CHAPTER EIGHTEEN || COLE
“Ineed to kill someone.”
Harris looked up from his desk, scowling as I approached. “We’re in a police station,” he hissed. “Can you at least try to be discreet? Or maybe not project from the diaphragm when you’re planning a murder?”
“Discretion isn’t in my lexicon, I’m afraid.” I paused, inspecting my fingernails so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. “I need your most promising case. Immediately.”
“You’re… hungry?”
“Does it matter?”
In truth, I wasn’t hungry. But after my interaction with Eli, I needed the kill. I needed to remind myself that I was a creature of sensation, not emotion. Eli had somehow confused me. He had weakened me.
Because I found I was, impossibly, hurting.
His rejection—not of what I was, but of who I was—wasn’t surprising. But it was painful. And I hadn’t experienced anything approaching pain in the past eight centuries. I didn’t like it. I needed to shut it off immediately. Which meant I needed a reminder that I was still a cold-blooded monster.
That, no matter how much I played house, I was still me.
I needed to watch the light fade from someone else’s eyes and enjoy it. I needed something—anything—to quell the panic I felt at the prospect of no longer belonging to Doctor De La Cruz.
It was foolish to think I ever could belong to him in the first place. He saved lives. I took them. We weren’t the same.
“There was a shooting in East Los Angeles a few days back,” Harris said with a sigh. “A mugging gone wrong, probably. We won’t catch the guy who did it.”
I looked up from my cuticles long enough to meet Harris’s gaze—a mistake. Because he was looking at me with concern, even though the last traces of his scowl still lingered.
“I’m looking for much darker blood tonight, if you have it,” I told him, striving to sound flippant. “Please and thank you.”
“Cole, what the fuck?” Harris let out a long breath and shook his head, though his gaze never left mine. “Are you okay?”
“I’m splendid, thank you for asking. I just need a kill. Immediately.”
“I’m not a vending machine.”
“This is Los Angeles. You might as well be.”
He shook his head again, then rolled his eyes heavenward. After a pause, he grabbed one of the files from the pile on his desk and held it up. “Fine. This one, then.”
I took the manila folder and flipped it open. The vacant, staring eyes of the victim—a pale blond boy—gazed sightlessly back at me from the photograph clipped to the front page of the report.
“It happened a block away from the Memorial Coliseum a few days ago, early morning. The victim, a sophomore at the University of Southern California, was walking home from work. He was stabbed forty-seven times, right there on the street.”
Before I could stop myself, I shuddered.
The young man in the photograph was so young. He hardly looked old enough to vote. I’d had over eight hundred years. He’d barely had any time at all. Someone had taken his life from him.
He was covered in blood.
So much blood.
He must have been so frightened in his last moments…
“Cole,” Harris breathed from the desk. I could feel his eyes on me, but I couldn’t look away from the photograph—at the poor young man whose life had been ripped away.
He had been stabbed to death. Someone out there had stabbed him forty-seven times.
“Are there any leads?” I managed, not sounding flippant at all.
Did my voice always sound like it came from somewhere far away?
Were the walls always this close together?
Did the police station always feel this unbearably warm?
Did I always wish I could still get sick at the sight of this kind of violence—the way a deep, primal part of me now instinctively wanted to?
What was happening to me?
Harris stood, and the movement forced me to wrench my gaze from the photo. He loomed over me looking uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next. I wasn’t sure what expression I wore, but the shock on his face told me it wasn’t good.
“There are no leads,” Harris said slowly, still watching me.
His words were hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure whether to take the file back, give me a hug, or both.
Thankfully, he did neither. Instead, he let out a long breath, his eyebrows knitting together.
“Christ, it’s like you’ve seen a ghost, Cole. ”
“I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies. Thousands,” I told him, forcing my voice to sound flat, even though my heart was still in my throat. “This one is no different.”
Harris snorted, though there was no humor in it. “Because you’re so fucking unaffected, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Look, do you want a different file? I have an elderly woman who was shot in a carjacking. She’s tough, and she lived—but the guy was clearly trying to kill her. He probably fits the bill, too.”
I glanced back down at the young man in the photo. His body was lying cold and lifeless on a slab in a morgue somewhere. All his years had been stolen. And his killer was still out there. Still drawing breath.
But not for very much longer.
“No,” I said firmly. I closed the file and met Harris’s gaze. “If you have no leads, that means the person who did this—” I shook the file for emphasis, “—might not get caught.”
“That’s very true.” Harris pursed his lips thoughtfully, watching me. “You know, if you aren’t careful, I might actually start to sort of like you, Cole.”
“Perish the thought, Detective.”
“Something happened with Eli, didn’t it?”
His question made me glance up sharply. Before I could stop it, my newfound emotions surged to the surface, choking off my words. Unseemly tears—unbefitting a vicious predator like myself—stung my eyes.
I nodded sharply.
“Do you—” He hesitated, grimacing. Then he took a deep breath. “Look, do you want to talk about it? I don’t do touchy-feely stuff very well, but I’d listen, if you wanted me to.”
Not trusting myself to speak, I shook my head.
“We haven’t turned up any leads on the Mormon missionaries,” Harris said, studying me. “You could help out with that instead. You could tell us if we missed anything—any signs of violence our forensics people didn’t catch. If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to.”
“I told you,” I said, my voice going uncomfortably thick. I avoided his gaze. “I need a kill. It’s what I do. That can’t have changed.”
I heard the doubt in my own voice—and Harris, being as perceptive as he was, no doubt heard it too.
“Cole—” Harris broke off. He paused for a long moment, then let out a breath and nodded at the case file in my hand. “Look, I don’t condone what you do. But whoever did that deserves it. You’d be saving innocent people from a monster.”
I closed the case file. And I realized I didn’t trust myself in his presence any longer. Another moment, and I might start bawling—right there in the middle of the police station.
“Right,” I said prosaically, trying to sound more like my old self. The shuddering breath I drew ruined the effect. “Well, off I go. Slaughter and mayhem await.”
I was certain my tone didn’t convince either of us. I turned and made for the stairs leading to the basement, where we kept the evidence. I could feel Harris’s eyes on my back the entire way there.
* * *
As it turned out, the police had very little to go on.
The victim, Joseph Goldberg, had just turned twenty and had transferred to the university earlier that year from community college.
He was apparently well liked among his peers, according to the interview the LAPD conducted with his roommate, Trevor Johnston.
Trevor had already been ruled out as a suspect.
According to him, Joseph was quiet and kept to himself for the most part.
He had made no enemies. He was a business major and very studious.
Apparently, he had wanted to be an accountant.
Which, albeit practical, was a little strange. After all, who wanted to stare at spreadsheets all day?
But there was nothing in the file to suggest why someone had stabbed Joseph forty-seven times. His wallet hadn’t been taken. He hadn’t had any nasty breakups recently. No debts the police could find. No substance abuse problems. He was just an ordinary, boring young man who hadn’t deserved to die.
I drove to the neighborhood where Joseph’s body had been found, parked a block away from where the killing had taken place, and walked.
The street was dark and quiet. Most of the lights in the drab stucco homes and beige apartment buildings were turned off—not surprising, given that it was the middle of the night.
The Memorial Coliseum was a block away, and the university was across the street.
It didn’t seem like a place where anyone should have been murdered.
But then, I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised.
I had seen many horrible things in my long life, hadn’t I?
Strange how none of it had ever bothered me—until now.
I found the crime scene easily. It had happened right there on the sidewalk.
I could smell the blood. It had been cleaned, but not well.
There was another scent there, too—faint but unmistakable.
It was the same scent I had caught on Joseph’s bloodied clothing, which I had checked out of evidence after storming away from Harris.
The scent of the killer, no doubt.
Assuming this hadn’t been a random crime, they had known enough about their victim to understand his routine.
According to the file Harris had given me, Joseph had worked weekends as a busser at the sports bar a few blocks from campus.
He would have been walking home at nearly two in the morning after his shift ended.
His killer had clearly known that. They had been watching him long enough to learn his routine—that or they knew him personally. I doubted the killing was random. After all, you don’t stab someone forty-seven times without a very good reason.
Not unless you were a serial killer taking pleasure in the brutality. And no self-respecting serial killer would have committed their murder right there on a residential street, where anyone could have witnessed it. Not without first vetting their victim and the location.
Still—it was just after two in the morning now, and the house directly across the street from where the crime had taken place had a for-sale sign out front.
The rest of the houses were dark. According to the file, the people who lived on either side of the murder scene were elderly.
They had gone to bed early and claimed to have seen and heard nothing.
Had the murderer known that?
Well, I wouldn’t have to wonder for long. Soon, I would be able to ask Joseph’s killer myself. A dangerous smile curved across my lips, but it felt different than before.
Hotter, somehow. More filled with fury.
Eli’s dark eyes rose in my memory. What would he think of what I was doing? But I already knew. He would be repulsed. Heartbroken.
A fresh surge of pain tore through me, sharper than before. My chest felt strange—hot, heavier than it ought to have been. I wiped my burning eyes and shoved the thoughts of Eli away before they could do me in.
Instead, I followed the killer’s scent down the street. It abruptly vanished in an alleyway behind a store that sold automotive parts. That probably meant the killer had gotten into a vehicle.
There were two security cameras on either corner of the building. Assuming they were operational, one or both would have caught the face of the killer—and their vehicle. Perhaps even a license plate, which could lead me right to their front door.
“Gotcha,” I whispered. But I didn’t feel the cold, predatory triumph I always had.
Instead, I merely felt… resignation. Whoever had done this to Joseph had to die. They couldn’t be allowed to do it to anyone else. But there was no dark, sharp-edged glee in that knowledge.
I tried to force it, but the smile died on my lips as quickly as it had come. The hunt—usually the best part, aside from the actual killing—felt empty. Just as hollow as I had been before I met Eli.
“Stop it,” I said to myself. I didn’t care that I sounded like a madman. No one else was around to hear it.
Given that it was the middle of the night, the automotive business was closed.
I could easily break in, but I’d no doubt set off alarms in the process.
The alarm company would likely call the police and the store manager.
They’d come to inspect the damage and file a report.
And then, with a hefty dose of hypnotism, they’d be more than happy to help me find the footage I needed.
But that would take hours. Apart from not being subtle, it was a lot of effort. Far easier to come back tomorrow morning and hypnotize the manager on duty into handing over the footage from the night of the killing.
I could certainly wait a few more hours. After all, I was a patient monster.
It didn’t occur to me until I’d gotten back into my vehicle and started driving that there was another reason for my delay. A much better—and far more terrifying—reason. Because deep down, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to do this anymore.