Free Sweet Scent of Blood by Suzanne McLeod Page B

here, to tell you where she is.’
    ... or somehow Bobby was reliving the past.
    A past that was burned into my brain.
    Bobby hadn’t been a vampire then, just one of their blood-pets. He’d kept watch all that night, after the girl had been found, waiting for the morning. Waiting for me to come.
    ‘I tried to get her to come out once they’d gone.’ His face crumpled. ‘But she started screaming ...’
    It had been January. I took a deep breath and hugged myself, unwillingly replaying the scene in my mind. The morning sun was a cold disc in a sky streaked with red warnings. The place had been a rats’ nest - or rather, a fang-gang’s nest - of squalor, right in the heart of Sucker Town. My stomach roiled. Even now, I could still smell the gagging stench of urine, fresh blood and pain...
    Bobby’s expression was bleak with horror.
    I’d scrambled into the basement to get her. By then her screaming had disintegrated into whimpers. Her rainbow eyes dripped tears of ice that shattered like glass as they fell. After a while, she let me pick her up. Her fingers dug in my shoulders even as she flinched from my touch. I wrapped my coat around her, smearing the ruby dots that pitted her green skin like a macabre sprinkling of bloody sugar balls. The bastard suckers hadn’t left her with enough blood for the bruises to bloom.
    ‘How could they do that to her?’ Bobby’s whisper was harsh. ‘Siobhan’s so tiny.’
    Siobhan, the girl, was Mick’s sister - half-sister really - seeing as she was a full-blooded leprechaun. She’d been twelve years old, here on a holiday visit from Ireland to see her brother, too young to fight back when the fang-gang had snatched her from her bed. She’d been gone for five nights when Mick had sought me out and begged for my help. If she’d been human, any hope of rescuing her alive would’ve died within twenty-four hours, but those with fae blood last so much longer.
    And even though I’d known it was an inside job - no vampire could’ve crossed Mick’s threshold without an invitation - and that Mick was only the messenger, I agreed to the bargain when it was offered.
    Siobhan was the first fae I’d managed to save. There’d been others in need, before Siobhan, but I’d found them too late. After Siobhan, I’d been much more successful, but by then I had my own insider information.
    That bargain, the one I’d made then, was why I was now standing in a locked cell with a vampire accused of murdering his girlfriend, and it was why that vampire was taking me on an unwelcome trip down memory lane.
    He was delivering an invitation.
    So what the fuck was wrong with using the phone?
    Chill air crawled over my flesh. I backed up and leant against the door, not sure if Bobby would say any more. He rocked from side to side, grey eyes glazed, mouth half-open revealing a glimpse of fang. He might have hit the jackpot and graduated from blood-pet to blood-sucker over the last four years, but he was still just a puppet, jerking on his Master’s strings. It would be decades before Bobby would reach his Autonomy.
    I wondered if he’d known what the Gift had meant, or whether, with his looks, he’d truly been a sucker? Poor bastard. But then, he was better off than Melissa, his girlfriend. At least he wasn’t lying in the morgue. Yet.
    Another blast of frozen air hit me. I rubbed my hands over my arms and shivered again. What had happened to the heating? I looked up at the vents, puzzled. Then it hit me: Constable Curly-hair must’ve cut the heat. That same heat that was keeping Bobby, the vampire from getting agitated. Bitch! I rapped my knuckles against the cell door. Time to go.
    Movement caught in the corner of my vision. I turned back to see Bobby on his hands and knees, head hanging down.
    This was so not good.
    I slammed my hand against the door again.
    Bobby started moving, his movements more fluid now as he crawled across the floor towards me.
    I kicked the door with my heel,