Page 81 of Midnight Coven

When Nick glanced a second time at the detective with the salt and pepper gray hair, the old man was already heading for the first flight of stairs.

Without talking about it, they each walked up one side of the waterfall staircase.

Nick went up the stairs on the left.

Morley took the stairs on the right.

That was more habit too, probably for both of them. It crossed Nick’s mind they should cover as much ground as they could, looking for clues.

Nick didn’t see anything on the steps.

He didn’t smell anything, either.

No blood. Not stronger or more recent scent of vampire.

He smelled the opposite, in fact. The smell of vampire where Jordan was struck him as significantly more recent. Notimmediaterecent, but the owner of that scent left maybe two hours ago. Three at most.

The scent on the stairs struck him as closer to five, six hours old.

Whoever had been in here, he must have gone up this set of stairs, then taken another way back down, likely a set of stairs or an elevator in some other part of the house.

As he climbed, Nick continued to look around the massive room.

The quietness still struck him more than anything.

It was eerily quiet.

No sentient machines hummed in his vampire ears. No A.I. in the walls. No monitors on anywhere Nick could hear. The only nearby sounds came from water from the fountain in the driveway, the one with all the stone koi, and the sound of Morley walking up the steps. Past that, Nick could hear wind in the trees outside, softer bird calls, what might have been an owl. He could hear bats using their sonar if he really listened.

He could hear Morley breathing.

If the fountain hadn’t overpowered his ears, he likely could have heard Jordan breathing in the room upstairs. As it was, he could hear Morley’s heart beating, even from the opposite staircase. He could hear the quiet of everything else.

Being a vampire usually meant blocking out sounds to get to the one you wanted.

Here, there wasn’t a whole lot to block out.

Nick’s eyes continued to scan the floors and walls.

Everything he saw reinforced that impression of an odd mishmash of European gothic with modern and ancient Japan. Even the Japanese elements struck him as strangely dark, twisted to align more with the chosen European pieces.

Antique tables held vases and statues of bronze and black stone.

Most of what Nick saw seemed to be either black or white, occasionally accented with deep purples, midnight blues, dark greens, very dark reds. There seemed to be a lot of marble to go with the marble floors, but even the art on the walls was mostly leached of color: either black, or bone white, or some shade of gray.

A number of silk hangings and paintings decorated the walls up the stairs, most of them modern and expensive-looking recreations of traditional Japanese brushstroke styles. Nick saw landscapes of Mount Fuji and rice paddies and one larger painting of downtown Tokyo more from his era, meaning back when he’d been human.

Even with him staring around at everything, gazing over the massive chandelier made up of tiny, metal, gold-colored carp, Nick got up the stairs twice as fast as Morley did.

He still mostly looked for blood. Smelled for blood.

There was none here, from what Nick could tell.

None on the stairs. None on the walls.

None on the marble.

That probably should have been a relief. Given what Jordan told them about the vamp killing everyone in the house, however, it only disturbed him.

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