Free For a Few Demons More by Kim Harrison Page B

out, Jenks flew from my shoulder to hover over her. “ She smells like a Were,” he proclaimed. “And fish. And rubbing alcohol.”
    Glenn twitched the sheet with which she’d been covered in lieu of a bag all the way off. “Her ankles have pressure marks, too.”
    My brow furrowed. “So someone held her against her will and then killed her?”
    Jenks’s wings clattered. “There’s a strand of medical tape caught in her teeth.”
    The breath Glenn had taken to answer me exploded out of him. “You’re kidding.”
    Adrenaline pinged, and feeling woozy, I looked to see. “I’m not trained for this,” I said when Glenn took a penlight from his pocket and motioned for me to hold her mouth open. Gingerly I took her jaw in my hands. “I’m not going to take a knife to her and poke around.”
    â€œGood.” He trained the light on her teeth. “I don’t have authorization for that.”
    The squeak of the double doors pulled my head up. Jenks swore as I let go of Vanessa’s jaw, my swinging hand almost smacking him. Tension flashed to fear for an instant as I saw Denon, my old boss from the I.S., standing in the middle of the floor like the king of the dead.
    â€œThis is an Inderland matter. You don’t have clearance to even look at her,” he said, his honey-smooth voice rippling over my spine like water over rocks.
    Damn it all to hell, I thought, jerking my fear back. He wasn’t my boss anymore. He wasn’t anything. But I was too deep underground to tap a line, and I didn’t like it.
    The low-blood living vampire smiled to show his human teeth, a startling white beside his oh-so-beautiful mahogany skin. Iceman was behind him along with a second living vampire, high-blood this time by his small but sharp canines. The scent of burgers and fries had come in with them, and it looked like Glenn’s fifty dollars had bought less time than he’d hoped.
    Jenks rose in a hum of wings. “Look what the cat dragged in and puked up,” he snarled. “It smells like it used to be something, but I can’t tell what, Rache. Fuzzy rat balls, maybe?”
    Denon ignored him, as he ignored everyone he thought beneath his notice, but I caught a twitch of an eye as he kept smiling, trying to impress me with his mere presence.
    Glenn clicked off his penlight and tucked it away, his jaw tensed, unrepentant. Denon wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Not that he ever had been, and especially not now. He was probably the reason I had lost my license, though, and that ticked me off.
    With a practiced swagger, the large muscular man came forward on cat-light feet. He was technically a ghoul, a rude term for a human bitten by an undead and intentionally infected with enough of the vamp virus to partially turn him. And whereas living high-blood vampires like Ivy were born to their status and envied for having a portion of the undead’s strengths without the drawbacks, a low-blood vampire was little more than a source of blood as they tried to curry the favor of the one who had promised them immortality.
    Denon clearly worked hard to build up his human strength, and though his biceps strained his polo shirt and his thighs were heavy with iron-pumping muscle, he still fell short of his brethren and woulduntil he died and became a true undead. And that was contingent upon his “sponsor” remembering and/or bothering to finish the job. With Denon taking the blame for Ivy’s leaving the I.S. with me, that likelihood was looking slim. His master had turned a blind eye, and Denon knew it. It made him unpredictable and dangerous, since he was trying to ingratiate himself back into his master’s good graces. The fact that he was working the morning shift spoke volumes.
    Though still beautiful, he had lost the ageless look of one who feeds upon the undead. It was likely they were still feeding on him, though. He