“Still bleeding?” Cut a vampire and chances were he wouldn’t bleed. Kill a vampire, and chances were the thick, slow blood that moved sluggishly through his veins was going to make an appearance.
“Shot through the middle of his forehead.”
The horror of what she was saying clamored there in the back of my brain, but I didn’t have time for it right now.
I liked—had liked Sven. He seemed to fit into the town and the vampires here with ease, and had made friends with pretty much anyone he met.
I didn’t know anyone who would have wanted him dead. But he had come here after living a full, and probably overly-long, life outside this town. I didn’t know what had happened in his past, what he had done, what had been done to him in the years before he decided to move to Ordinary.
It was agreed that Old Rossi took care of vetting the fangers who became a part of Ordinary. I knew he was very thorough in checking their backgrounds.
I trusted Old Rossi as my father had before me and my grandfather had before him. Old Rossi knew which vampires to bring into Ordinary, and which to keep far, far away.
But I’d never had a vampire show up dead inside the town’s boundaries. Outside the town’s boundaries either for that matter.
“One bullet is not enough to take down a vampire.”
She rubbed her thumb over her middle finger, a nervous habit I hadn’t seen her do for a while. “It wasn’t just the bullet.”
“Okay?”
“There were symbols drawn on his chest and both palms.”
“What kind of symbols?”
“I’ve never seen them before.”
That wasn’t a good sign. Myra was the daughter Dad had bequeathed all of his books and journals to. She had been steadily reading her way through them for over a year.
“What were they drawn with?”
“Blood.”
“Excuse me?”
This was a vacation town. A sleepy beach town where little kids built sand castles and our highest repeat crime was expired parking meters. We didn’t do corpses covered in weird symbols drawn in blood.
“Blood,” I said.
“Blood. Looked like it to me. If it isn’t, we’ll know soon. I had the body delivered to Old Rossi.”
“Not the morgue?”
“You think someone other than Old Rossi would know more about this? How to kill a vampire with only a bullet and some squiggly lines?”
She was right. Old Rossi had been in town for several hundred years. Back when it was just a spot where gods had chosen to vacation and creatures had decided to settle. As I understood it, he had been born mortal and done a stint as a soldier. I didn’t know which war.
The story of how Rossi had been turned had only been pried out of him once, by some great-grand so far in my past I’d lost count of how many generations back. That story had been passed down in oral tradition, details lost over the years. By the time my father heard it, then passed it on to me, the names and dates had all been blurred by voices long dead.
The Old Rossi I knew was the same man my father and grandfather knew. To all outward appearances, he was a middle-aged, easy-going hippy sort of guy who ran naked meditation sessions and crystal-powered yoga raves.
He had, as far as I knew, left his long-ago-past life in his long ago past.
Rossi would know every way a vampire could be killed. Myra was right to have sent Sven’s body to him.
“Have you heard from him yet?”
“He wants to see you.”
