CHAPTER 6
The Hollis place sat at the end of the gravel road, something the ridge had coughed up and left to rot.
June killed the headlights fifty yards out and let the truck roll the last stretch on momentum, tires whispering over stone, the engine ticking as it cooled.
No light in the windows. Not a lamp glow, not a blue flicker, nothing.
The kind of dark that happened when the people inside didn’t need to see.
She sat with her hands on the wheel. Four days since Terrell.
Four days of watching the pack split along the same fault that had split at Gabriel’s house, the older wolves holding the line, the younger ones pushing, Ramsey Tucker standing in corners with his arms crossed and his face closed down to nothing.
Four days of Emma’s kitchen and Emma’s silence and Emma’s hands white around a mug of cold tea.
Four days of the intake form on her kitchen table, the three names in the same handwriting, two of them dead and the third one missing.
The clinic’s backed up, she’d told Emma.
Boarders are stacking up. Mrs. Hadley’s cat still isn’t eating.
All true. None of it was the reason she was sitting in a truck at the end of a gravel road with the ridge pressing close on three sides and a Victorian full of vampires going dark in front of her.
She got out. Closed the door quietly. The gravel crunched once under her boots and then went silent as she hit the path.
The porch steps complained. Warped wood, dry-rotted at the edges, the kind of decay that happened when a house sat empty long enough that the weather stopped caring what it touched.
She crossed to the door without hesitating.
Knocked twice. Hard. The way you knocked when you weren’t asking permission.
The door opened before her knuckles finished the second strike.
Luca Moretti stood in the frame. Dark hair, dark eyes, not tall.
Wiry. He looked twenty-three, the same fixed, unageing twenty-three he always looked, accurate in the moment but fundamentally wrong about time.
His hands were at his sides. He hadn’t been sleeping.
He hadn’t been doing anything that required preparation.
He’d heard her coming, and he’d been standing at the door waiting for the knock to finish.
June filed that away without comment, the routine she used for everything that confirmed what she already knew.
She stepped past him. The door swung closed behind her without a sound.
The front room was high-ceilinged and smelled of dust, old wood and something underneath it that she couldn’t name, not rot, not mold, something older.
The furniture belonged to another century.
A settee with faded upholstery. A side table missing a leg, propped on a stack of books.
No overhead lights on. The only illumination came from what bled through the windows.
Starlight, weak and silver, catching the dust motes suspended in the air, amber-still.
Sebastian Croix stood near the front window.
Hands at his sides. Not looking out. Just standing.
The stillness of a man who had been still long enough that stillness was his default state.
His gray eyes tracked her entrance without moving his head.
Silver at his temples catching what little light came through the glass.
He might have been planted in that spot; he’d certainly decided to take root.
Through the doorway to the kitchen, Marcus Ellery sat at a table with a pipe coupling in one hand and a rag in the other.
Sandy hair, hazel eyes, big hands. He looked up at June with the frank, assessing attention of someone deciding whether they were about to be inconvenienced.
The coupling didn’t move. The rag stayed where it was. His expression didn’t change.
June didn’t wait for a question. Didn’t wait for an invitation. She’d driven nine miles in the dark to say this, and she was going to say it standing, flat, direct, no cushioning.
“Deacon Pruitt. Terrell Oakes. Both dead in the last week. Both with the same wound. Horizontal cut just below the jawline, smooth edges, no tearing, no secondary tracks.” Her voice came out flat.
Clinical. The register she used for describing a radiograph to a worried owner.
“A feeding leaves punctures. Teeth tear. The margins are irregular because tissue gives way unevenly when something bites down. These are blade cuts. Or something built to act as one. Controlled. Single pass.”
The room absorbed it. Sebastian didn’t move. His reflection showed nothing in the dark glass. Just the silver at his temples, the line of his jaw, the absolute stillness of a man who had learned to become part of the architecture.
“The blood volume is wrong,” June said. “Both scenes. The ground underneath is stained, but there’s no arterial spray.
No fan pattern. A carotid transection should produce a volume that saturates.
These didn’t. The blood is concentrated in the collars, along the jawline.
Not on the ground where the body fell.” She paused.
One beat. The dust motes hung. “It looks staged. Deliberate. The bodies were placed, not dropped. The blood was collected before they hit the ground, or most of it was, and what was left followed gravity to the low points and stayed there.”
Marcus set the coupling down on the table. The metal made a soft sound against the wood. His hazel eyes moved over her face slowly, the same unhurried attention he gave a set of labs, looking for the value that explained the rest.
“I’ve been sitting on this for four days,” June said.
“The pack reached its verdict the night Deacon was found. Gabriel held the line. Barely. Ramsey Tucker lost his friend and chose to wait rather than argue, and waiting is more dangerous than rage when the man doing it is built like Ramsey. Two nights ago, they voted again. Gabriel held again. I don’t know if he’ll hold a third time. ”
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” June said.
“I’m not asking for protection or intervention or whatever it is people usually ask vampires for in stories.
I’m asking you to tell me if I’m wrong. If there’s some feeding behavior I don’t know about that explains a clean cut, missing blood and a body arranged in a ditch, the placement itself deliberate, careful about how it had landed.
Because if I’m wrong, I need to know before this goes any further. And if I’m right, “
She didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. The sentence hung in the room, the particular weight certain sentences carry when everyone present understands what comes after the dash.
Sebastian’s gaze tracked her. Slow. Deliberate.
The focus of a man who was already measuring something and had been measuring it for longer than she’d been alive.
His gray eyes narrowed fractionally. Not suspicion.
Deliberation. The quality of a man who already had a theory and was waiting to see if she’d arrive at the same place on her own.
Luca stood by the door. His hands were still at his sides. His dark eyes met hers, and something in his expression shifted. The careful register he usually kept, the containment that made him read younger than he was, dropped away, a coat he’d decided was too heavy for the room.
He was going to answer. She could see it in the set of his jaw; in how his weight settled onto both feet: he’d decided to stand behind what he was about to say.
The dust hung. The house creaked. The ridge kept its secrets beyond the windows, and in the kitchen doorway, Marcus Ellery picked the coupling back up and didn’t look away from June’s face.
Luca didn’t perform offense. He didn’t straighten his spine or set his jaw or do any of the things a man might do when someone had just accused his kind of murder by implication. He just looked at her with those dark eyes that carried two centuries in them and said what he meant.
“No vampire drains a body and leaves it on the ground.” His voice was warm.
Direct. Plain sentences, no flourishes. “Blood on the ground is waste. Waste is how you get found. A feeding that leaves a body is already a risk. A feeding that leaves a body in the middle of a pack town is either catastrophic stupidity or it was never a feeding.”
He paused. The dust hung between them. The old house creaked somewhere in its bones.
“Someone is staging these to look like nest work.” He said it as he might say the sky is blue or the ridge is there: a fact, verified, requiring no emphasis.
“Which means someone knows enough about how vampires feed to fake it convincingly. And has a reason to want the pack’s attention fixed on the Hollis place instead of wherever it should be looking. ”
June held his gaze. She’d believed him before he finished the sentence.
She’d known it, somewhere underneath the clinical observations, the wound margins and the blood volume that made no sense.
Known it as you’d know a fracture before the radiograph confirmed it, the wrongness that lived in the space between what you saw and what should have been there.
Sebastian didn’t move from the window. His hands stayed at his sides.
His gray eyes tracked her face with the slow, deliberate focus of a man reading terrain he’d mapped in daylight and was now verifying in the dark.
The narrowing was subtle. Barely there, a fractional contraction of the muscles around his eyes that most people would have missed.
June didn’t miss it. She’d spent too many hours looking at animals to trust faces, but she trusted the quality of a gaze that was measuring something and had been measuring it for four hundred years.