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He didn’t want to think about how he knew that, but he did know.

It felt true.

Looking around, he supposed he should be trying to learn more about the house and its occupants, the victims especially, but Nick increasingly suspected the victims, apart from their family name, were incidental. They were chosen for their bloodline. They were chosen to involve Nick, to bring Nick out here, maybe even to implicate him.

He hated that realization, but he knew it was true.

He’d known it from the beginning. He’d been deluding himself there might be some other cause for all these deaths. Their deaths might as well have been utterly random. Killing them for their name was just as senseless and useless and fucking stupid.

Thinking about the victims just made him angry at this point.

That felt personal too, implicating him in all this death.

Involving him in it, forcing him to feel responsible… tying their lives and deaths to him.

Nick knew it wouldn’t help him to dwell on that.

He knew that’s what the killer wanted.

It didn’t help knowing those things.

At the end of the day, the only thing that would help was stopping him. The only thing that would help was taking him out of the equation. He needed to find that child-killing, baby-murdering piece of shit and, if necessary, rip his heart out with his own fangs.

He tried to smell more from the second set of stairs, but the results were the same.

Not enough blood.

Not enough anything.

Maybe the techs had simply overdone it with the bleach. They’d removed all the blood and other bio-matter too soon. They’d taken the bodies away too soon. Nick hoped they would at least get imprints and vampire-venom off the bites, but honestly, all of that felt too slow.

There had to be a faster way to find this asshole.

Maybe he needed to call Brick.

Maybe that should be his next stop, not St. Maarten.

Then again, Brick and St. Maarten seemed pretty cozy these days, so maybe either one of them would do.

Maybe they knew something about this already.

Anyway, the labs still couldn’t tell much when it came to distinguishing different vampires from one another, even if they had reasonably fresh bites to work with. About all the cops couldusuallygo on was a particular vamp’s actual, physical characteristics. Even fingerprints weren’t as reliable for vamps, assuming they had any fingerprints at all.

Some vampires didn’t, oddly enough.

Nick did. He still had all of his whorls and lines and indentations left, but they felt less well-defined than most human fingers looked and felt to him.

Wynter had been fascinated by that, by his strangely soft fingertips.

Still, Nick had fingerprints on file with the I.S.F.

They could ID him with those, and countless other vampires, too.

Maybe they’d luck out with this asshole.

It wasn’t something Nick could count on though, for a number of reasons.

For one thing, he might not be in any of their databases.