Page 60 of Midnight Coven

He looked angry for the first time since they picked Nick up.

“Bullshit. Youdoknow it.”

Nick scowled, shaking his head. “No, I really don’t. I’ve never been to this house before in my life. I’ve never even stepped foot on this street before, I don’t think.” Aiming a harder, more meaningful stare at his boss, Nick gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. “Do you need me to check out the blood over there? Because I already have. I can smell it from here. Female. Approximately forty-two years old. Human. She had chicken for dinner… real chicken, not synthetic, so that tracks with the expensive restaurant they went to. Olive oil with real bread. Oregano, basil, rosemary, salt. The side was potato, garlic, onion, and broccoli. Also at least one glass of red wine. Cheesecake for dessert. She’s been dead around twenty-one hours.”

Morley just looked at him for a beat.

Then he seemed to give in again.

He blinked, frowning as he looked down at the bloodstain where the forty-two year old mother of two had died.

“That ability of yours… it’s downright creepy, Midnight.”

“But useful,” Nick said. “And it’s why I’m here, right? Show me where the other bodies were found. We should go over all the kill sites first. We can talk about any theories we might have after. Maybe by then forensics will have something for us that’s actually useful.”

Morley grunted.

His dark eyes continued to study Nick’s face.

By the end of that silent assessment, some of the anger had leached out of Morley’s expression, right before his mouth lost that hard look. Seeming to accept something he saw on Nick, he motioned with his head for the vampire to follow.

“All right,” he said. “Come on, then. Might as well get it over with.”

Nick grimaced.

Remembering exactly who and what had lived and died here, he didn’t answer.

He’d never get used to dead children.

Never.

Not even if he lived to be a thousand years.

CHAPTER13

REMEMBERING

It didn’t helpat all that Nick saw what he expected to see.

Being familiar with the layout of the house and the dead bodies didn’t make any of it easier to see in real life. The dead-smelling blood, the smell of slowly rotting corpses, the blood spatters and soaked sections of carpet. The way the different kill sites were positioned in different parts of the house… it was all the same.

Well, except for a few things.

The bodies had all still been there in Nick’s dream.

He could smell other things now, too: fluids used by the squints to pull DNA and blood samples from the carpets and the walls. Chemicals they used to identify patterns of blood, and to pull shoe prints from the hardwood and metal floors. He smelled the wafting scents of the human techs themselves, including one guy in particular who had badly needed a shower.

It clogged up some of the scents, but not enough for Nick to miss much.

The biggest difference from Nick’s dreams was the blood.

In Nick’s dream, not all the blood had been dead yet.

All of the humans smelled a lot better in his dream.

Nick had a memory of feeding on them.

He knew it wasn’t really him who had fed, but the sensations were clear in his mind, and disturbed him more than the obvious signs of violence. The Shadow fed on the youngest ones the most enthusiastically, nearly draining the two eight-year-old girls dry.

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