.”

“What time of day, exactly?”

“Six in the evening.”

“That’s when they switch. Around six, everyone gathers in the other wing to pass on the work to the night shift, so the West Wing becomes empty for a short while… One or two creatures stay for emergencies. The murderer knew that.”

“So, a very meticulously planned attack.”

“Who was the lab assistant?”

“Cony Smith, a vampire.”

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