I needed to watch the light fade from someone else’s eyes and enjoy it. I needed something—anything—to quell the panic I felt at the prospect of no longer belonging to Doctor De La Cruz.
It was foolish to think I ever could belong to him in the first place. He saved lives. I took them. We weren’t the same.
“There was a shooting in East Los Angeles a few days back,” Harris said with a sigh. “A mugging gone wrong, probably. We won’t catch the guy who did it.”
I looked up from my cuticles long enough to meet Harris’s gaze—a mistake. Because he was looking at me with concern, even though the last traces of his scowl still lingered.
“I’m looking for much darker blood tonight, if you have it,” I told him, striving to sound flippant. “Please and thank you.”
“Cole, what the fuck?” Harris let out a long breath and shook his head, though his gaze never left mine. “Are you okay?”
“I’m splendid, thank you for asking. I just need a kill. Immediately.”
“I’m not a vending machine.”
“This is Los Angeles. You might as well be.”
He shook his head again, then rolled his eyes heavenward. After a pause, he grabbed one of the files from the pile on his desk and held it up. “Fine. This one, then.”
I took the manila folder and flipped it open. The vacant, staring eyes of the victim—a pale blond boy—gazed sightlessly back at me from the photograph clipped to the front page of the report.
“It happened a block away from the Memorial Coliseum a few days ago, early morning. The victim, a sophomore at the University of Southern California, was walking home from work. He was stabbed forty-seven times, right there on the street.”
Before I could stop myself, I shuddered.
The young man in the photograph was so young. He hardly looked old enough to vote. I’d had over eight hundred years.He’d barely had any time at all. Someone had taken his life from him.
He was covered in blood.
So much blood.
He must have been so frightened in his last moments…
“Cole,” Harris breathed from the desk. I could feel his eyes on me, but I couldn’t look away from the photograph—at the poor young man whose life had been ripped away.
He had been stabbed to death. Someone out there had stabbed him forty-seven times.
“Are there any leads?” I managed, not sounding flippant at all.
Did my voice always sound like it came from somewhere far away? Were the walls always this close together? Did the police station always feel this unbearably warm? Did I always wish I could still get sick at the sight of this kind of violence—the way a deep, primal part of me now instinctively wanted to?
What was happening to me?
Harris stood, and the movement forced me to wrench my gaze from the photo. He loomed over me looking uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next. I wasn’t sure what expression I wore, but the shock on his face told me it wasn’t good.
“There are no leads,” Harris said slowly, still watching me. His words were hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure whether to take the file back, give me a hug, or both. Thankfully, he did neither. Instead, he let out a long breath, his eyebrows knitting together. “Christ, it’s like you’ve seen a ghost, Cole.”
“I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies. Thousands,” I told him, forcing my voice to sound flat, even though my heart was still in my throat. “This one is no different.”
Harris snorted, though there was no humor in it. “Because you’re so fucking unaffected, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Look, do you want a different file? I have an elderly woman who was shot in a carjacking. She’s tough, and she lived—but the guy was clearly trying to kill her. He probably fits the bill, too.”
I glanced back down at the young man in the photo. His body was lying cold and lifeless on a slab in a morgue somewhere. All his years had been stolen. And his killer was still out there. Still drawing breath.
But not for very much longer.
