Page 2

Chapter 1

Six weeks later

G ordon looked at the decapitated vampire on the slab in his neatly organized morgue. The head was slightly oozing thick vampiric blood onto the polished steel surface, and the cut that had separated head from torso ran in jagged peaks and valleys.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Gordon said, tapping his gloved fingers against the edge of the slab.

Across from him, his favorite intern, Corinne, looked up from where she was laying out his instruments. “Excuse me?”

Unlike Gordon, Corinne was human. Before she’d started on the instruments, she’d laid out the two-piece corpse for Gordon. She was good at that, not that laying out a corpse for examination was advanced brain surgery, but she’d paid attention to positioning the oozy head. She’d done it as respectfully as these things should be done. She’d also adjusted the lights correctly, even though she probably hadn’t told the corpse it was to make them look their best like Gordon usually did when he was by himself. Ah, well, there is always room to improve.

Gordon pointed out the cut that had taken the vampire’s head off to Corinne. “He did do a goddamn zigzag pattern, that pompous hunter. I thought he was too old for that kind of silliness, but clearly I was wrong.”

“Am I supposed to take part in this conversation or are you mostly talking to the corpse again?” Corinne asked. On a scale of zero to ten with zero being not judgmental and ten being excessively opinionated, she was about a two. Gordon liked her for that as well.

“The corpse. Thanks, Corinne. Go have a cookie. I can finish up here, it’s pretty cut and dried. No pun.”

Corinne sighed. “I have samples to take care of, so could you please stop pushing your weed cookies, Dr. Morrison?”

Gordon put a hand on the bodyless head’s forehead. “She is failing to appreciate your zigzag decapitation, friend.” The corpse took that information in stride.

Corinne walked off, her dreadlocks shaking as she muttered something about how Gordon was a crazy corpse lover who needed to get out more, or laid, if Gordon heard correctly, which he did, vampire hearing and all.

“She doesn’t understand, precious, does she?” Gordon said to the corpse, brushing first the matted hair with his gloved hand, then turning the head this way and that, which made it ooze more. “You are one ugly bloodsucker. And bless your heart, you pissed him off real good in your last minutes if Maxim took the time to zigzag your head off.”

Gordon got to work, but the exam was cursory. The body wasn’t starved, and nothing out of the ordinary showed up after he opened it up. It would have been a good teaching case, but Corinne was too old in intern years for it, and they hadn’t yet given Gordon new ones.

Once he was done and the chest cavity closed again, Gordon sighed, pulled his gloves off. Then he reached for the paperwork Corinne had prepared, ticking all the relevant boxes that marked this as an ordinary execution by hunter, no further inquiry needed.

He initialed and signed everything before he moved the remains onto a gurney and rolled that gurney out of the morgue and to the end of the white hallway outside that he’d recently redecorated with old movie posters, framed beautifully: The Curse of Frankenstein , The Devil’s Necromancer , The Mummy , Dracula .

Some of the fae pencil pushers had told him in no uncertain terms that his choice of décor was in bad taste, but Gordon really didn’t care. And since most of the cases he got were beyond caring about their immediate surroundings, it wasn’t like all that many people would notice Gordon’s excellent taste in silver screen classics, which was really too bad.

At the end of the hallway, Gordon took the elevator down to the basement where the cremation facilities were located. The fluorescent lights were flickering irritatingly. No fae is complaining about how having a big-ass oven intended for burning people is in bad taste. I have to tell maintenance to change the lights to LEDs already. Lightbulbs went out of fashion, what, thirty years ago?

Downstairs, Gordon wheeled the corpse down the leftmost hallway, a job he could have had one of his interns do, but he wasn’t going to be that kind of boss. Some of them liked to complain about how scary the subbasement was with the hallways’ low ceilings and eerily greenish linoleum floor. Gordon’s request to spruce up the place had been denied, and he could understand that, given the only reason to come down here was storage and burning corpses.

The oven, or more properly the cremation furnace, had its own room with extra insulation, and Gordon pushed the gurney in there. It was a bit of a struggle to get the corpse inside but nothing a vampire couldn’t handle.

“And the worst of your struggles are over. Or I suppose the struggle you made people go through. Whatever it was you did to people.”

Slightly panting, Gordon turned on the oven. The program would run its course, and the decapitated vampire’s ashes could then be handed off to a relative or whoever decided they wanted to claim them, and if none did, off to storage a few doors down the hall they would go.

Once the flames filled the basement crematorium with noise, Gordon cracked his knuckles, wondering whether he should call it a day or not.

Would be an easier decision if I had someone to come home to.

Gordon, like he had done about every day over the past month or so, ever since an involuntary visit to Maxim’s ridiculous high-rise and the vampire-friendly bar therein, thought back to the tall, dark, and delicious werewolf detective whom he only knew as Adler.

Perhaps that is his first name. Perhaps I should have asked him that instead of telling him it was too early to be having a beer. Perhaps I shouldn’t have pulled away when he tried to kiss me. Perhaps I am a crazy idiot who’s only good with corpses and who has forgotten how to appreciate broad shoulders and a muscular build when he sees it.

Remembering Adler was like remembering chocolate. Sweet and full of decadent flavors, but not something for a vampire like Gordon, not anymore. To Gordon, his days as a vampire had been more like a diet in the dating department. And before that. Yeah, I started that diet well before then.

Gordon watched as the display on the oven proclaimed the cremation cycle had been initiated, the oven was up to temperature, and everything was running as it should. Bright flames and their warmth filled the basement, and Gordon remembered Adler, close and warm, his darker skin making Gordon’s own look paler than it was, just like the flames did, but in an entirely different way.

Gordon would have loved to kick something, but that would help nothing, and—vampire or not—he wasn’t the violent type. So he took the elevator back up and headed for the Forum Cafeteria to see if a blood donor was around, one who wouldn’t want to talk while Gordon drank.

When Gordon strolled back down to his little underground realm in the bowels of the Forum, his mood was marginally improved. The kindly blood donor had interrupted her dinner so Gordon could eat, and she had shown no interest in distracting him with conversation.

Gordon found himself still amused by Maxim’s zigzag decapitation, something Gordon hadn’t expected the hunter would actually do even though he had joked about it a few times before.

As Gordon rounded the corner to his department’s hallway, he noticed immediately that someone had left the door to his office open, and no one did that, because while he tempted the interns with weed cookies, they were aware of boundaries and good at maintaining them.

“Hello?” Gordon said before he reached his office door, thinking that perhaps an overeager janitor was in there.

Gordon opened the door all the way. Maxim, the golden-haired vampire, still wearing his very sexy hunter’s outfit, was in there, eyeing his mint-in-box collection as if he were a philanthropist at a gallery opening. Gordon felt almost sad that this was just a small slice of the entirety of his collection. The items on display were only a few select pieces to impress his interns. The office, while large, was too small to house all of Gordon’s treasures.

“Hello.” The hunter spun on his heel, looking in equal measures lithe, graceful, and deadly.

“Maxim? What are you doing here?” Gordon closed his door. Maxim had a tendency to provide Gordon’s interns with unnecessary gossip, and Gordon preferred to keep the hunter and them separate, wherever possible.

Maxim put his hands on his hips. “I was waiting for you. You have my corpse.”

“That’s almost done. It’s in the oven right this minute. Since when do you care enough about a simple case to drop by here in person?”

Maxim crossed his arms. “I like to follow up on things. Dotting Ts, crossing Is. Special attention to detail, Heath calls it, though between you and I, I think it’s a fad.”

“You…okay?” Gordon said. The one thing Maxim was notorious for was his disdain for the Forum’s bureaucracy. Following up on the day he sent a corpse was not something he did. Ever. And Gordon had been master of this morgue for decades.

Maxim smiled like a cat who knew they deserved to be admired for existing. “How have you been, Gordon?”

“Me?”

The hunter wrinkled his nose. “Yes, Gordon. How have you been since we last saw one another?”

Panic flooded Gordon, and he wasn’t exactly sure why. No, wait. This is like when Corinne asks me whether I did something fun over the weekend. Fuck. I never have anything to tell her, and then when I do and I say I spent four hours looking for that right piece for my cosplay outfit, she gives me this exact look. Fuck.

“I, uh. Fine. Fun weekend.”

“Is that so?” Maxim said, eyeing Gordon’s most recent acquisition, the Kawaii Demon Hunter figurine, holiday edition. Kawaii Hunter had a red and white Santa hat on and wore a knit scarf while slurping something gingerbread spiced.

“Yes?” Gordon asked.

Maxim’s hand brushed a little dagger at his belt, though the thing wasn’t actually that little, and the way his hand had brushed across it didn’t seem all that incidental.

“I will be taking up gaming,” Maxim said, waving his hand at Gordon’s gaming couch with all the air of a royal demanding the horses be saddled or the chariot readied. “You shall teach me. You can tell me all about your weekend while we’re at it.”

“Ah,” Gordon said, wondering whether he could pretend the cremation furnace needed to be watched by a professional.

Maxim looked first at Gordon, then pointed at the Christmas Kawaii Demon Hunter in box. “If you can beat me thrice, I will buy you one of those.”

“Really?” Gordon said, the collector part of his brain instantly overriding all others.

“Really.”

“Fine. I like a challenge.”