Page 15 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker)
“I’m sure I’ve seen worse,” I promised. The dubious look on his face was more than a little scary, but he opened the door anyway.
And he was right. Frankly, “not pretty” was too kind.
CHAPTER 5
Twist craned her head around to look, but even she didn’t ask if the remains of Charles Mailloux were food.
There was a spray of blood all along one pink and beige striped wall, and a brass vase laying upended on the floor, its flowers strewn everywhere, themselves spattered with blood as well. It painted an especially macabre picture, since they’d once been pale pink roses.
The murder weapon was instantly clear, as the solid-looking vase had a dent in its side the size of a human head.
Vampire, my helpful brain pointed out.Human strength probably wouldn’t dent the thing, however hard they’d hit him.
Correspondingly, one side of Charles’s face was entirely caved in, blood and brain matter spattered around him on the floor. His one remaining light brown eye was wide, like he was terrified, or maybe shocked. I was grateful the rug underneath him had been red already, to cover up some tiny measure of the gore.
Cain was watching me, so I’m sure he didn’t miss that I went a little green just looking at the scene. The daddy vibes I’d always gotten from him were proven even more true in the moment,since his reaction was to step between me and the horror, cutting off my view of it.
“Are you okay?”
I had this knee jerk urge to assure him everything was fine, but clearly, nothing was fine at all. Fuck me, Charles was dead. My mother’s best frenemy since before I was born, gone. Finally, I managed to force words out. “Can...can we go back out?”
“Of course,” he agreed. “It is Mailloux, then? The maid who called us hasn’t stopped crying, and Mr. Mailloux’s assistant isn’t here yet. We called her, but she said she’s in San Diego and can’t make it back until sometime this evening. The butler’s about eighty, and I was a little hesitant to drag him into this mess to identify?—”
“It’s definitely Charles,” I interrupted, nodding. His assistant claiming to be in San Diego made sense, as she was also a vampire, and despite Davin’s example, most of them couldn’t just wander out in the sunshine. I hoped for her sake that the cops didn’t catch her in the lie. Well, assuming she wasn’t the killer, I hoped that.
I dropped the bag of food onto a leather-upholstered bench in the hallway next to me, and chafed my arms with my hands, even though I was still wearing my jacket. I wasn’t cold, was I?
Yes, I was freezing.
I hadn’t thought the whole house was cold before.
There was a weird thing about being raised by vampires. Every human I’d ever known had a story about the first time someone close to them had died. Grandma, or great grandpa, or an aunt, usually when they were nine or ten or fifteen.
Me? I was more than thirty, and I had never even been to a funeral. My mother’s parents had been dead for who knew how long—probably before America was a country, let alone before my birth. I had no idea if I had any family at all other than her. And she was surrounded by vampires. Vampires, who didn’t getsick, rarely died in accidents, and were damned hardy even when someone attacked them with intent to kill.
Plus, Mother kept a stranglehold on the vamps in the area, and any infighting was taken very seriously. This wasn’t like New York, where younger vampires jockeyed for minor political positions by killing each other. If Mother caught any vampire killing other vamps, she would take matters into her own hands and put an end to it, however she had to. Same if they got caught killing humans.
Mother was going to have a meltdown when she found out about this.
Or, I supposed, she already had, since her assistant had called me at noon, when they both should have been long abed, to insist that I come investigate.
I slumped onto the bench next to the bag of food, and instantly, Twist started trying to squirm her way out of my coat pocket. So I pulled her out and set her on the bench beside me, then opened the bag of food, taking out a wrapped chicken breast and setting it in front of her.
Detective Cain, meanwhile, squatted down in front of me—damn, he was in fine shape for a man over forty—and he looked up at me, eyes so very blue and earnest. “I’m sorry, Kn-Flynn. It is Flynn right?”
“Yeah. Flynn.” My words came out weird, stilted and dead somehow, like maybe Charles was the one speaking. Charles, who was instead lying on the floor in a puddle of his own blood.
“I’m sorry, Flynn, but could you tell me about the—about Mr. Mailloux?”
Of course. The maid hadn’t stopped crying, he’d said. Still, there was the butler, who doubtless knew more than I did.
But I knew things as well, and if the cops cared to do their jobs, they would want to talk to everyone, to make sure they saw not just one biased side, but the whole picture.
But how the hell did I explain things to them without outing the existence of vampires? Humans had reacted badly enough to their own people performing magic. Only a year or so before, some cult had been uncovered who had been trying to kill a whole group of magic users, just based on their specialty. The human race was not ready to deal with the reality of vampires.
“I guess it’s, um, some kind of rich asshole thing,” I started, tentative, but warmed to the story as it came out making sense. “Charles and my mother were in competition. Always trying to buy the same pieces of art, hire the same popular landscaper, just...out rich-douchebag each other? But I think they were also kind of friends. They had a lot in common, obviously. Always at the same parties. Always giving out friendly insults that really meant the other had outdone them and they were jealous.”
The truth was that they had both wanted to be senator of Los Angeles, but Mother had been the one chosen. She was older, and richer, and more powerful than him in every way. She had even lived in Avalon longer—she’d been there since the town’s founding in the seventeen hundreds. Funnily enough, though Charles had looked like he was in his seventies, he’d been closer to six hundred, and Mother...well, no one truly knew how old she was, but she was definitely older than him.
