All Together Dead

vampire’s body, which had begun the rapid disintegration of its kind. She’d retrieved her throwing star, and she was polishing it on her pants leg.
    “Good throw,” Eric said. “Who was he?”
    She shrugged. “I dunno. The guy with the arrows, was all I know. All I care.”
    “He was the only one?”
    “Yes.”
    “Can you tell me what he looked like?”
    “I was sitting next to him,” said a very small male vampire. He was perhaps five feet tall, and slim besides. His hair trailed down his back. If he went to jail, he’d have guys knocking on his cell door within thirty minutes. They’d be sorry, of course, but to the unobservant eye, he did look like the world’s easiest target. “He was a rough one, and not dressed for the evening. Khakis and a striped dress shirt…well, you can see.”
    Though the body was blackening and flaking away as vamp corpses did, naturally the clothes were intact.
    “Maybe he had a driver’s license?” I suggested. That was almost a given with humans, but not with vampires. However, it was worth a shot.
    Eric squatted and inserted his fingers into the man’s front pocket. Nothing came out, or from the other front pocket, so without further ado Eric rolled him over. I took a couple of steps back to avoid the flurry of flakes of ash. There was something in the rear pocket: a regular wallet. And inside it, sure enough, was a driver’s license.
    It had been issued by Illinois. Under blood type was the designation “NA.” Yep, a vamp, for sure. Reading over Eric’s shoulder, I could see that the vamp’s name had been Kyle Perkins. Perkins had put “3V” as his age, so he had been a vamp for only three years.
    “He must have been an archer before he died,” I said. “Because that’s not a skill you’d pick up right away, especially that young.”
    “I agree,” Eric said. “And in the daytime, I want you to check all the local places you can practice archery. Throwing arrows is not a skill you can improvise. He trained. The arrow was specially made. We need to find out what happened to Kyle Perkins, and why this rogue accepted the job to attend this meeting and kill whomever necessary.”
    “So he was a…vampire hit man?”
    “Yes, I think so,” Eric said. “Someone is maneuvering us very carefully. Of course, this Perkins was simply backup in case the trial went wrong. And if it hadn’t been for you, the trial might well have gone wrong. Someone went to a lot of trouble to play on Henrik Feith’s fears, and stupid Henrik was about to give that someone up. This Kyle, he was planted to prevent just that.”
    Then the cleanup crew arrived: a group of vampires with a body bag and cleaning supplies. The human maids would not be asked to mop up Kyle. Luckily, they were all occupied in refreshing the vampire rooms, which were off-limits to them during the day.
    In very short order, the residue of Kyle Perkins was bagged up and taken away, with one vampire remaining behind to wield a little handheld vacuum. Let Rhodes CSI try to get ahold of that.
    I sensed a lot of movement and looked up to see that the service doors were open and staff was pouring into the large room to pack away the chairs. In less than fifteen minutes, Quinn’s judicial paraphernalia was being stored away, his sister directing the work. Then a band set up on the platform, and the room was cleared for dancing. I’d never seen anything like it. First a trial, then a few murders, then dancing. Life goes on. Or, in this case, death continues.
    Eric said, “You had better check in with the queen.”
    “Oh. Yeah, she might have a few words to say to me.” I glanced around and spotted Sophie-Anne pretty quickly. She was surrounded by a crowd of people congratulating her on the favorable verdict. Of course, they would have been just as glad to see her executed, or whatever would have happened if the Ancient Pythoness had turned thumbs down. Speaking of the A.P….
    “Eric, where’d the old gal go?” I asked.
    “The Ancient Pythoness is the original oracle that Alexander consulted,” he said, his voice quite neutral. “She was considered so revered that even in her old age, she was converted by the very primitive vampires of her time. And now she has outlasted all of them.”
    I didn’t want to think about how she’d fed before the advent of the synthetic blood that had changed the vampire world. How’d she hobble after her human prey? Maybe they’d brought people to her, like snake