Then he waited, leaning forward, forearms braced on his thighs. If he’d been starving, he wouldn’t have been tempted by the blood pouring from Kenwick’s body.
Where did the thing go when the blood had no contact with anything but a corpse?
Hopefully, back to wherever it had come from.
“Hopefully?” Jack sputtered, walking shoulder to shoulder with Henry along the Stanley Park seawall.
Henry shrugged. “No way of knowing. I gathered up all the Asian artifacts, and then last night I poured holy water over them…”
“Holy water? Seriously?”
“Belt and suspenders, Inspector. Then I encased the artifacts in concrete…”
“Do I want to know…” Jack raised a hand, cutting himself off. “No, I don’t.”
“And then ‘asked’…”
“A vampire making air quotes. Now I’ve seen everything.”
“Asked,” Henry repeated, quoting more emphatically, “a young man on a container ship to drop them overboard mid-ocean.”
“Yeah, like I haven’t seen that plot before.”
“Safer than leaving them in Vancouver.”
“Fair enough.”
They walked a little further through fat snowflakes that melted as they hit the ground.
After a moment, Jack sighed. “So, VPD found a weapon in Kenwick’s library, no serial number, no prints, but ballistics traced it to a drive-by shooting we wanted the Pride for. They also found some old blood at the scene that matched one of the victims of a Pride massacre in a condo down the block from yours. The unofficial consensus is gang violence. Same old, same old. A lot of that going around. A lot of the other thing going around too.” He paused, then added, “Yourother thing. Ancient evil emerging from artifacts…”
“I understood what you meant.” And he wasn’t wrong. Like attracts like. Henry could see sinuous shadows moving under the water off the park. It might have been currents moving seaweed, but he doubted it. “I was thinking about moving back to Europe.”
“ ‘Was’?”
“After weighing the possibilities, I changed my mind.”
“Because you’re onlyhopefulthat whatever the hell possessed Robert Kenwick is gone?”
“That too.” Henry watched a snowflake land on the back of his hand. After a moment, he shook it off.
Jack watched it float downward. “You know, I said possessed by a demon or a vengeful ghost right at the beginning.”
“In reference to the man who murdered Kevin Groves. And, as I said then, he was just a person.”
“Just?”
“Maybe notjust.”
“Do we have the sick bastard?”
“No.” James Chin’s body hadn’t been found, but it had only been three days. The cold weather would keep the smell down; it might be weeks. Long enough that there’d be no dots to connect.
“Is the sick bastard going to cut again?”
NotDid you kill the sick bastard?Henry noted. “No.”
“Fair enough. This time.”
