How to Elude a Vampire (VRC: Vampire Related Crimes Book 2) Page 3

  “I’m up, I’m up! Why are you so mean to me?” he asks.

  “I tried waking you up sweetly, and do you know what you said to me?”

  He thinks about it for a moment. “I love you?”

  “Try again.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, you’re handsome?” he asks.

  “Closer. It did have the F word in it.”

  He seems to think for a moment longer. “Fuck me, McBitey?”

  I sigh before grabbing him and pulling him into my arms. At least he doesn’t stiffen up anymore when I insist on holding him without his prostheses. That only took months to accomplish and a lot of hard work.

  “You know you can’t hold it against me if I say something… snippy when I first wake up. You’re basically asking for it.”

  “The funny thing is that vampires are the ones who are nocturnal, yet you act like you are.”

  “Yes… at least I have something lovely to look at in the morning. Isn’t that right, Artie? Just seeing your honey-brown eyes and fucked-up hair makes my day brighter,” Finn says as he reaches over to the dog. I catch his hand first and make sure he’s looking as I glare at him. “Artie, help me! There’s a grumpy vampy who looks prepared to eat me.”

  “I miss the good old days when it was just me all alone, living alone, completely alone. I felt… powerful and could brood all day long. It was nice.”

  He grins at me. “Nah, you’d miss me so much. You like being weighed down by my humanness. You secretly love it.”

  “Do I?” I ask, even though I’m squeezing him tightly, prepared to not let go. We don’t really have to go to work, right? We could just sit here, and I could continue to hug him to me.

  I run my hand down his bare back to his ass cheek and squeeze it tightly.

  Yes, this definitely has to be better than work.

  My phone rings, like someone has realized that I was considering the outcome of mauling Finn before work. I groan as I grab it, but I make sure to keep Finn locked down so he can’t run.

  When I see that it’s from our boss, Brooks, I accept the call. “This is Church.”

  “Church, we have a bit of a situation. There is a suspected body in the South Fork River. There’s suspicion that a vampire was involved, so the VRC will assist until we are positive. Can you head straight there?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “I’m assuming you might see Finn between now and then and can relay the information?” he says, sounding sarcastic. He thought us being in a relationship was a bad idea when the department frowns on relationships inside the same units. But thankfully, he hasn’t spread it around, and the people that do know don’t seem to mind because they will all do anything for Finn for some extremely weird reason.

  “Maybe he’s around here somewhere. He’s small enough that I usually stick him in the little cupboard under the stairs,” I say.

  Finn viciously pinches my nipple. “I can hear you.”

  “Why he even likes you is the real question,” Brooks says.

  “Him? I’m the complete package,” I say.

  Finn gasps and I realize with horror what I’ve done. “You’re… You’re saying because I don’t have an arm and a leg that I’m not complete?”

  “Don’t you dare,” I growl.

  “Wow, that’s low,” Brooks says, jumping right on board like the asshole he is.

  I glare at Finn. “Don’t.”

  He wipes away a fake tear.

  “No! You’re not allowed to be dramatic! It’s not cute!”

  “Now you don’t think I’m cute!” He pushes away from me, but I grab him and pull him back before kissing his cheek. “I think you’re adorable.”

  Brooks sighs. “I don’t want to hear any of this. Meet your team at the location in fifteen.”

  “Got it,” I say and hang up. “Did you hear all that?”

  “I did,” he says as he pushes past Artemus to grab his prostheses. He doesn’t like me paying him any attention while he’s putting them on since he’s still foolishly worried I’ll look at him differently or some other nonsense. I wish he would understand that I love him and his body the way it is. But I think only time will fix that and I’m willing to give him all the time he needs. That or maybe I’ll just try shaking some sense into him someday. I swear humans are the most stubborn creatures alive.

  I get dressed and head into the bathroom to finish up getting ready. Since I get done first, I grab him some stuff from the kitchen for the drive over.

  “A body’s not good,” Finn says as he comes out of the back. “Things have been relatively quiet and now a body.”

  “There’s a possibility it wasn’t a body or, if it is a body, someone might have fallen in and drowned. With the recent rain and wind, it’s not farfetched that they could slip into the water and drown.”

  He still doesn’t look certain but nods anyway.

  I drive so Finn can eat a granola bar. Since I’m a true vampire, I can eat human food, which is impossible for regular vampires. I don’t require it, but I find that it does make me healthier to add human food into my diet periodically, though I can’t live only on human food.

  Once we get to the point of interest, I park next to a VRC police car. They were probably the first on the scene so they could get all the vital information before a search team is called in. We get out and head over to the river where the bank makes a steep drop straight into it. At the edge is a small gathering of people.

  The first to notice us as we move down the embankment is a uniformed cop who works with the VRC. He gives us a smile and a nod as a welcome. Next to him is his partner, and across from them are two teenagers.

  “Morning, Church, morning, Hayes,” the vampire says with a smile. “We currently have two divers out and hope to get more in shortly.” I don’t know Officer Perez extremely well since he’s more of a first responder than the other detectives. His partner, Officer Miller, is a little more outgoing than he is, so I’ve spoken to him a little more.

  The difference between the human department and the vampire department is that the human department is much bigger. It also breaks off into branches beyond just police, homicide, and so on. There are departments that deal with cyber issues, and terrorist issues, among other things. But within the VRC department, there are only a small number of members. It’s a hard line of work for vampires, forcing them to be able to interact around blood without showing any reaction to it. Many don’t make it past training. So that means we are in charge of everything related to vampires. Vampire attacks, vampire deaths, vampire homicides, vampires harassing people. If a vampire did it, was around it, or a victim of it, we take over. Since it was called in as a vampire incident, Perez and Miller were sent in first, but now that there’s confirmation that something more might have happened, someone like Finn and I would be called in.

  Miller turns to us. “So these two reported that they thought they saw a body in the river. We immediately got the dive team on it as well as the emergency response team. They’ve been out about five minutes now.”

  “What makes you think it’s a vampire case?” I ask the two teens.

  Their eyes get huge and they instantly look elsewhere. One’s a boy and one’s a girl, but they’re dressed similarly, telling me that they belong to one of the private schools in the city that requires a uniform.

  I sigh, which results in them shrinking back, like I can’t even sigh without causing absolute terror. Thankfully, Finn is the definition of a friendly face and he has the personality to back it up. Oh, and he’s pretty much the same height, which helps them trust him.

  So he smiles at them. “What are your names?”

  The girl fiddles with the button on her blazer. “I’m Bethany and this is Ricky. Um… so we were walking down this path here… it’s a shortcut to school, and we saw a person in the water. Well… I did. I saw them. I pointed it out to Ricky, but he didn’t see them. I just… I just said maybe a vampire did it in passing… I’m sorry. I didn�
��t mean anything by it.” She looks really concerned and slightly embarrassed. “I’m not racist or… um… are vampires a race? I don’t… I’m not…”

  Finn pats her shoulder. “It’s fine. Can you tell me exactly what you saw? Word for word. Here, come walk with me. Talk to me as if you were going through all of this again and explain everything to me, alright?”

  They nod and Finn pulls them back down the small strip of walking land along the bank as I follow behind them. It’s clear they haven’t interacted with vampires much because my presence is making them nervous. Perez and Miller, while both being vampires, are younger and not as menacing.

  “So you walk this way to school?” Finn asks.

  “Y-Yes.”

  “Talk me through it,” he says.

  She starts walking with Finn by her side. “It was… around here that I thought I saw something sticking out of the water. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, so I just kept walking and didn’t say anything. Then…” She walks a little farther. “Right here, I swear I saw a head… I think. But there was hair floating and then the body dipped back under the water, so Ricky didn’t see anything. I could be wrong. I’m going to feel awful if I’m wrong. I’m probably wrong.”

  I see the divers surface as I walk over to the bank and stare into the water. The fresh rain and rushing water disrupts my senses horribly, so I don’t smell anything like death or decay, but there’s no way for me to be positive.

  The divers look our way, so I wave them closer to where the girl had pointed. “She saw the body there initially. Maybe it was caught on something.”

  One stays searching where they are and the other moves farther upstream.

  “Can you think of anything else?” Finn asks.

  She shakes her head. “I’m going to feel really stupid if I’m wrong.”

  He smiles at her. “We’d rather you be wrong. But we’d also want to know so we can look just in case. Marcus, I’m going to reach out to the team and see if there’s been any missing people or incidents near the river in the past few weeks.”“I got something!” a diver shouts, stopping Finn in his tracks. He’s holding up a cloth, maybe a torn shirt—I can’t tell from here.

  He swims over to us and I pull on some gloves before reaching out and taking it from him, careful to not get the dripping water on me.

  “Looks like part of a pleated skirt,” Finn says.

  I breathe in, pulling in any smell from it, but only one stands out. “It smells like decay. Alright, let’s get a bigger team in here and see what we can do,” I say as I leave Finn to bag up the evidence for now, in case we can get something off it.

  Within half an hour we have a large dive team on location sweeping the river. Finn and I stand by until we hear a call about an hour after we arrived.

  “I found her!” someone shouts from downstream. We head down to follow him and find a diver pulling the body out of the water. Another comes to help him and the two drag the body to the shore. She hasn’t been dead long, at least as much as I can tell since the water does different things to the body.

  The forensics team is called, and we’ll have to wait for them to properly assess the body, but Finn and I can at least do some detective work while we wait.

  I kneel down to look, curious if there’s a clear sign of death.

  Finn points at her shoulder where her skin is colored differently. She must have been lying against that shoulder when she died. “She didn’t drown. She was dead before she hit the water, right?” he asks.

  “Looks like it.” I tilt my head as I look at her throat where two clear fang marks stand out against her pale skin. “She was bitten.”

  “Oh shit,” Finn says as he moves to my side of the body. “Huh. Someone could have fed on her and tossed her in the river thinking they’d hide the evidence that way. She’s missing a finger. Looks too clear of a cut to have happened on a rock or from an animal, but I’m sure the medical examiner will have a better idea.”

  “What about this?” I ask as I point at her hand. There’s a clear hole that goes straight through her palm. It’s small, but it looks like it’d been done postmortem.

  “The other hand too,” Finn says. “Just a hole… this is strange. What would make that? If it was just one hand, I would have said she slammed it on something that punctured the skin trying to escape or something, but both hands? That doesn’t seem right.”

  “The autopsy could tell us more.”

  The forensics team, as well as Karsyn and Briar, arrives and begins setting up the scene. So we leave them to it.

  I step back and watch them work around the young woman with no ID as I try to piece together what might have happened to her.

  Chapter Three

  FINN

  “This isn’t good,” Marcus says, as if any dead person could be good. Well… I suppose some could be good. But not this. Not like this at all. “Especially when things are finally beginning to calm down between the humans and the vampires, we now have this. A vampire has attacked and killed a human.”

  “We’re not positive the vampire killed her,” I remind Marcus, even though I know it’s stupid to say. There are definite bite marks on her throat. Unless she had a partner that she allowed to bite her, it almost has to have been a vampire who killed her.

  We’d spent the rest of the day combing the crime scene, but no one was able to retrieve anything else that would help us with the case. The issue is that the river has been running higher and faster than it normally does for this time of the year with all the spring rain. Her body could have been tossed in feet away or miles away. Until we get information back from the autopsy, we just won’t know.

  We walk into the house where Artie instantly greets us with his wagging tail and ginormous body.

  “Let’s go get that kitten,” Marcus says.

  Clearly, I heard this man wrong. “Wait… what?” I ask as I look over at him. “Kitten? Like a real one or a stuffed one?”

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  “This day just went from horrid to amazing. I need a kitten. Does Artie get along with cats?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “We’ll find out.”

  “You can’t just find out.”

  “We’ll take him with us and if the kitten is still alive at the end, you can bring it home. Now let’s go and get this over with.”

  I really can’t believe Marcus is the one bringing this up. “You’re kind of excited about this, aren’t you? I honestly didn’t think you’d bite and I hadn’t even brought it up again, and yet here you are, rushing out to the car,” I tease as we head back out with Artie.

  Artie is so ecstatic he gets to go with us that he dances outside the car door. When Marcus opens the door, the dog has to crawl inside since he can’t stand or sit up inside the back seat without ducking his head. It doesn’t deter him from stuffing his head between the front seats and panting in my face.

  “You’re gonna get a fluffy little brother or sister,” I say as Marcus starts driving.

  “I want it to have short hair,” Marcus decides.

  “Do you like short-haired cats better?” I ask curiously.

  He’s got the stoic brooding look going on like he’s too embarrassed to admit anything.

  “Marcus?” I poke his side.

  “I just… found that the shorter-haired ones like to… lie near you more.”

  I clearly didn’t hear any of this right. “You wanna cuddle with the kitty! That’s so cute! My heart can’t take this.”

  He growls at me like a feral animal, which only results in making me laugh. “I don’t want to cuddle it. I just know that it’s what you want.”

  When he pulls up to the shelter, Marcus and I get out, leaving Artie inside with the windows cracked. I shut the door and turn and that’s the moment I see it.

  My eyes latch on to it as my heart expands, and I realize that insta-love is a true thing. A thing that I never once believed in and now I see that it’s not a fairy tale. It’s real.<
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  The dog prances down the sidewalk, feet rising as the tail wags back and forth. A cute pink tongue lolls from its mouth as its eyes lock onto mine, causing it to erupt in a whole-body wiggle.

  I rush forward and drop to my knees as the woman wearing a shelter shirt lets it run to me. It hits me with the strength of its full body as it dances on my leg and tries to lick my cheek, but since it’s only about seven pounds, it can’t even get near my face. The dog’s hair is a mess of brown and white splashes, with ears that stand straight up and look too big for its tiny brown head.

  “I think she likes you,” the woman says.

  “Can I pick her up?” I ask as I scratch the top of the dog’s head.

  “Of course.”

  I scoop her up and turn to look at Marcus who looks absolutely horrified.

  “I will not have a purse dog,” he says as he shakes his head. “No.”

  “Marcus, come on. Look at it.” The little dog immediately grabs the glove I use to hide my prosthesis and tries pulling it off.

  “You just like it because you finally weigh more than something.”

  “But, Marcus…” I lift her up and she licks the air since she can’t reach my face. It’s clear she already loves me, and I already know that I’ll be taking her home with me.

  “If you want a dog, we can get a dog. That’s not a dog. That’s a gremlin.”

  “But, Marcus.”

  He points at the car where Artie is trying his best to stuff his muzzle through the cracked window. “Artemus’s head is bigger than it.”

  “But, Marcus.”

  He sighs. He knows he can’t win when I set my mind to something. “I thought you wanted a cat?”

  “I changed my mind. We can get a cat later.”

  “Is your dog good with other dogs?” the lady asks.

  “Sadly, he loves all dogs,” Marcus says. He’s so funny.

  “We could let them meet,” she says.

  Marcus sighs, but goes back to the car and fetches Artemus. He snaps his leash on and pulls him out and I realize that Artie would crush the dog if he laid on her, or stepped on her, or even set his head on her.