A Perfect Blood

longer, there’d be more damage.”
    “And you’d know all about that, huh?” Jenks asked. Yeah, the dead vampire would.
    Glenn turned the corpse’s face and lifted a lid. Red, demon-slitted eyes stared up, cloudy in death, and I shuddered, making Nina suck in her breath to gain control. Or perhaps she/he was responding to the corpse’s teeth, pointed like a living vampire’s. The skin was ruddy like Al’s, but bubbled and pebbled like a gargoyle. It was hard to see with her curled up, but the arms looked wiry and strong, as if she could haul nets over the side of a boat all day. Wings? I thought, and I backed up fast. What were they doing to these people?
    “Okay,” Glenn said as he stood. “We need to get this back to the . . . ah, forensics lab. I want to know how long the body was stressed before she died.”
    “An hour. That’s all. Perhaps less.” We all looked at Nina, and she shrugged, dust and rust marring her makeup like dried blood. “But by all means, do your scientific poking and prodding. She’s suffered so much, what’s one more indignity?”
    Hands over my middle, I turned my back on one monstrosity to face another that society had deemed too uncomfortable to put on public display. My vision grew blurry, and I wiped a hand under my eye. Damn it, she’d been conscious when they’d done that to her, I could tell by the pain in her face. And it was a her. Something gut deep told me it was a woman, something more than her pointy facial features landing somewhere between a pixy and a buffalo.
    I could hear the soft sound of sliding fabric as Glenn opened the shroud farther, and the creak of his shoe’s leather as he shifted his weight. “A body under the floor doesn’t match anything you’ve found at the earlier sites. We need to revisit them for a spell-hidden body.”
    I nodded, stiffening when Ivy touched my shoulder. “You’ll be okay for a moment?” she asked. There was pity in her eyes, and I tightened my resolve even more. “I’m going up to make a call. The reception down here sucks like a dry socket. You’ll be okay until I get back?”
    “Yes,” I whispered, and she strode to the hallway, the sound of her feet vanishing almost immediately. The whining of the elevator replaced it, and I closed my eyes. This might be the last time I had a chance to look at the body, and unclenching my teeth, I opened my eyes and turned around.
    Nina noted my pain and said nothing, probably cataloging it as something to be used against me at a later date. “Apart from the young woman whose heart gave out, this is the first female victim we’ve found,” she said. “She’s also the most deformed. Even more than the newest victim.”
    “Meaning?” Jenks prompted harshly as he sat on Glenn’s shoulder.
    “Meaning perhaps what they’re doing is more effective on the female gender,” Nina said as she shifted the shards of broken cement around with the tip of her metal rod. “I don’t think they expected what happened here. This woman lived for a day. They buried her instead of putting her on display. They weren’t ready to move yet, and couldn’t risk her being found.”
    I put a hand to my middle again, sick from the cocoa. I’d grown up with experimental practices and wild theories as my parents struggled to keep me alive, and this was hitting close to home.
    “I know this woman,” Glenn said, and Nina looked sharply at him. The FIB detective was carefully examining the woman’s clenched hand and didn’t notice the vampire’s dilating pupils. “Not personally, but from the missing persons’ files. I looked them over last night.”
    “The I.S. files?” Nina asked, and Glenn glanced up, blanching at Nina’s black stare.
    “Yes. I don’t remember her name, but her ring matches the description of one worn by a witch who went missing last Friday.”
    Glenn dropped her hand, and the deformed fist fell against the corpse with a soft sound.
    Numb, I stood over her and forced myself to look. “Did you notice if she was a carrier for Rosewood?” But I already knew the answer.
    The skin around Glenn’s eyes gave away his distress. “Yes. They all were.”
    Nina squinted at me as if we had been holding out on her. “Rosewood? The blood disease? They were all carriers? When were you going to tell me this?”
    “I confirmed it this morning,” Glenn griped back. “When were you going to tell me Rachel had found a new site?”
    Jenks was a darting blur of silk and