Page 27 of The Vampire and the Case of the Hellacious Hag

He jumped a little on his front feet and barked. I adjusted his vest since it was skewed and flashed him an approving grin. ‘Hunt.’ He didn’t really need commands because he understood what I wanted, but after our demonstrations at the police academy I thought we should be more professional, if only to maintain the illusion to outsiders that Fluffy was really nothing more than a dog.

He started from where we were, working in an arcing pattern with his nose to the ground. Gunnar and I walked slowly behind him, staying out of his way as he searchedfor any scent that might indicate where the murder had taken place. Sidnee and Thomas followed, and I noted approvingly that he had slipped a protective arm around her slender waist.

Things were starting to cook between them and I was pleased to see it. She deserved a happy ever after, or at the very least some phenomenal sex and a few orgasms. I’d bet any money that Thomas was an attentive lover; he was a man who missed nothing.

Fluffy let out a bark and wagged his tail excitedly. We were in a flat valley dotted with small hills of gritty dirt and gravel. Everything was an even gunmetal grey mixed with brown; it was ugly and unremarkable to my uneducated eye.

My dog continued to work his way at ground level. I’d thought he was on to something, but now I wasn’t so sure; this was a large area and it could take him a while to search it all. I’d need to give him a break in a while – he deserved a snack and some water.

‘Thomas,’ I asked belatedly, ‘are any of these materials going to be bad for Fluffy?’ I’d read on my phone about the possibility of toxicity with some types of chromite.

‘No, I promise he’ll be fine,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Our mine is checked continually. We’ve never detected any hexavalent chromium – that’s the dangerous kind.Everything here has been tested, and it’s stable and nontoxic.’ He waited a beat. ‘Though I still wouldn’t recommend eating it.’

Sidnee burst out laughing, and Thomas looked faintly pleased. Huh. That was a joke? He was always so stoic that he was difficult to read at times but apparently Sidnee knew him well enough to recognise his joking face, or maybe she’d genuinely found his remark funny. Stan’s sense of humour was off, too; I blamed Sigrid and Gunnar.

‘No eating. Got it,’ I replied, giving a thumbs up.

Fluffy disappeared between two hills of tailings and I moved forward to keep him in my sight. He gave a sharp bark, whirled towards me excitedly and gave me three more clear barks in rapid succession. ‘We’re up,’ I called to the others as I ran towards him.

When I reached him, he was sitting and staring pointedly at a spot on the ground. I patted him. ‘Good boy.’

Gunnar took the camera and started taking photographs of the area as I scanned the ground for any obvious clues. The place Fluffy was staring at looked exactly the same as everywhere else and I couldn’t see any bloodstains. If Alfgar’s head had been removed here, I’d have expected to see something.

I squatted down and used the flashlight on my phone to scan the earth more closely; although the area was lit by bright halogen lamps, they threw odd shadows between the two hills. There was still nothing to be seen, not to my eyes anyway – which gave me an idea.

‘Sidnee, can you do a partial shift and look around with your mer vision?’ I asked.

She brightened. Her mer eyes could see extremely well in the dark and she had an increased colour spectrum. ‘Sure!’ She was bouncing on her toes, excited to help in a way only she could.

Before she said anything else, Thomas was reaching into his rucksack and pulling out a bottle of water. She beamed at him. ‘Thank you.’ With the water close to her, when she smiled again she revealed teeth like a shark’s – not unlike the hag’s – and her eyes were as black and flat as a great white’s.

When Sidnee went mer, her nature changed, too. She leaned into Thomas, her whole body sinuous and sensuous as she sniffed up his neck and gave a soft clicking noise I’d never heard before. Thomas held himself still as the woman he desired above all others wrapped herself around him like a stripper round a pole. She ground up against him and leaned in, then she went on tiptoes andlightly nipped his ear. He inhaled sharply and couldn’t hold back a low groan.

Abruptly, Sidnee seemed to remember what she wassupposedto be doing – and it wasn’t taunting poor Thomas. She took a deep breath and, with a visible effort, turned away. His expression was carefully neutral but he couldn’t bank the heat in his eyes, and he was definitely staring at her ass when she exaggerated the swing of her hips as she sauntered to the scene of the crime. His breathing was faster, and he took the rucksack off his shoulders to hold casually in front of him. Heh-heh-heh. Yes, things were really starting to cook between them.

Sidnee crouched next to me and stared at the ground. ‘There,’ she pointed.

I looked around for a stone to mark the spot. ‘What is it? Blood?’ I asked, seeing nothing.

She sniffed. ‘Not blood, not sure what it is.’ Her speech was a little muffled. As a mer, she spoke underwater with a series of high-pitched sounds and clicks; her teeth weren’t that conducive to English. ‘It’s green, I think.’

‘Hold on.’ I retrieved a small spade and an evidence bag. ‘I’ll let you get it since you can see it.’ She nodded then removed my marker and scraped a tiny bit of whatever it was into the bag. ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

She blinked and her eyes went back to their usual warm brown. ‘No, there’s nothing. This site is very clean. Too clean,’ she added.

‘Dammit.’

‘Yeah.’ she smiled. ‘I wonder what that was? It was almost neon green in my mer sight. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

I shrugged and picked up the bag. ‘We’ll have to hope the lab can identify it.’

We walked back to Gunnar and Thomas. ‘What did you find?’ my boss asked.

I looked at Sidnee. It was her explanation to give. ‘Not sure,’ she admitted. ‘Some sort of green substance. There wasn’t much and we don’t know what it is.’

Gunnar picked up the evidence bag and stared at it. ‘I don’t see anything but dirt.’ He looked at us curiously.

‘Sidnee could see it but I can’t,’ I told him. ‘It’s only neon green in another spectrum of light that we can’t see. We’ll have to send it to one of the labs.’

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