Page 69 of High Stakes and Soulmates
We drive to the department before heading inside. I don’t even get to greet anyone before Maeve is on me. She takes note of Yorick and gives him a smile.
“Evening, Yorick.”
“Such a pleasure!” he says as he proceeds to kiss her hand, which simply results in her being horribly confused.
“I have some… information on the case. Is he okay to join?” she asks me.
“Yeah, he’s fine. Or at least I think he is. Sometimes he’s rather suspicious, but I think that’s just in general, not in relation to any case. Honestly, he could be evil and just fooling everyone…”
“I would make a sexy evil guy,” Yorick decides as he rubs his chin in thought. “I think I’d wear my hair down for that, though.” He pulls his hair out so it falls around his face and then tosses a smolder at us. “Thoughts?”
“I see,” Maeve says, clearly understanding.
“You see it too? Thank you. Me too.” And then he happily follows after us as Maeve gives me a nod, like she understands why I think he’s safe to talk around, while Yorick assumes she’s all in about him wearing his hair down for the ultimate bad guy look.
She leads us into a room and shuts the door.
“Nothing happened with Cyrus, right?” I ask, assuming she’d have started with that if it had.
“No! Of course not. So I heard you got a nosebleed when one of our detectives hit you in the face with the door?”
“I did. I’ve never seen someone open a door with such enthusiasm.”
“Well… the tech proceeded to not clean up the blood properly, and the DNA was run on it by another person who wasn’t aware of what had happened. It wasn’t until I saw the location of the swabbed blood that I realized that it wasn’t that the killer had dripped blood on the way out, it was that you had bled on the porch,” she says.
“It’s not a big deal, I haven’t been condemned of too many crimes,” I tease, knowing that, especially for a vampire, my record is quite clean. Well… besides the one time they threw me in jail for throwing a police car, but I realized later that no one actually arrested me and when Cyrus simply showed me the cell, I let myself in. I will do anything to please my sweet Cyrus.
“Right… did you realize that you never made a record for yourself? When we did this years ago and started recording all vampires… you were the only vampire not recorded.”
“Seriously?” I ask. “You’d think I’d have been the first person we did, but you’re right. We started out with a detective who no longer works here, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know why we didn’t, but once it got put into the system, there was an immediate match connecting your blood to the blood that’s been used at every crime scene so far. As in, the blood that was used to draw the lines that have been found next to every victim.”
My stomach tightens, and I’m suddenly back on that sidewalk, the sound of Cyrus saying the word “Tesoro” crashing around my mind while my world shatters around me.
I feel Yorick’s hand on my shoulder before he squeezes it. The simple touch draws me back to this room as the realization of what’s happening hits me.
“Hey, buddy, it’s okay. What happened? Do you want me to eat her? Is she saying shit about you? You can’t say shit about my friends or I will eat you,” Yorick growls as he pulls me in close.
“Don’t eat her,” I whisper.
“You sure? Because if she’s saying shit about you, I will.”
My chest hurts. Why does it hurt so badly?
Maeve gives me a look of concern. “Ezio, I’m in no way saying you’re the killer. You don’t think I’m aware that if you were, you wouldn’t use your own blood? I mean, yeah, you didn’t have your blood in the database, but if it was you and you were hiding this fact, there’s no way you’d have left your blood all over the porch.”
“It really is him,” I manage to get out.
“Who?” she asks.
“It’ll be okay. We’ll get answers, torture, or just kill him. Whatever you’d like,” Yorick assures me. He gives me a squeeze, and even though I take comfort in it, I find myself wishing Cyrus was here.
“Dead. I want him dead,” I admit. “His name is Louis Florian. At least, that was the name he went by nearly two hundred years ago. Either or both names could have been fake, I’m not sure. It’s him. He did this. I know he did this. He’s trying to destroy my life again… he’s probably the one who killed Cyrus’s family. He just… he just comes back randomly to fuck with me. To remind me that he can ruin my life even more than he already has. Fuck!”
“How would he have gotten your blood?” Maeve asks.
“I… I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, it’s quite a bit of blood. I… don’t know what it would even have been from. How long can blood be stored? But even so, I feel like I would have remembered someone draining that much blood from me.”
