Inside the large open area, there was a big crowd dancing, talking, hooking up. The music was loud, so people had to get close to communicate—and the darkness reinforced the need to go clutch: With the limited faculties possessed by humans, they had to get up in each other’s spaces to hear and see properly in the dim environment. And it wasn’t all Homo sapiens LARPing it. He could sense a few vampires milling around among the men and women, but just three or four—and they stayed away. Made sense. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t fraternize with these rats without tails, so no one in the species was going to hi-how’re-ya and reveal themselves in this environment unless they had to.

“Let’s go down to the lower level,” Butch said over the din. “V told me the stairwell’s entrance is somewhere back there.”

As Boone follow-the-leader’d through the gyrating bodies, he stared straight ahead and let his peripheral vision track the masks, the drapes of clothes, the heights and the weights of Pyre’s patrons. Just as he had been trained to do.

The stairwell to the subterranean level turned out to be easy enough to find, and they proceeded down a dank, cold series of steps, bottoming out in a corridor that was long as a football field and strobe-lit by a series of last-legged fluorescent ceiling mounts.

“Fourth door down on the right,” Butch said. “Storage area.”

Boone looked at the sequence of heavy doors. “Is that what’s behind all these?”

“Think so.”

The sound of something snapping brought Boone’s head around. Butch had taken a pair of bright blue nitrile gloves out of the pocket of his coat and was putting them on.

“It’s a little late for this”—the Brother held his hands up like a surgeon—“but old habits die hard and all that shit.”

“Why is it too late?”

“There is no way they got the body out without disturbing the scene. No matter how careful they were.”

From out of another pocket, Butch produced a small headlamp and put it on like a crown. Triggering the beam, he stopped in front of door number four. “You stay out here, but by all means, lean in and look around. Like I said, the scene’s basically ruined at this point, but there’s no reason for us to add to that by both tromping around inside.”

As the Brother opened the heavy panels wide, the creaking hinges were right out of a horror movie—and so was the scent that hit Boone’s nose like a slap.

Blood. Not exactly fresh, no. But there was a lot that had been spilled—

Oh, God, Boone thought.

Down on the dirty concrete floor, directly in the path of Butch’s frontal lobe beam of light, there was a congealed puddle that was shocking in size.

As Butch stepped through the jambs and looked around, the walls of the empty storage area glistened in the icy illumination of his lamp. But at least all that appeared to be groundwater seepage as opposed to plasma.

The beam rose to the ceiling and moved in a slow circle before stopping in the center of the room directly over the congealed puddle. “This was where she was hung up. On one of these.”

A series of iron eyelets, thick as a male’s thumb, were set in rows in the ceiling’s heavy beams. It was hard to imagine what they had been used for. Maybe as part of a dyeing system for fabric?

“Was it by ropes?” Boone asked. “How she was hung up, I mean.”

“A meat hook.” The Brother got down onto his haunches and looked around, his lamp illuminating the Jello-like blood too many times for Boone’s comfort. “Boy . . . if she wasn’t dead before he hung her up, she did not last long.”

“Him?” Boone tried to cough the tightness in his throat away. “I thought you said we shouldn’t draw conclusions.”

“Fair enough, you caught me. But statistically, the vast majority of serial killers are male. And the ritual nature of these killings, with the females strung up, throats slashed, all of them bleeding out here at the club, is a clear pattern. The killer finds what they’re looking for and does what they have to with the victims out of sight down here.”

Boone coughed into his fist again. “What exactly did he do to her?”

“I didn’t show you the pictures, did I?” The Brother held his phone out behind him on an arm stretch. “They’re in the camera section.”

Boone swallowed hard as he took the unit and went into photographs. When he called up the first of . . .

“Oh . . . fuck,” he breathed.

One terrible image, after another . . . after another. There seemed to be an endless number of them—and abruptly, the smell of the rotten, moldy earth, and the cold pool of blood, and the idea that someone had lost their life right down here where he was made him dizzy.

“Excuse me for a moment.”

The polite words were spoken fast, and he didn’t wait for an acknowledgment. His body moved before he was aware of his brain ordering his legs to lift his feet so he could back away. When he hit the door opposite the one that was open, he coughed a couple more times and turned the phone screen into his leg. Dropping his head, he breathed through his mouth and felt the world spin—

The smell of fresh air in the springtime, of delicate flowers, of . . . sunshine . . . had him lifting his eyes.

Down by the stairwell’s door, a figure was standing still as a statue and focused on him. And in spite of the black hooded robe that covered the head and draped down to the feet, he knew it was a female.

And that scent of hers. It went in through his nose and didn’t stop there. Somewhere along the neuropathways of his mind, or maybe it was in his very veins, what started as a thing he smelled became a fullbody sensory experience.

Like touch.

Like . . . a caress.

Straightening, he took a step forward. And another. Sure as if she were calling his name and he were powerless to resist the entreaty. But before he made it very far, she disappeared back through the stairwell’s door quick as a gasp.

Desperate not to lose her, he took off in her wake, his stride nothing short of a bolt. By the time he got to where she had been standing, the distorted steel panel was easing into its poor-fit position against its jambs, and he yanked the weight open. Following that springtime scent, he jumped up the steps three at a time and broke out into the club proper.

She must have been going at a dead run, he thought. To have gotten up those landings that fast.

Boone looked around to assess whether she’d gone all the way out of the building or was trying to get lost in the crowd. If the latter was her goal? Mission accomplished. There were too many people dressed in black with too many cloaks covering their heads—

There she was. Heading for the exit. Fast.

Shoving humans out of the way, Boone didn’t care if he created chaos—and unlike her, his big body couldn’t bob and weave through the tight squeezes between the men and women. By the time he ran through where the coat check was, she was out the door, her scent already beginning to fade.

Out in the cold, he barraged past the bouncers and looked left and right—

There, going around the far corner of the building. The tail end of her cloak billowing out behind her.

Boone closed his eyes, intending to pull his dematerialize-in-a-pinch trick—except then he realized he had a movie theater’s worth of human eyeballs focusing on him. Not exactly the kind of PR stunt the vampire race needed: Surprise! We really do exist!

Cursing a blue streak, he took off on foot and tried to follow her prints in the snow. There was no way of isolating which were hers, however, and her scent had dissipated into the night.

The female was no doubt gunning for some privacy so she could ghost out of here. And if she did that, he was never going to catch her.

Boone rounded the corner of the building and slowed his roll to a walk . . . which then petered out to a standstill. There were no security lights on the exterior flank of the old building. None on the warehouse next door. And the illumination from the distant streetlights only carved out a narrow visual slice down the space between the structures. Even with the reflective quality of the snow cover and a set of supercharged vampire retinas, there was a lot that he couldn’t see.

“Goddamn it—”

The soft click of a gun safety being taken off duty ripped his head around.

Staring into the dense shadows, his nostrils flared as he caught her scent on the cold breeze.

Yes . . . he thought. There you are.

“You can trust me,” he said into the darkness. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”

* * *

I’m not going to give you a chance to hurt me, Helania thought as she kept her nine-millimeter trained on the vampire who’d tracked her outside the club.

The dark-haired male was standing in the dim glow of streetlamps that were a good block and a half away, but there was more than enough light to assess him. And damn . . . he was downright enormous, with heavy shoulders, a barrel chest, and long, powerful legs. All that socalled real estate was covered in black leather, the jacket he had on open in spite of the cold, his hands bare of gloves.

His deep-set, pale eyes were trained right where she was standing in the darkness.

You’re too good-looking to be a killer, she thought to herself.

But come on, like only hump-ugly males killed people?

Still, she was shocked at how handsome his face was: Strong, even features, as well as a pair of lips that made her think of things that should be last on her cognitive list given the circumstances of their acquaintance, as it were.

“I just want to ask you a couple of questions.” He flashed his palms at her and slowly raised them up like he was on a TV cop show. “My name’s Boone. And you can lower that gun.”

Maybe he could see her, although she doubted it. She was very far back from the glow he was standing in. How had he found her? Oh, wait—he’d probably heard her taking the safety off.

And was that an aristocratic infliction to his words?

“Can you tell me what you were doing down in that corridor just now?” he asked.