Page 47 of Red Rooster

9

New York City

The bodies lay beneath white sheets. Harvey made no move to walk her over there and lift up the covers, and Trina didn’t insist. Frankly, just the shapes of them under the drapes was enough to give her the cold chills. The silhouettes weren’t quite…right. Pieces missing. Pieces in the wrong place.

Harvey, drawn and tired, flipped through her notes and stared down at them as she said, “Webb’s not joining us?”

“No,” Trina said, and left it at that. She could have pretended he was still hungover and his stomach too jumpy for the post-mortem, but she didn’t feel like lying to Harvey any more than necessary.

The ME looked up, finally, expression pinched. “You were at the scene. You saw. Cause of death was exsanguination. The victims were hacked apart. Eviscerated. Parts are missing – fingers, mostly, like they were trying to fend off their attackers.” She paused a moment, allowing Trina a brief shudder. “They looked like they were killed by abear, Trina.”

Not far off. “I–”

“Now look,” Harvey continued, voice hardening. “I know it’s a leap to go from missing bodies tochewed onbodies – oh yeah, there are teeth marks,animalteeth marks – but lots of weird shit is going on around here and you? You’re not even questioning it. Just standing there looking like you’ve got a stomach ache. So this is me asking, unofficially, off the record – as a friend – what you know about all this.”

For a moment, Trina almost caved. In part because Harvey was a competent ally in her day-to-day job, who worked tirelessly to help them catch criminals. And also in part because she was starting to feel like a shaken soda, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to confide in someone?My great-grandfather’s not only alive, but ageless, and also a vampire, and the former tsarevich of Russia turned Lanny into one, too.

‘Cause that would go over well.

Trina waited a beat too long. Swallowed. “Christine–”

“Forget it.” Harvey turned away, disgusted. “Get out of my morgue.”

And yeah. That was fair.

She found Lanny outside, sitting on a low concrete retaining wall that had been backfilled with dirt and planted with St. John’s wort. He looked almost serene, with his shirtsleeves pushed up and his head tipped back, eyes closed. The sun fell full on his face – that rich, hot, baking late summer sun that always felt so good when you’d been trapped in air-conditioned buildings all day – and Trina was struck by the difference in him. Gone were the bruise-dark circles around his eyes, the grayish pallor of his skin. His face seemed fuller, too; the face of a man with healthy eating habits and a regular workout routine. It was only now, when faced with the stark contrast, that she realized that he’d been sliding down for a long time; she should have noticed. She hated herself for not.

His eyes cracked open a slit. “How’d it go?”

“Better that you weren’t in there trying to lick the dried blood off the bodies.”

“That’s fucking disgusting,” he said, and shut his eyes again.

Trina sat down next to him on the wall, forcing herself to push past the prickling unease that told her not to sit too close, getting in tight enough that their shoulders brushed. His arm felt warm through both their sleeves, and she wondered why she’d expected it to feel any different.

Lanny hummed a little sound that was mostly content. “Who’d’ve thought vampires could sit in the sun, huh? Betcha I can eat garlic, too, which is a damn good thing, ‘cause my ma wouldn’t understand if I suddenly stopped coming by for pasta night.”

“Guess most of the old myths were wrong,” Trina said, hearing a hollowness in her voice.

“Hey, do you think I can walk into a church without lighting on fire? Maybe I can still go to Mass.”

She didn’t answer right away, turned to glance at him, and found that he was smiling at her, the expression more than a little bitter.

“These are the kinda questions I gotta ask myself, you know?” he said, voice bitter, too. “Can I still pray? Can I see my reflection to shave in the mornings? Can I still” – his breath hitched – “be with you without wanting todrink your damn blood?”

She sucked in a breath.

His smile twitched, fell, and he glanced away.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “It’s hard for you to even wanna sit here with me, isn’t it?”

Her pulse throbbed in her temples, caught painfully in her ears, like they needed to pop. They were valid questions, all of them. But she thought of Nikita, of how he wasnothinglike Rasputin. Thought of Alexei, the entitled prince. And poor sweet Jamie, who hadn’t asked for any of this.

She took another breath, this one deep and measured. “I can see your reflection in the grill of that car right there,” she said, pointing to the Cadillac parked in front of them, “so that answersthatquestion. And for the rest of it. Lanny, the thing that happened to you was physical. It changed the way your body works – maybe even what your body needs – but it didn’t change your mind. Or your heart. You’re stillyou. Just…healthy.”

“And required to drink blood.”

“Think of it as medicine. Like insulin for a diabetic.”

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