“So if you know something, and I need to know it, you’ll tell me.” Edmund didn’t reply and I dropped the towel to settle a mean little smile on him. “Yes or no, primo?”
“If I can answer, I shall,” he said carefully. Which meant that he might know stuff he had sworn to keep secret.
Vamps always had secrets. But this should be common vamp knowledge. “Are vamps always beheaded after they die a second time?”
“If their master is not able to revive them, yes. No Mithran wants to return as a revenant.”
“And then their heads are reattached for the grave.”
“Yes. For the services.” I saw enlightenment dawn in hiseyes. “But their spines and tendons are not reattached. It’s cosmetic only.”
“So properly interred vamps shouldn’t be able to rise from the grave, heads in place. Their heads should loll over and bounce as they walk.”
“No. They should not be able to rise at all.” Edmund looked troubled. He oughta.
“But the dog-fanged vamps are rising, walking, seeing, eating, and drinking. Making either the vamps themselves different or the method in which they were prepared for the grave different. Who are the vamp morticians?”
“Mateo and Laurie Caruso,” Edmund said, “of Caruso Family Funeral Services. For the last two hundred years and more.” He sounded unhappy about it. I had to wonder why.
“Vamps?”
“Yes.”
I thought about his tone and the unhappy look on his face. “Mateo and Laurie Caruso. Do they have dog fangs?”
“Yes.” He looked utterly saddened at speaking the word. The kind of sad that spoke of a personal history, one filled with heartbreak.
“You and Laurie. You used to have a thing, didn’t you.”
“If by ‘have a thing,’ you mean did we have a romantic relationship once upon a time, yes. We were... close.”
Bruiser got in the limo and began to wipe off on the fluffy towels. The storm had lessened again, and beyond the patting sounds of Bruiser’s towel, I heard nothing. “Shemmy,” I said, “take us to Caruso Family Funeral Services.”
Bruiser stopped patting and looked at me, then at Ed. Comprehension dawned in his eyes. “Oh. Bouvier clan.”
Just in case he wasn’t on our page, I said, “Dog fangs. All the risen revs had them. Heads, mouths, eyes, ears, legs, arms, everything works and nothing should work at all.”
“Yes.” The limo pulled away as Bruiser retrieved a small cell from a pocket of the limo and punched in a number. When Scrappy answered, he said, “Tell the Master of the City that his faithful Enforcer and his faithful Onorio are en route to Caruso Family Funeral Services.” He listened a moment, said, “Thank you,” and disconnected.
“Faithful?” I asked.
“There is only one funeral home in the city for Mithrans. If we have to kill the Carusos, I wanted to remind Leo that we do so while still being loyal to him.”
“Why?”
“Mithran funerals and burials are very circumscribed, sacred, and private affairs,” Bruiser said. “Almost holy. Without the Caruso family, there will be no one to provide the correct interment procedures for the city’s undead. Things will become difficult.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. I’ll keep them alive if possible. But if they’re raising the revenants or helping the people who are, then they go down. Unless I can use them.”
“Understood,” Bruiser said. Then he did a strange thing. He turned off his cell before gesturing that we all do likewise. We all did and then held the cells tightly beneath an armpit to muffle any remaining mic. “One thing you should know,” he said. “Leo’s eyes among the Europeans has not always been reliable.”
Leo’s eyesrefereed to Leo’s Madam Spy. That she had not always been reliable suggested that she was either easily confused or a turncoat, a double agent, spying for Leo and giving intel to both sides. That sucked. And that was possibly deadly. I nodded and we all turned on our cells. I quickly texted Alex to find and turn off the security system at the funeral home. This was Enforcer business, not cop business. And if the morticians were EV spies, planted here a couple of centuries ago, then we needed to keep the Eurotrash from discovering that we were onto them.
Eli shook himself. Blinked. Looked around the limo until his gaze settled on Bruiser. “You killed a little girl?”
Bruiser repeated his previous statements, nearly word for word, his tone careful, his eyes on Eli’s hands, close to his weapons. “Her name was Joan Bennett. She stood four feet nine, and she looked like a child. She was staked and beheaded in nineteen forty-three for killing two of her human servants. Not a child. But you were seeing a child.”
Eli frowned, his eyes staring into a past only he could see. “A little girl blew herself up. Killed three of my men. Nearly killed me. She was maybe ten.” His eyes filled with tears and he blinked against them. “I saw her coming. There wasnothing to suggest that she was a danger, but... I knew it. Somehow. And I didn’t take her down. I just watched her walk up to us and... If I’d just shot her, my men would have lived.” Eli’s expression didn’t change. His hands clenched and then released. Rain dripped off his fingertips. “I couldn’t do it. I knew what she was going to do and I couldn’t... couldn’t do it. I just stood there.” A single tear gathered and fell, trickling down his rain-slicked face. And still his expression was stone.
