Clara had been just a police photographer once. Even a year ago that had been her whole job. She had worked for a rural county sheriff’s office, documenting methamphetamine busts and car accidents. Then she’d done something stupid. She’d fallen in love with Laura Caxton. Caxton’s life had been about vampires and nothing else. To stay a part of Caxton’s life Clara had agreed to go back to school for forensic criminology, where she’d learned all about latent fingerprints and hair follicle matching and the legal ins and outs of DNA testing. It had gotten her a place on the SSU, the special subjects unit—the Vampire Squad—and exposed her to parts of the human anatomy she had never guessed existed. Or wanted to.
She’d learned the trick of using her camera’s viewfinder to shield herself from the gore back in the old days, and luckily it still worked. You focused in on a flap of skin hanging loose over a ravaged jugular vein and you thought about composition, and lighting, and getting the color values right, and suddenly it was just a picture. Something created, something not quite real.
It was the only way she could handle this mess.
“They were having a Tupperware party,” Special Deputy Glauer said, squatting down next to her. Even if he’d sat on the floor he would have been a head taller than Clara. Big and muscular and with the kind of stiff mustache Clara always thought of as police issue. He’d been just a local patrol cop in Gettysburg when he met Laura Caxton, a good, solid peace officer from a town that went most years without seeing a single homicide. Now he and Clara were partners, in charge of tracking down and killing the last known vampire in Pennsylvania.
They were both in way over their heads.
“The hostess—she’s over there, most of her,” Glauer went on, pointing at a body he’d partially covered with a sheet, “—is one of the top advertising executives in town.”
Clara squinted through her camera. “That seems wrong.” She’d noticed, of course, when she came in that this wasn’t their typical crime scene. Usually the bodies turned up under bridges, in abandoned buildings. This apartment was in an old warehouse, but one that had been converted to expensive loft space. It was in one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Allentown. “It doesn’t fit the profile.”
Glauer nodded. Together they’d been following the trail of Justinia Malvern, the last living vampire, through one murder scene after another. Vampires needed blood to fuel their unholy existence. The older the vampire got, the more blood it needed every night, or it weakened. Eventually it would lose the strength to crawl out of its own coffin at night and had to lie there rotting away in a body that couldn’t die. Justinia Malvern was the oldest vampire on record, well into her fourth century. Most of that time she’d spent trapped in her own coffin, too weak even to rise to feed. That had changed in recent years. She had been feeding a lot recently. Bodies had been turning up all over Pennsylvania. Always before, though, they’d belonged to homeless women or illegal immigrants, migrant workers or housekeepers, the kinds of people who didn’t get reported as missing when they failed to turn up for work one day. Malvern was smart. On bad days Clara was sure Malvern was smarter than she was. She’d known that the police would be after her, that she had to keep a low profile if she wanted to keep hunting.
And now—this. “If she’s taking this kind of risk,” Clara said, “it must mean one of two things. Either she’s desperate, she needed blood and she didn’t have time to find a safe supply. Or—”
“Or,” Glauer said, nodding, “she’s not worried about us anymore. We’ve been following her around, cleaning up her messes. Not giving her any reason to worry. Not since Caxton was arrested. Yeah.” He stood up slowly, the joints in his knees popping. “We don’t scare her enough to make her hide anymore.”
They both froze in place at the same time. They’d both been trained by Laura Caxton, the world’s last living vampire hunter, and they knew better than to jump, even when a shadow loomed over them from behind.
“Interesting theory,” their boss said. Deputy Marshal Fetlock of the U.S. Marshals Service was a thin man with jet black hair that had turned dramatically white at his temples. Clara sometimes thought it looked dashing, and sometimes thought it made him look like a skunk. “Write it up and send it to my email.”