Bitten (The Graced Series Book 2) Page 2

  And Alice wouldn’t be able to see a thing. Darkness was no blessing for the human population, not in a vampire-run town, and the street lights didn’t extend far into aristo parks like this one. “I need to look at the body.”

  Dinya shrugged. “Figured as much.”

  “I mean, do you mind if I check it out with these onlookers here? Or you want less of a crowd?” The presence of the aristo audience indicated to Alice that the victim was a vampire. A human body would have barely earned a glance from the bejeweled fribbles.

  Dinya looked around the crowd and made her decision. Shoving her whistle into her mouth, she blew a series of ear-piercing blasts. Most of the vampires pressed their hands against their ears; some even had their eyes scrunched shut.

  Effective, Alice thought. Perhaps she should invest in a whistle herself. Not that she had a lot to do with vampires, but you couldn’t predict the future.

  “You lot,” Dinya shouted. “Clear out, we need to continue this investigation.”

  One man in the crowd drew himself up to his full height — which wasn’t a lot greater than Alice’s. His chin was almost obscured by his collar, and he had the most obnoxious yellow and pink waistcoat/cravat combination she’d ever had the misfortune of seeing.

  The aristo spluttered. “What did you just say?”

  “Clear out!” Dinya repeated. Rather tactful for the day captain, Alice thought.

  The vampire took a step closer. “Do you have any idea who you’re speaking to, human?”

  Dinya played with her whistle. The other vampires looked nervous. “I don’t care if you’re the king himself, which you ain’t, cos I’ve met the man. I have a crime scene and I want it cleared of spectators.”

  The idiot vampire’s expression turned hard. Oh boy, this isn’t going to end well. Dinya eyed the man off, a faint smile dancing on the edges of her mouth. With the captain’s height and musculature, Alice would put money on the human over the vampire any day of the week, no matter that vampires were biologically stronger. And she’d bet that Dinya would enjoy beating some sense into the fool; the woman wasn’t known for her tolerance of vampires. That’s why she was the day captain.

  “I am going to report you to your superior for this—”

  Dinya laughed. “I am the superior. Your report has been noted and filed under ‘I’, for ‘I couldn’t give a fuck.’ Now leave.”

  The aristo’s mouth opened, and Dinya’s hand dropped to her steel baton. “Do I need to charge you for obstructing an investigation?”

  The vampire spluttered something outraged, then turned on his heel and stormed from the park. The remaining onlookers trailed after him, no doubt wishing to dissect the scene in full.

  Once they’d left, Alice knelt on the soft grass next to the corpse. The dew from the green blades soaked into her black pants. She held her breath the way she always did when uncovering a corpse. Some small part of her never forgot what it was like to lift that sheet, to see someone you loved lying there, dead and forever gone.

  Slowly, Alice pulled back the cover, exposing the victim’s face. The extended fangs and purple eyes — not to mention the long hair and youthful features — clearly marked the dead man as a vampire. No one she knew. No one she’d have ever even met. She didn’t deal with dead — or alive — vampires particularly often. The former, because they were long-lived and didn’t tend to attract the interest of the city coroner unless there was an accident; the latter, because she was just about as common as you could get. Vampires were generally from aristo families, or were trying to become aristos; they didn’t tend to mix with lowly humans like her.

  “Do you know who he is?” Alice asked.

  Dinya crouched down next to her. “Not yet. One of those fools could have probably identified him for me, but I figure we’re better off checking the body out first. Once the aristos work out it’s one of their own, we’re going to have a hard time keeping custody of the corpse.”

  Alice threw the sheet off the body. Noting the dead man’s dark-blue tailored jacket, white silk shirt and tan linen pants, she came to the same conclusion as the captain. The vampire was an aristo — or at least came from money. Lots of it. The coin spent on clothes like these could have fed, clothed and housed a human family for four months.

  Alice began her inspection in earnest, starting with the man’s head and working her way down.

  “No marks at the neck. Jacket is undone. Shirt is buttoned haphazardly. No signs of struggle — hands aren’t cut or bleeding and no foreign matter under the fingernails. No bruising on the abdomen. Body is still in rigor. Minor wound on the anterior.” She didn’t bother undoing his pants. She’d do that when she stripped the body for an autopsy, if she had a chance to do one. She glanced at his feet, which had been shoved into a pair of unlaced shoes, then turned the body over with a grunt. He was surprisingly heavy.

  Looking up, she nodded at Dinya. “Can you help me get his jacket off?”

  Together, they cut the jacket off the body. It would have been nearly impossible to get it off otherwise. Underneath the jacket, rusty colored blood stained the back of the silk shirt. She lifted the garment up.

  “Staked in the back,” she said. “Lividity shows he was laid on his back and left there soon after. That — with the rigor — indicates the victim was killed less than twelve hours ago.” Looking around the park, she nodded to herself. “No doubt dumped here afterward. He was dressed rather quickly first.”

  Murder, then. The reason she’d become a doctor. She’d started out hoping to save people, but had soon realized that she was drawn to helping those it was too late to heal. And so she’d learned all there was to know about dead bodies, and the information they could share. When asked why she’d gone into the death market, she usually said it was because dead people couldn’t lie like the living, but that was only part of the reason.

  “They picked a rather public place to leave the body,” Dinya commented, running a hand over her baton.

  “Kill an aristo vampire, dump them in an aristo park? My guess is it’s a message, to get someone’s attention.” While Alice wasn’t a guard, there was something to be said about knowing death as well as she did.

  Dinya tapped the whistle to her chin, then turned in a slow circle, her brown gaze taking in the park. “Or maybe,” the day captain said, “it’s a warning.”

  Chapter 4

  Trsetti village

  The villagers caught up to Fin just before he reached the camp. One managed to grab his shoulder, throwing him off balance, as another landed a lucky punch, hitting him square in the eye. Pain burst through him, and his eye immediately began to swell. It was going to leave one heck of a bruise come morning.

  Ducking another club swung at his head, Fin tried to dart between the towering trees, hoping that Byrne had heard the commotion and was already coming to investigate. When a hand grabbed the back of his leather jacket and jerked him off balance, he realized that he was not going to be quite that lucky. He threw out his arms to try and keep upright, but a villager punched him in the stomach. The air whooshed from his lungs.

  Hitting dirt, Fin cried out as pain shot up his chest. Not the ribs. He really hoped that he hadn’t broken any. Ribs were a bitch to heal.

  “That half-demon bastard fucked my wife!”

  A boot shot out and smashed him in his aching chest and he heard something crack loudly.

  Mother fucker.

  Gasping for breath and clutching at his side, Fin curled into a ball. He didn’t have enough air to set the man right. The guy’s wife had fucked him. She’d put an aphrodisiac in his drink, for blood’s sake.

  Why hadn’t Byrne come blasting out of the trees and scared the living daylights out of these backward villagers yet? Maybe he hadn’t heard the fight. Or he’d moved the camp. Or maybe he’d just left Fin to fend for himself. It had to happen sooner or later.

  “You said he raped your wife?” Another man was speaking now,
his voice gravelly and thick. Probably the town’s headman; he smoked like he was dying of thirst in a desert, and each cigar was his only source of hydration.

  “Not rape. But she swears he seduced her with his foreign ways. His demon eyes.”

  The. Bitch.

  “I thought he had normal eyes.”

  “Mostly.”

  “No mercy then. We can’t risk other women thinking they can cuckold their husbands. Or fuck demons.”

  The blows rained down on him again, every villager who’d followed him kicking, punching and spitting on him. I’m going to die.

  Curled into a protective ball, his hands and arms covering his head, he thought he was hallucinating when a roar shattered the air, and the assault faltered.

  “What was that?”

  Then came the sound of breaking tree limbs and foliage. And the screaming started.

  “Bear! It’s a bear!”

  Fin wanted to shout in relief, but he could scarcely catch his breath. And what if this wasn’t salvation? It could very well be a real bear. His eyes had swollen shut from the beating, and there was no way for him to know.

  “Run! We must have woken it up from hibernation.”

  “Just break this bastard’s neck and be done with it.”

  Hands grabbed him roughly, large rough palms securing a hold on his head. Fin twisted and turned, trying to throw them off.

  The hands disappeared.

  More screams erupted, and the sound of footsteps pounding on the forest floor reached Fin’s ears, among the shouts of rage and terror.

  Then one of the most beautiful noises he’d ever heard, a deep, rumbling voice, pierced the forest. “Leave him!”

  Byrne.

  “Demon!”

  “Monster!”

  “He seduced my poor wife!”

  “Really?” Byrne growled. Fin sensed someone standing over him, heard several loud sniffs. Man, he hated when Byrne did that.

  “Then why does he stink of aphrodisiac?”

  Fin winced. Of course Byrne would be able to smell that. But he wished he could see the remaining villagers’ faces; he was surprised they had lingered long enough to speak with an angry were. Maybe he’d underestimated them.

  Or they were just idiots.

  “Of what?”

  “Minar root. It’s an aphrodisiac,” Byrne repeated.

  “Maybe they don’t know what the word means either,” Fin gasped in his native language. “They’re certainly dumb enough not to.”

  Byrne didn’t laugh. “Then tell me a word they will understand.”

  Fin coughed, blood trickling down his chin. “Sex stimulant? I don’t know. Do I look like a fucking dictionary?”

  Well, he kind of was. But now was not the time to get into that.

  “Someone gave him something to make him horny,” Byrne stated.

  Fin loved that the guy was straight to the point.

  “Liar!”

  “What did you call me?” Byrne’s voice was soft, but Fin could picture what the bear looked like. Even in his human suit, the towering man could be terrifying. Or he might be in his in-between form. Even worse.

  “I—”

  “If you want to survive the day, I’d suggest you leave.”

  “But—”

  Almost conversationally, Byrne said, “It’s been a while since I had human steak.”

  The sound of their hurried departure would have made Fin laugh, if he hadn’t hurt so much. Minutes passed as Byrne waited to make sure the villagers wouldn’t return, and then the were’s hands were on him, businesslike, deftly checking Fin’s injuries.

  “I swear, Fin, you’re a magnet for trouble.”

  “No shit,” Fin muttered.

  “Can you walk?”

  His body said he couldn’t, but pride made Fin say, “I can try.”

  Byrne pretty much had to carry him back to their camp; Fin could barely see anything more than a blurry grayish line. Soon he was warming by a fire, the comforting pain of a blanket spread over his shoulders. He didn’t want to think about the bruises he was going to have if even wearing a blanket hurt.

  Then Byrne began the long job of patching him up and of telling him how much of an idiot he was. The trouble was, Fin couldn’t really argue with him. One, because Byrne was stitching up the worst of his cuts, and the bear wasn’t above making it hurt if he thought Fin needed it; and two, because his friend was right. Fin had been an idiot, but he wasn’t going to agree with the other man, just on principle.

  “What took you so long to find me?” Fin grumbled about halfway through the stitching. He still couldn’t see properly, especially as he was holding a deer steak over his eyes. He wasn’t exactly sure how this was meant to help the swelling, but Byrne had insisted on it.

  “Oh, it didn’t take me long. Figured you could do with a bit of roughing up.”

  Fin choked. “A bit of roughing up? You call this roughing up?”

  “Well, it got a bit out of hand. Heated up pretty fast. But I stepped in before you got your stupid neck broken, so you should be thanking me.”

  “Thanking you? You got the shit beaten out of me! Ow!” Fin flinched as Byrne jabbed a needle into his hand.

  “You’re alive. And I had to threaten to turn people into food. You know how I hate having to do that.”

  Fin sighed. He knew. When they’d first met, Byrne had made mincemeat out of a bunch of scumbag humans. He’d been picking bits of them out of his teeth for days after. Long pig, he called it.

  Thing was, Byrne wasn’t really a pork man.

  Chapter 5

  Oberona Mountains

  Hannah stared at the small, wrinkly infant as it cried weakly, fists raised to the sky. The baby was naked, its eyes shut, its little limbs kicking in protest as the cold licked at it. Hurrying over, she reached down to pick the baby up, but paused, arms outstretched. Standing motionless over the small form, her eyes locked on her gloveless hands.

  It’s only young, she told herself. It won’t have many memories for you to withstand.

  But still she hesitated. Did that make her a horrible person? Why hadn’t she gone back for her gloves first? She growled. She knew better than to forget them.

  The baby’s skin was developing a blue tinge. Cold, Hannah realized; it was starting to suffer from exposure. She couldn’t leave it here, despite her lack of gloves.

  Grow a spine.

  Okay. Okay, she could do this.

  The child was lying on a blanket that had been spread over the damp grass. The material was frayed at the edges, but good quality, with a blue diamond-shaped pattern running over its length. Someone had spent a lot of time weaving the cloth. Hannah sighed. She wore only a long-sleeved shirt and leather vest — she didn’t have anything else she could wrap around the babe to keep it warm on the journey back to her cabin. She’d have to grab the blanket. Gritting her teeth, she thrust her hands forward, seized the cloth and wrapped it around the infant as quickly as she could. Just as she’d just tucked the last fold in place, her eyesight vanished and her ability imprisoned her.

  Hannah dropped to her knees beside the baby. She dimly felt the impact shudder through her joints. Memories upon memories soaked the material of the blanket. Scenes sped through her mind, so fast she had trouble keeping up with them.

  Gnarled hands spinning the wool from which the cloth was woven, the warm smile and faded brown eyes of the weaver. The whispered words of love as the blanket was passed on to the weaver’s oldest daughter. Delight and tenderness as the blanket was wrapped around the daughter’s first babe. And then anger and angst, as the cloth was draped a final time around a newborn daughter, to be left on the slopes of the Old Mother.

  All those memories and more rushed through Hannah.

  Gritting her teeth, Hannah sorted through those thoughts and recollections, forcing herself to focus on the blanket’s immediate history.

  *

&nb
sp; It didn’t matter, Ezra thought, a girl child wasn’t a curse like her husband’s father said. They were not ornaments that adorned houses, taking up space and costing gold to feed. They bred children; created the next generation, then raised that generation so they could inherit property and keep the Trsetti traditions alive.

  She was proud to have given birth to a daughter.

  “It’s a what?” her husband shouted from the other room. It was clear the midwife had delivered the news, much as Ezra had delivered her babe.

  Ezra glanced down at the infant in her arms, its naked wrinkled skin pressed close to hers as it suckled from her breast. Her mother had told her this was the moment that a woman bonded with her child. That it was this initial feeding that cemented the love a mother felt for her baby.

  But something didn’t feel right.

  Her head tickled, and her stomach fluttered. Maybe her unease stemmed from her husband’s reaction? A plate smashed in the adjacent room, and it was followed by cursing. The timber walls didn’t do much toward dampening the sound.

  “A girl?” That was her father-in-law, voice slurred, presumably from drink. He’d been celebrating the birth of his first grandson all morning. “I didn’t pay good money for that woman to give you girl children!”

  She could hear her husband rumble a reply, but Ezra could not make out the words.

  “By the blood, she will give you a son! Even if I have to tie her down to the bed to ensure it!”

  Ezra wanted to shout, to scream back through the wall that she hadn’t meant for the child to be female. She’d done everything right; had eaten apples and red meat until she’d felt nauseated from the mere smell. Her mother-in-law had assured her that this was the recipe for producing male young. Ezra hadn’t even touched a lemon during the pregnancy for fear she’d have a girl.

  Now her husband would mount her again and again until she fell pregnant. It didn’t matter that she might want a break between babes. That her milk might dry up if she became pregnant too soon. It wouldn’t matter to her husband or his father at all. After all, her husband had three deceased sisters, proof of his family’s disregard for her sex.