“I think I had a dream last night,” Thomas tells me.
“You dreamed?” Gilbert asks his brother. “I haven’t had a dream in a thousand fucking years. The last dream I remember was before the curse. It was about a dark-haired whore from the brothel outside of town.”
I roll my eyes. “You can’t call women ‘whores’ anymore, you know. Even if they sell themselves for sex. It’s considered an offensive insult now.”
“What do you call them, then?”
“Well, it’s illegal, but they’re called prostitutes.”
Thomas makes a face. “That’s a weird word.”
“I guess. And there’s only a few brothels in the country that operate legally.”
“Interesting.” Thomas shrugs. “I always thought they were crude.”
“Not crude enough to stop going,” Gilbert mutters under his breath.
I laugh. “Times have changed, right?” I look at Thomas. “What was your dream about?”
He flashes me a cocky grin and wiggles his eyebrows. “You.”
Hasan puts another glass of water on the table. His hands are so big they dwarf the glass. “I think I had a dream, too. I don’t remember people, only feelings.”
“That’s a good sign, right?” I ask. “Becoming more and more human would make it easier to break the curse. You all look much more human than the first night you woke up.”
“We don’t dream.” Jacques’s voice is sharp behind us, startling me just a bit. I quickly turn around, finding him a few feet back in the darkened hall connecting the kitchen to the dining room. His wings block out any light behind him. Still, I notice the bits of gray coloring left on his skin, mottled and blotchy. That pained look is back on his face, and it hurts my heart. I want to go to him, put my lips against his, and feel my heart beat in tempo with his heart.
But I don’t. Instead, I turn the timer off with a few minutes to spare and pull the casserole from the oven. No one speaks as we fill our plates and sit around the table.
“You didn’t get very much,” Hasan says to me, eyeballing the small portion of food on my plate.
“I already had dinner,” I tell him. “With a crazy homeless man who had great info on the vampires.” Everyone stares at me. “I’ll explain,” I say, and recap everything Mr. McMillan told me.
“All signs point to the bar. And I did some more digging. The free clinic opened half a year after the bar. And they get a large donation every quarter from the people who own said bar.”
I look up, a smile on my face. I always feel a rush when I get a break in a case. I’ve been chasing this lead for days and finally got through to something.
“You’re right,” Thomas agrees. “It’s too big of a coincidence to be just that.”
“There are pretty strict regulations when it comes to donating blood,” I tell the guys, who thought the concept was weird. “I mean, you’ll always run into people who don’t follow protocol, but if a lot of blood went missing, it would be noticed. People would be fired and it’d get looked into. From what I’ve heard, it seems like the vampires really don’t want to be found, especially if they’ve been here for hundreds of years.”
I get up and go to my bag, pulling out a folder full of files. “I had an officer pull all unsolved cases with blood loss as the cause of death. I filtered through them to the ones that could be vampires, and most of these victims are homeless.”
“People no one will look for or even notice if they go missing,” Jacques finishes.
“Right,” I say, excitement building. I’m getting closer and closer to cracking this thing.
“What is your plan?” Hasan asks carefully. He wasn’t fond of my last plan so much, so he followed me to the bar.
“Tomorrow—during the day, of course—I’m going to check out the free clinic. You know, just poke around as a regular person, not as a cop, and see if I get a feel for anything. This clinic provides free healthcare to a lot of people, so I need to be careful in how I handle things. I don’t want it to get shut down if it doesn’t have to be.”
“And if it does?” Gilbert asks.
“Then I’ll shut it down. I can’t imagine the whole thing is just a ruse, though. Or maybe I don’t want it to be. It’s open from nine AM to four PM. Even in the winter, those are daylight hours with human employees.”
“And then what?” Hasan asks.
I shake my head. “I’m not sure, to be honest. I’m not going back to look for vampires at night again, I can tell you that much. Not until I’ve figured out how to do that thing again.” I hold up my hand, imagining it on fire. “But I did pick up some nice-sized sticks from the yard and brought several knives for whittling wooden stakes later.”
