A Perfect Blood

noticing that the blood-drawn pentagram under him was one made to gather power from an external source. Jeez, I hoped this had nothing to do with me. The man looked as if he’d been in his midtwenties, fit apart from the half-goat thing.
    “How many have there been?” I asked. They might only have asked me out here to see if I had done it, but now that I was here, I was going to find out who had. Ivy, too, was studiously looking through the packet of information, clearly eager to take the run. There were a lot of papers. The I.S. wasn’t known for being meticulous about data gathering, meaning this had been going on for a while. They should have come to me sooner.
    Spinning gracefully, Nina turned to the body, looking at it as if it were a painting on a wall. “This is the third incident. His name was Thomas Siskton, and he was a university student, missing since last week.”
    Jenks whistled by rubbing his wings together, and then he darted to the railing, standing on it and facing the body. “There hasn’t been anything in the news. You’d think a hoofed university student with horns would make the papers.”
    “Keep your mouth shut,” Ivy said, knowing how hard it was for the pixy to keep a secret.
    Nina looked between me and Wayde, clearly not happy with the Were being here. She probably didn’t know Jenks was the higher risk for blabbing despite pixies being noncitizens. “We’ve kept it quiet. It needs to stay that way.”
    “Don’t worry about me,” Wayde said, dropping back and putting a hand in the air as he looked down submissively. “I’m a professional.”
    I grimaced, hearing what the undead vampire was saying. You don’t just keep something like this quiet without illegal memory charms. Great. I hated memory charms.
    Nina saw my understanding and smiled with her new, confident, sexy eyes and turned to Ivy, a hand out as if to escort her up the stairs. “The site is open for your inspection,” she said as she walked over the blood-painted word of Latin as if it meant nothing. “We’ve already gathered what we need.”
    “Good.” Ivy casually sidestepped Nina’s guiding hand and walked up the stairs by herself. “I’ll let you know what you missed.”
    Her attitude was surprisingly belligerent, and I wondered why she was letting her emotions show like this. She knew it would attract the undead’s attention all the more, and clearly she didn’t like him. Concerned, I went to follow Ivy up, and Wayde touched my elbow. “Hey, uh, I’ll stay here if you don’t mind,” he said, his face pale as he looked up at the body.
    Jenks snickered, which I thought totally unfair, following it up with a “Not used to the blood, wolfman?”
    Wayde’s expression sharpened on the pixy. “He’s half turned into something. You know how many nightmares I’ve had about that?”
    Yes, I suppose being able to turn into a wolf, painfully, might give one a new kind of nightmare, and I smiled as I gave his arm a squeeze, feeling the hard muscle under his shirt. “You can wait at the car if you want. I’ll be fine.”
    “No, I’ll stay. Just not up there,” Wayde said, and Nina cleared her throat for me to hurry up, even as Wayde looked past me to the body and shivered.
    “Rache . . .” Jenks complained, and I headed up the stairs, hands in my pockets and giving the Latin a wide berth, reminded of how Nina had skirted the dead child under the ground.
    “This is the third,” Nina said, and I blanched as I now had nothing else to look at other than the blood-soaked, softly pelted, cloven-hoofed, disfigured man before me. Jenks was right; he even had tiny horns, and his skin was gray and softly textured like a gargoyle’s. What in hell had they done to him? And why?
    Please, God, may it have nothing to do with me. But I was the first demon this side of the ley lines, and I was getting a really bad feeling.
    “We found the oldest one just last week,” Nina added, almost as an afterthought, her voice telling me the vampire speaking through her was deep in thought.
    “You didn’t find them in order?” Jenks had parked himself upwind of the corpse. It smelled, but the cold had suppressed most of the stench. Actually the body had a distinctive meadow scent under all the decaying blood, and I wondered if that was part of the faun thing that it had going.
    Nina gave Jenks a dry look. “All the dump sites are similar to this one, but the first involved three teenagers from three different