“I’m going to need more than that if I’m going to solve this problem.”
“Is that what you’re going to do, Delaney? Solve this problem?” The fangs were starting to show, his usual hippy-chill attitude peeling away to give me a peek at the animal inside.
“I understand you take care of your own and the threats against them. But this is murder and I am the law in this town. Even if we buried Sven’s death under a convenient story of him leaving for brighter horizons, we know someone killed him.
“They left him like that so we could find him. So we would know what they did to a citizen of our town. That won’t stand with me. And it shouldn’t stand with you.”
He watched me with that damned steady gaze, the look that made me wonder how many of my fears he was cataloguing to use against me later.
“It wasn’t a threat.” Rossi said.
“Really? Because it looks like a threat to me.”
“It was an invitation.”
The biscuit and bacon I’d eaten earlier turned in my stomach. “Is that what the symbols mean? Some kind of invite?”
“No. The symbols are Sven’s plucking apart, his undoing, his final death. His body is the invitation.”
“To what?”
“War.”
I let that sit between us for a couple seconds. Someone must have closed a door too hard somewhere in the house because the egg shells on their glass pedestals shivered and chimed.
“All right. What war? With whom? Over what? And if other vampires can’t see this ichor techne, then was it an invite to you or to someone else, someone non-vampiric?”
“I was a mortal man many years ago, Delaney. When Rome seemed to rule the world.” A shadow crossed his eyes, but it was not the black of killing. I thought it might be memory or regret.
I couldn’t imagine looking back at memories from so long ago. Rossi had to be over two thousand years old.
Holy crap.
“This has something to do with Sven’s death?”
“I was a soldier,” he continued. “No different than the men beside me. Until we faced an army from the east. We were slaughtered, left broken and bleeding. Their soldiers defeated us. Overwhelmed by numbers, we fell.
“But it was that night, as the wounded got on with the business of becoming the dead that the true enemy arrived. Devils, demons with fangs and a hunger for blood. There were only two of them. Impossibly tall and pale.
“They moved through the wounded, searching, sniffing. I had fallen near another soldier. Near my brother-in-arms. Myfriend.”
He practically spat that last word.
“I don’t know which of us made a noise. Maybe it was me. That’s...” He shook his head. “Too long ago. But they heard and they came sniffing our way. We were both drawn up and feasted upon. They drank our blood. It was horrifying. Painful. Until it wasn’t. Until we begged for it.”
“Vampires,” I said to break the silence.
“Our makers. My maker.”
“Are they still alive? Do you think they’re behind this?”
“They are not behind this.”
“What about your friend? The other soldier.”
“Lavius is dead.”
“Are you sure?”
