I stood, pulled off my jacket, handed it to Wrassler, and accepted a heavy-duty flashlight from him. The beam was blinding. This sucker was a big, heavy, well-balanced weapon, enough to decapitate a zombie with one good blow. I almost smiled at that thought.
Bending low to the ground, I duckwalked across the rammed stones and inside, shuffling my feet through thedebris on the floor to stand. There was room for only one person in the mess.
There were ashes on the floor where yesterday there had been body parts. The sun had been enough to burn them, and the smell of smoke, scorched stone, and bone dust hanging on the air brought on a sneeze. Then a few more.
When they passed, I shined the light around. Wooden coffins had been pulled from their vaults and dumped. Amaury’s, two child-sized coffins, three against the far wall. I searched for the coffin with Leo’s stone nameplate and found it in the corner near the warped door. The lid was closed. I shoved the coffin around, and the rank stench of scorched rotten blood hit me as the light beam played along the surface. The wood had once held a beautiful grain; now it was raised and rough where my fingers touched it.
“Jane?” Bruiser asked from outside.
“In a minute,” I said.
I didn’t really want to open the casket, but I had to know. I slid my fingers around the crack and found gouges in the wood, as if someone had used a crowbar on it. The lid was no longer sealed. I lifted up on it, bent, and aimed my flashlight and my left eye into the crack. The stench boiled out. The wood casket was lined with seamless metal, and there was no fluffy satin stuff for the body to rest on. There was a layer of scorched blood and char.
But there was no body. A faint shudder of shock cascaded through me.
Before Leo was interred, his casket had been filled with the blood of his enemies, forcibly bled as some kind of weird vampire tribute. That blood was supposed to give a vamp a chance to be thrice born—raised from the dead a second time—so why waste it on fabric. The blood in the bottom was dried, cooked, and so rotten that Beast shied away from it.
There were no ashes. No bones. No body.
Leo’s body was missing.
I wasn’t sure what I felt about that, my emotions frozen and contained, as if I held tightly to them. I opened the casket fully and inspected it with the light and with my fingers, gingerly, not touching the old blood, but moving fast, before the sunlight could set it aflame. The char in thebottom wasn’t scuffed, as if Leo had moved around. There was only the impression of a body in the bottom layer of burned blood.
On the inside of the casket was a long slide latch, a way for the thrice-born to get out of the coffin if they came back with sufficient strength. This one was still latched, though badly damaged by the crowbar.
Something caught my attention. Scratches on the metal, all along the length of the slide latch. I touched them with my fingers. They were fresh, with no blood caked in them.
Something in the back of my mind whispered that vamp fingernails were tough enough to scratch metal. But Leo had been completely covered in the pooled blood. It would have been all over and under his vamp claws. These scratches were clean.
Had someone stolen his body and then staged it to look as if he had come back from the dead a second time? I went back over the entire casket and found nothing significant. Satisfied that I would accomplish nothing more, I laid the casket lid down and duckwalked back out.
The day was much brighter than when I went in, and I squinted as I handed Bruiser the flashlight. “Better see for yourself,” I said.
He hesitated, then crawled into the dark hole. I could hear shuffling and Bruiser moving around. Wrassler questioned me with his face, eyebrows going up.
I shook my head. “Let him make up his mind what he’s seeing.”
Ten minutes later, Bruiser crawled back out. There was dust and ash all over the knees of his pants, smudged across his face. His fingers were coated with a grimy, oily, rank layer of old blood. As he stood in the sunlight, the blood flamed and was gone. His skin seemed unharmed, which was weird because I could feel the heat where I stood.
Quietly, Bruiser said, “If this is real and not staged, then Leo was awake and could not pull the latch. But I have my doubts.”
“Me too.”
“No blood in the scratches?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Yup. Come on. Let’s check out the chapel before we leave.”
Sabina, the outclan priestess, had either lived in the chapel or used it as a storage place for the relics she kept hidden in her crypt. Now, however, there was nothing left of the chapel or the crypt. The Firestarter had destroyed everything.
Like a punch to the gut, I remembered the first time I had come inside the chapel. I had been with Rick LaFleur, and we both came close to being dead. The memory of that event bled through me.
The chapel had been one long room: white-painted walls and backless wood benches in rows. It had been nighttime, and moonlight had poured through red-paned stained glass windows, tingeing everything with the tint of watered blood. At the front was a tall table with a candle and a bowl of smoking incense filling the air with the scent of rosemary, sage, and bitter camphor. There was a rocking chair beside the table and a low stone bier carved with a statue lying faceup, marble hands crossed on her chest. The stone woman was Sabina.
Bending and drawing on Beast’s strength, I pushed the stone cover, and it moved with a heavy, grating sound, stone on stone. It weighed several hundred pounds, and it took work to move it even a few inches. Behind me, Rick lit the candles with his cigar lighter. Holding one, he joined me, and we looked through the narrow opening into the crypt.
There was no coffin in the bier; the stone was lined with tufted white silk and boxes. I pulled three boxes out of the narrow crack I had made, exposing a bit of parchment from a scroll. It was so old it crumbled, flaking away. I closed the box and opened the next one. Inside the velvet-lined interior was cradled the largest pieces of the Blood Cross in the Americas, the ancient wood sticks wire wrapped, shaping them into a cross.
“You would dare to steal from me?” Before I could turn, Sabina was on me, fangs at my throat. Claws tearing my flesh.
