Alpha Omega 02 - Hunting Ground

shoe and caught a glimpse of Angus’s face. “He is very protective,” she told him. “In a very Nietzschean ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger’ sort of way. At least there won’t be twenty feet of snow here.”
    Charles laughed.
    No one was smiling when they walked into the room.
    Blood soaked the carpet, and the walls were sprayed with it. It was getting old; in a few hours it would start to smell rotten. The walls looked brown rather than red. She didn’t look at the two piles of meat and bone and body parts yet. One small step at a time. What did all the blood tell her?
    â€œ ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him,’ ” murmured Anna.
    â€œI thought you did Latin quotes,” said Charles.
    â€œI can’t do Shakespeare in Latin.” She thought about it a little because that meant she didn’t have to look more closely at what was in the room yet. “ Cui bono , then. Who benefits from this?”
    â€œI can’t see how it could possibly be money,” said Angus. “Or not only money. Or love, either. Sunny, maybe—but Chastel?”
    Anna stepped all the way into the room, and the carpet squished just the way the carpet in her friends’ apartment did after a keg of beer had broken open (some bright person tried to open it with a screwdriver and a hammer when the tap quit working).
    She could tell where Michel had been because there was a person-shaped place where the blood hadn’t saturated the tan carpet.
    And there was the body . . . or pieces thereof. She made herself look. Charles’s life might ride on their finding who had done this. She didn’t have the luxury of being squeamish.
    Hands, feet, head (one that looked much more like some wax sculpture for a horror film than something that had perched on shoulders and talked) sat on top of the pile. The head faced the doorway they’d come through, one hand on each side, feet on the outside of that. The rest of that pile was entrails and bones.
    A square of cloth—no telling what it had originally looked like, but she was pretty sure it had been a tablecloth from the shape—was spread out on the floor next to the pile of body parts. On the square of cloth were stacks of meat cut into steaks and two racks of ribs, as if someone were planning a barbecue.
    Why was the blood bothering her?
    â€œI don’t know vampires,” she said, talking fast so her jaw didn’t vibrate. “But I read Dracula when I was in high school. Would they waste all the blood like this? Or is this meant to horrify? Who do they want to frighten, and why?”
    â€œNo,” said Charles suddenly. “They wouldn’t waste the blood. Not without a good reason. You’re right, this was deliberate. Meant to look like serial-killer stuff. That’s all wrong for vampires. A vampire who left victims like this would have been killed before he—or she—did it a second time. They can afford human attention a lot less than we can.”
    â€œThis is planned for effect. A lot of effort.” He stared at the body parts—and smiled with satisfaction. “Too much effort, apparently.”
    He waved his arm at what was left of Chastel. “They cheated. We have one dead body—and there is just too much mass there, by about twenty pounds. I bet we find some commercially prepared cow in amidst the meat and that there is more of the Frenchman under the offal. Meat on bones. They didn’t really have time to make a thorough job of it. It just had to look good for the audience.”
    â€œWho is the audience?” Angus asked.
    â€œNot us,” said Anna. “Me aside . . . this is bad—but to wolves who go out every full moon and hunt? There’s just not a lot of horror left in blood and meat.” She wouldn’t point out that Angus was having a hard time pulling his eyes from the steak pile. “Especially when the victim is someone like Jean Chastel. I bet the French wolves felt bad about Michel, but said, ‘good riddance’ when they saw Chastel. Do you think this is for the public? To force the Marrok to not come out? Or is it for the fae, who have no idea what a butcher Chastel was? To add to the horror of the death so that the hunt for Charles has that righteous feel?”
    â€œYou sound like a psychologist,” said Angus.
    Anna shook her head. “No. Wrong