Page 21 of How to Stake a Vampire

“At home, playing D&D with some guys from Milwaukee,” Virgil replied promptly.

Gavin blinked. “You mean, the Langhorne brothers?”

“Yes.”

“You know them?” I asked Gavin.

The dragon newt nodded. “Their cousin went to our school.”

Which meant Virgil was telling the truth, since he knew Gavin would be able to check his alibi.

A crash from behind the counter interrupted our conversation. Ellie was trying to operate the espresso machine and had succeeded in covering herself and half the counter in coffee. She shot a guilty glance at Virgil.

“I should probably help her before she accidentally poisons someone,” the vampire barista said with a sigh.

“Good idea.”

Six hours later found us back at Hawthorne & Associates.

“So let me get this straight,” Samuel said, his voice carrying a controlled calm that probably preceded someone getting fired or possibly fed to something with teeth. “There have been moreblood bank thefts, but no one bothered to report them because they were afraid of upsetting the Tremaines?”

Bar a side trip to Stake My Shake for lunch, we’d spent the day visiting most of the blood banks across Amberford. The results had been depressingly consistent; there had been varying amounts of inventory going missing at most of them, plenty of nervous ghoul staff, and a collective case of selective amnesia when it came to filing official reports.

The tension thrumming through the mate bond from my alpha put my wolf’s teeth on edge. This case was turning out to be bigger than any of us had anticipated.

“That’s about the size of it,” Didi confirmed. “Crimson Curations lost several pints of AB negative last month. Midnight Supply had their entire O-positive stock depleted over the course of three weeks. And don’t get me started on what happened at Plasma Palace.”

Samuel groaned. “What happened at Plasma Palace?”

“Someone kept breaking in and stealing exactly one pint at a time,” Gavin admitted. He scratched a horn. “It took some time for the staff to connect the dots.”

None of us felt the need to inform Samuel that the staff at Plasma Palace were not the smartest tools in the supernatural tool box. Barney had words with the manager before we’d left. The ghoul had lost a couple of limbs in distress.

Samuel sat back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose.

I noted the faint circles under his eyes with a degree of concern until I realized I was likely the cause of them. Damn my wolf and her libido.

“So, bar our clue about a vampire who dresses like he’s from the Victorian era and hums Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, we have nothing?” my alpha grumbled.

“No,” Barney muttered. “And we still have no idea why he wanted those genealogical files.”

“Maybe he’s into family trees?” Bo suggested, busy snarfing a muffin he’d unearthed from God knows where.

We all looked at him.

The Husky finished swallowing and licked his chops. “Someone could be mapping out vampire bloodlines and cherry-picking specific types of blood to steal.”

“That actually makes horrifying sense,” Barney said grudgingly.

I studied Bo with something approaching admiration. Sometimes, my dog acted like a true genius.

“Or maybe they’re planning something real terrible,” the Husky continued with significantly more enthusiasm. “Like, I don’t know, wiping out all inferior vampire bloodlines.” His tail thrummed the air with macabre zeal. “I saw a TV show like that once. It was cool!”

And sometimes, my dog just acted like an utter nutjob.

Samuel scowled. “How about we have less useless speculation and more concrete ideas?” There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” he called out irritably.

Janet stuck her head in, her expression apologetic. “Sorry to interrupt, but Charlene just rang. Gregory and Constantia Tremaine are in the building. They’re asking to speak with you about the blood bank investigation.”