Chapter 3

The smell of bacon filled the house. A sickly scent of coffee mingled with it to create a wholly human aroma. The sounds emanating from the kitchen gave nothing away as to the otherworldly nature of the goings on therein.
Lisa emerged from the basement to find Heidi making breakfast. She moved from stove to counter top, wearing a pale pink bathrobe. As Lisa entered the kitchen the other woman looked up and said, "So, we have coffee or orange juice this morning."
Lisa's parents had never let her drink coffee. Heidi didn't worry. Of course Lisa not having physical metabolism meant the caffeine had no effect to detriment her development. Or any effect whatsoever.
Heidi set the dining room table and served up her eggs, toast, bacon and hash. They sat down and Heidi looked into Lisa's eyes before digging into her own food.
"You've fed?" she asked. Lisa had no idea how she could know; looking into her aura or her mind, or maybe there was a tell in her appearance.
Lisa hung her head and began telling Heidi about the bodies she had left behind. She choked on her words as she described how each man had died. When she had finished the other vampire was patting her hand, and she was in tears again.
“You did good. It’ll be okay,” said Heidi. “So you called 911 with their phone?” Lisa nodded.
“Did you wipe down your finger prints?”
Lisa went wide-eyed and stared at Heidi in horror. The older girl smiled sadly (or was it condescending?) and said, “That’s okay. We don’t leave much in the way of finger prints, and if they do identify them they will have a dead end. Literally.”
This was true. Lisa was officially dead; autopsy, funeral, and wake. It had been an ordeal, particularly the funeral where there had been an open casket and Lisa had been conscious the entire time. It was the last time she had seen her family up close.
It was this thought that brought to Lisa a new worry. What would happen to her family if the police ID’d her? Her family was still alive, maybe they would think the finger prints belonged to one of them. A memory of her little brother denying his theft of a cookie came to mind, but in this vision instead of a missing cookie it was missing lives he was denying. She voiced this concern to Heidi.
“Well, I don’t think the finger prints would bear any resemblance but it is possible that an oddly inclined detective might want to ask your family some questions about you…” Heidi trailed off in thought, then came back with, “I’ll have to talk to O’Reilly, he has contacts with the coroner. That may help. We can always check up on the family.”
Lisa sighed, and slumped to staring down at her knees.
“Did you want to go see them tonight?” Heidi asked.
Lisa looked up at her confused for a moment. ‘Would she like to see the bodies?’ It was a moment before she realized Heidi meant her family. But by then it was too late and the idea had sunk and rooted. Though the notion of looking over the cold dead faces made her sick to her stomach, she suddenly needed to see it. It was as though she needed to do it for closure. But that wasn't right, was it?
“No,” Lisa answered after a moment. “I want to see the bodies. Could O’Reilly get us into the morgue?”
O’Reilly was Heidi’s Master. Not the one who turned her, he was dead in a permanent fashion, but the one to whom she owed her loyalty within the strange feudal/ corporate structure of vampire society. He was a bit of a prick, using those in his service as peons to expand that very power base. Of course from what Lisa had seen that was pretty much the norm.
Heidi seemed to flinch at the thought of asking her Master for a second favour in the same day. But then her expression cooled into its usual impenetrable mask of cheeriness.
"I think he could," she said. "Will he? Well, we'll see." With that she turned back to her breakfast.
Lisa turned back to the food too. It was all impeccably cooked. Although a vampire's sense of taste quickly disappeared along with his pulse, but the sense of smell was sharpened to perfection and some tastes, usually the favorites, lingered. Heidi continued to eat breakfast like a human and insisted Lisa do the same. Of course Lisa could taste only the contents of the food, not the food itself. The eggs, for instance, tasted of fat, oil, pepper, sodium, protean, and several other things, probably omega-3s and the like. It stuck on her pallet like warm cereal, but she swallowed it anyway.
The bacon was another story however. Lisa had always liked bacon, and while she could taste everything in and on the bacon, she still liked it and savoured it for as long as she could.
After breakfast Heidi went upstairs to call O'Reilly, and Lisa turned on the news. Her murder wasn't the only headline, a hooker had been killed in a hotel downtown. She then began to steel herself in preparation for the trip to the morgue.


Marc was not happy as he drove to the morgue. In fact that was an understatement; he was furious. The late night traffic was making matters worse, if that were even possible. It would have been easy to get away with speeding in any event seeing how the person sitting next to him was a cop, assuming anyone bothered to pull him over.
Aida sighed, audibly, for the fiftieth time. A literal number, Marc had been counting. As much as he loved the dark woman sitting next to him, he despised some of her habits, and now was not a time for stressing his tolerance of those habits. Still she did them, and still he tolerated, but he knew he was nearing the end of his rope.
"I don't need you to get into the morgue," he said. Aida had changed out of her duty uniform and into a more casual outfit, but she still had her badge on her belt like some plainclothes detective.
"I know, but you need someone to go with you," she replied. "You shouldn't be alone right now."
Marc was almost touched by her concern. But he didn't know if it was a question of making sure he was okay, or making sure he didn't hurt anyone else. That thought soured him once more, and a dark scowl returned to his pale face. Marc was not a large man and like many persons of Mexican decent he wore a cross at his throat, revealed in the open collar of his finely tailored suit.
A they drove to the morgue, he dwelt on what had happened. It had always been a possibility, in fact from one point of view it was inevitable. None-the-less the events of the previous night, that senseless murder, filled him with rage. Soon he would have to face the facts of loss, but before that came vengeance. And that was probably why Aida was travelling with him.
The morgue was cool, icy even, not that Marc noticed. Instead of slipping in through a window or a back door as he had been planning to do they walked through the front door. Aida's badge got them past security, and Marc had to admit that it was a useful thing to have around.
They were taken into the freezer by the night-shift worker, a pale goth-like young man. The corridors were confusing and everything smelled of formaldehyde. Still, the building was deserted at Eleven pm, which made sense. Who the hell would hang out with a bunch of dead people at night?
"Got a lot of bodies in today," the night coroner was saying. "Some kind of gang fight, then the girl you wanna see."
"What sort of 'gang fight'," Aida asked stiffly. It was her cop voice, used more often for interviewing witnesses.
The young man shrugged as he turned a corner into the freezer room, where a number of tables sat with white sheets covering the bodies on top. "The news just said you guys were following some leads, and frankly it looks like someone set a dog on them after," he replied.
"After?" Marc asked and the man shrugged again and led them to a particular metal slab.
The goth checked the toe tag on the body then, with a "this is it" he left them to inspect the body.
Marc stared down at the white sheet before unveiling the body. He needed to see the body, he knew, at least to make sure it was who he knew it to be. But then, he didn’t really need to pull back the sheet. He could feel it.
Then there was a sound from the hallway. A group of people were coming. Marc turned to see the goth coroner leading a trio into the freezer. They looked like a family, a small buxom blond and her teenage daughter dressed in black. The man was tall and heavy set, with a long scar running from his forehead to his dimpled cheek. What was more, Marc recognised him instantly.
“Sorry,” said the goth, “I have some relatives here to I.D. the other bodies. If that’s okay with you?” The question was aimed at Aida, who turned to Marc for reassurance.
“It’ll be fine Oz,” said the tall man, the tall vampire. “You can go.”
O’Reilly then turned to Marc and stared at him from the doorway where the trio had yet to move into the room. The goth turned and left in obsequious obedience to his master.
“It’s been a rather long time, Marcus,” O’Reilly said with his usual dry politeness.
“Not too long, a couple months since I was last invited to a council meeting,” Marc replied. His voice too took on a cold detached quality.
O’Reilly turned to the child standing beside the woman Marc had first presumed to be her mother. “You may as well go and do whatever it was you wanted to do,” he said.
Marc began to cross the room, stepping around the metal slabs. The tall teen vampire entered the room at a tentative pace, seeking something out among the lumps of white.
“This is your creation then?” the latino man asked, indicating the older girl, who wore a dark cocktail dress that left far too little to the imagination.
“My daughter, and granddaughter,” replied O’Reilly. The he abruptly cut off the discussion. “Despite our rather cordial meeting, I must be going.”
He turned to leave then turned back to his daughter for a moment. “A word, before I go, Heidi,” he commanded, and the two went out and down the hall to have their discussion.
Marc turned back to face the freezer room. Aida was a tableau of prepared violence. Her hand had even drifted down to her hip, where her pistol would have been. She didn’t show any signs of relaxing as she watched the other vampire making her way around the room, gently touching each body in various places. The girl walked with strength but her movements contained a kind of hesitation, and Marc decided that Aida was in no real danger.
He crossed back to the table Aida was standing. Flush with anger, he had made up his mind. Instantly he whipped down the sheet to reveal the upper half of the body. Lying underneath, as though in a peaceful rest, was his Etelvina. Pale and wan, and nude.
Marc felt his anger building once again. Grief swelled and he could feel his body trembling, he stopped it. The girl lying on the slab before him was so young, and looked so frail. Between her breasts and below her ribs there were holes in her flesh, puncture wounds from whatever her killer had used. He hadn’t even looked at the crime scene yet, or picked Aida’s brain for information of what the detectives were doing. He knew he had to do that, but when he had got to the hotel and she had told him what had happened he had insisted on coming out here, to see the body.
“Who was she?” It was the teen vampire. She had come around to the other side of the table and was touching the wounds in his sister’s chest.
“My sister,” he replied soberly.
The girl lifted her hand to touch the nose then and asked another question. “Was she mortal?”
“She was human, a nineteen year old girl.” He looked up into the face of the young looking creature. It was impossible to tell her true age but the looked no older than the girl on the table. “How old were you?” he asked.
A deeply personal question, Marc was not surprised by the flare of irritation he saw in the girl’s eyes before she answered.
“Fifteen,” she said. “Just six months ago.”
Noting the political need to reciprocate Marc replied with his own age at death, twenty-five. Of course that had been much longer than six months ago. He had watched his baby sister grow into child hood and pass into the middle years of adolescence. He had known that one day he would have to watch her buried, but had been hoping it would not be too soon. In the end though, a young death was a hazard of her lifestyle. A lifestyle no one would have chosen for her, least of all herself or her brother.
"That's surprisingly young," Marc commented absently. "Why..." he trailed off in his distraction.
"It was my choice," the girl replied.
"Why would anyone want choose...?" Aida began. "I mean, why would a child... a teenager...?"
Marc laughed. "Haven't you ever wanted to be immortal, Aida?" he asked. "Or invincible, or irresistible to men?" He gazed down at his sister in sadness. "Or strong enough to protect yourself from this?"
Aida didn't have a response to that.
"Who did it?" the girl asked.
"I don't know," Marc answered, his irritability and anger flooding back to him suddenly. "Why are you here?" he growled.
The teen vampire glared at him. Then she sighed. "I killed them," she said, pointing to the other bodies.
Marc grunted his acknowledgment and covered his sister back up. Aida though looked shocked. She gaped at the three other corpses, covered in their white sheets, then turned back to the tall skinny child who claimed to have murdered them.
"What," she said, "All of them?"