Page 62

The male vampire Nick had seen inside his dream, the one who’dactuallydrained these small bodies dry… that vampire hadn’t felt any remorse at all.

He’d been disgusted by none of it.

He’d second-guessed none of it.

He’d felt regret for none of it.

It would never have occurred to him to feel regret, or pain, or remorse, or guilt. It would never occur to him to feel anything but good about what he’d done.

These humans were food.

They were glorious, good-tasting, enjoyable food.

Well that’s not exactly true either, is it, Nick?

Grimacing, Nick looked away.

He realized only then that he’d been looking at the police-marked outline of one of the little girls. They’d sketched a replica of her corpse with a nanotech blue powder that conformed exactly to her body. It left a sharp, glowing blue map of the position in which she’d been left on the carpeted floor of the second-floor playroom.

Nick saw the image-captures already.

Some of them had been forwarded to his headset on the drive over.

Nick remembered this one in particular.

She’d been drained of so much blood she looked skeletal in the police images. Her skin hung off her bones. She appeared so pale and brittle, she looked like she’d been dead for weeks instead of hours. She looked almost like a preserved mummy.

Ashes to ashes…

Nick didn’t want to know which voices inside him whispered any of those words. He didn’t want to know if he knew more about these deaths than he was willing to admit to himself, much less to Morley or anyone else in the NYPD. If Nick did know more, he wasn’t ready to dig that information out of his subconscious just yet.

All he knewfor certainwas, he hadn’t done this.

He absolutely wouldn’t have done this.

Moreover, he couldn’t have done it.

Even apart from the rest, it was physically impossible.

Nick fought to hold onto that thought, to make it mean something in his head. He tried to use it to ground himself in some kind of reality outside that dream.

He was a cop.

He needed to look at this like a cop.

The vampire part of the killer’s motives, Nick already understood.

Vampires fed.

But why here?

Whythesepeople?

And how was this asshole involved with what Nick discovered back in San Francisco?

More to the point, how had Nickseenany of this? How had this sick fuck somehow gotten access to Nick’s mind?

“You all done in here?”