Bad Blood

“I will. Soon.”

“Promise?”

Doc crossed his fingers behind his hip, hating himself for doing it. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Fi frowned. “Don’t say that. That’s the last thing either of us wants to come true.”

He held his hands out to her. “C’mon, baby. Nothing’s gonna happen to me. I’m a big bad leopard again. C’mere and let me show you.” He growled softly from deep in his chest. Silently he wished away the words he’d spoken. Hope to die. Why had he even put that thought out into the universe?

“Speaking of big bad leopards, are you going to go back to Sinjin now? See if he’ll reinstate you into the pride?”

“No. Never. He threw me out when I needed the pride’s help and support the most. That man is dead to me.” He patted the bed again and gave her the most wicked look he could manage, then stroked a finger down the side of his goatee. “Now come here, woman, or I’ll come get you myself and I really don’t think you want that.”

She shrieked, then laughed as she jumped into bed beside him. “You have the devil in you.”

Happily distracted, he pulled her beneath him and sank into her warmth, nipping her throat lightly. “And now, so do you.”

“You the one who found her?” The officer handed Creek his license back and gave him a hard once-over. “You’re a ways off the reservation, aren’t you?”

He really needed to get his mother’s address off his license. “Yes, I found her.” Creek ignored the officer’s second question as he blew out a slow breath and tried to erase the mental image of the girl dying in his arms and how at first glance, he’d thought she was Chrysabelle. How that had sucked the breath out of him. Charged him with a rage he hadn’t felt since he’d pulled his father off his sister.

But the girl he’d found wasn’t Chrysabelle. She wasn’t even a real comarré. And the puncture wounds on her neck were meant to look like the work of a vampire, but he had his doubts. A vampire wouldn’t have had any reason to carve the girl up like that. Or leave that much blood behind.

“I understand they already have your DNA and prints.”

It was no secret he had a record. “Yes.” He wiped his hands down his jeans again, but they were stained with blood. Her blood.

The officer pulled out an e-tablet and stylus. “Tell me what happened—start from the beginning.”

“I was on my way home, and when I passed this alley, I heard her moaning.” Actually, he’d been tracking a fringe vamp that had been going after street people. The smell of blood had drawn the fringe into the alley.

“On your way home? Your license says you live on tribe land.” The officer’s eyes narrowed.

“I used to. That’s my mother’s place. I live down near Pineda.”

“We’ll need to verify that. And you need to get your license updated.”

“Will do.” Better tell Argent, his Kubai Mata sector chief, the cops were going to be calling. Good thing the KM had a system in place for that kind of stuff, but then what didn’t the KM have covered? They hadn’t stayed a secret society for so many years by being unprepared.

“What happened after you heard her moaning?”

He’d staked the fringe and cleaned up the ashes as quickly as he could. “I saw her lying there. Looked like she’d been run through a shredder. I was surprised she was still alive.” He shifted, blew out a breath. “I yelled for help, but no one came.” He hadn’t yelled for help because he knew there was none. Plus the smell of blood had already drawn new fringe. “I held her. She died in my arms.” At that point, the fringe had been curious, but not a threat since the girl was no longer a viable meal.

“And that’s how you got her blood all over you?”

“Yes.” They’d searched him for weapons. Since Argent had yet to show with his replacement crossbow, all they’d found on him was a titanium stake and his halm, which they’d thought was just a length of pipe. Most people in Little Havana carried a lot more than that.

“Then what?”

“I went into that bodega and they called nine-one-one. The rest you know.”

“You touch or move anything else around the scene? We gonna find your prints on anything you want to tell us about now?”

“No, I know better than that.” Maybe a street person had seen the gold and stripped her flesh trying to harvest it.

“What were you doing in this part of town?”

There was no good reason to be in Little Havana unless you lived here. Clearly the cop was trying to trip him up. “I told you, passing through on my way home.” Half a dozen new fringe lingered in the gathering crowd like circling sharks. They came and went, sniffing around, figuring out the blood wasn’t from a live source and disappearing again.

“Do you know the victim? Ever seen her around here before?” Red and blue LED police lights illuminated the sheet now covering her.

“Never seen her before.” But he knew what she was. The brunette roots of the platinum hair and simple signum, what was left of them, anyway, pegged her as one of Dominic’s fake comarré. One of many things the officer probably had no clue about. Another was that the vampires in the crowd had now doubled in number. Things were getting ugly in this city. He’d seen more othernaturals openly mingling with humans than ever before. Any day now, humans were going to stop pretending they weren’t seeing things and figure out the world around them had become a very different place. The night of Halloween would be the end of the innocence if it didn’t happen before that.