Page 33 of Suck This

I pointed at the blood on the ground that was congealing to something the same consistency as gravy.

“If it was a vampire that did this, she wouldn’t have any blood left,” I informed Grady. “And that one isn’t bitten.”

I pointed to the man—at least I assumed it was a young man based on the clothes he was wearing—and gestured to the guy’s face which had clearly been blown apart with a shotgun blast to the head.

Grady grunted. “Just seems suspicious is all.”

I rolled my eyes. Everything was suspicious to Grady.

He was damn good at his job, but he was wary of freakin’ everything. Everything could be explained away—and not in a good way. In a suspicious way.

In Grady’s world, the door to the elevator opened too quickly—must be a ghost in the hotel.

Food arrived from the kitchen minutes after we placed the order—they must’ve stolen someone else’s food to serve to him and he didn’t need the bad karma that would bestow upon him.

Car is parked two down from his house. He’d seen the same car two days ago in the Walmart parking lot—the car must be following him.

A commotion at the door of the apartment building we were investigating the deaths in front of momentarily stole my attention, and I paused in what I was doing to stare at Nash as he stomped toward us.

He took one look at the rookie who’d just been reamed by me and sneered. “Go home.”

The kid didn’t hesitate in the least to run to his squad car and get the hell out. And the funny thing was, my brother wasn’t even his boss. He just so happened to look like him in that moment.

Corbin, who’d been inside talking to one of the residents of the apartment building, stepped out onto the landing that led to where we were.

“Nash, what are you doing here?” Corbin asked.

I ripped my gloves off, finishing up the last bit of what I could accomplish and tucking the gloves into a garbage bag that was set to go back to the station just in case.

Nash looked at me, then looked at Corbin, his eyes pleading.

“Found the vampire who was last seen with her,” my brother said grimly. “Acadia, why don’t you go on home?”

I glared at him and crossed my arms over my chest.

“No,” I snapped.

I had a feeling something bad was about to happen, and I wasn’t going to be left out of the loop. There was no reason I had to leave. None. In fact, I was still technically processing the scene, even if all I had to do was clean up after myself and I’d be done.

My brother’s long-suffering sigh was caught by everyone, but it was Grady who had his complete attention, and who asked what was wrong.

“We are almost finished,” Grady told my brother. “If you give us ten minutes max, we’ll be out of your hair.”

“I had this emailed to me,” Nash said, looking at me, then moving his attention back to Corbin.

My brother waved him closer.

“It’s fine,” he said. “She really is done. What do you have?”

Nash pulled out his iPad, looked at me pointedly, and pressed play.

It most assuredly wasn’t fine. Something in which I found out two minutes later as the man on the screen opened the door for the woman. The man touched the woman’s neck gently, asking her a question, and then turned toward the camera.

It was then that my breath caught.

I might’ve made a sound, too, but my brother and the rest of the men witnessing the scene on the screen were too engrossed in what was going on to notice that I was about to pass out due to lack of oxygen.

Holy shit.

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