Free Deadly Desire by Keri Arthur Page A

found in Armel's. That powerful sense of wrongness was there, but fading fast. Another hour or two, and there'd be nothing more unusual in this roomthan the scent of sex and the musty aroma that spoke of vampire. A vampire who washed, I thought, thinking of the kid's comment with amusement.
    I walked up into the other room. This was a library rather than a study, as Armel's had been, but it still had a safe. Mel was dusting it for prints.
    My gaze fell on a chrome and glass side table and I noticed the dust gathered there. And it wasn't the powder Mel was using—this stuff was coarser, and reminded me of the dust I'd blown off Armel's wallet. I glanced back at Mel. “You taken a sample of this?”
    She looked across to see what I was pointing at, then nodded. “Don't know what it is, though I don't think it's regular house dust.”
    “It looks similar to some dust I saw at Armel's.”
    “Then we'll add it to the priority list.”
    “Thanks.”
    I finally let my gaze move to the body. Garrison, or what remained of him, sat in a plush leather chair next to the side table, a book slumped across his chest and the remains of a glass underneath the fingers of his right hand. Wine stained the carpet, its color almost as rich as the bloody pool that had formed under what remained of his legs.
    “Where's his head and the end of his legs?” I asked, suddenly realizing what was missing.
    “Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” she said, catlike green eyes bright in the semishadows. “But there's a couple of rather large Dobermans in the backyard, and the window behind you is open.”
    I looked at the window, then back at her. “Youhaven't checked whether the missing bits are out there?”
    She smiled grimly. “We have two bird shifters and a cat shifter on this team. Sorry, tackling dogs is off all of our to-do lists. But you could always try.”
    I could, but if those dogs out there were guarding the remains of their master, I wasn't going to interrupt them. The only reason a vamp would have a couple of Dobermans would be for protection, and I rather suspected these two would be trained to tackle most nonhumans. I also doubted that one lone werewolf would faze them, even if that werewolf had alpha tendencies and could back down most canines.
    “Have you called in a dogcatcher?”
    “Yep. But the vampire's bits would have turned to ash very soon after they hit the sunlight, and they could have been thrown in any direction from that window. It can wait.”
    I turned away from the window. “Any idea how these people are getting into the house?”
    She shook her head. “Marshall can't find any obvious—or nonobvious—methods of entry. But they appear to be walking out the front door with their hauls.”
    That raised my eyebrows. “They would have to have been covered in blood, wouldn't they?”
    “You'd think so. Cutting off someone's head and legs while he's alive would have created spurts of arterial spray, even in a vampire, but other than the pools of blood near the remains of his legs and neck, there's nothing.”
    “So they used a screen or something?”
    She wrinkled her nose. “I doubt it. Arterial spray is something of a misnomer—it comes out with a lot of force when a main artery is cut. Even if they'd used a screen, there would have been residual drips.”
    “And they couldn't have used any sort of floor cover, because then we'd not have the blood pools.”
    “Exactly.”
    My gaze ran around the room, then came to rest again on the pools of blood underneath Garrison's body. They weren't nearly big enough for a body that had been bled out. “Maybe they were collecting the blood.”
    “Maybe. Hard to imagine anyone sitting still through that sort of thing, though, and they don't appear to have used restraints of any kind.”
    “Could it have been magic?” I asked, looking at Mel again. “Cole thought there might have been magical influences over at Armel's murder.”
    She frowned. “If it