Chapter 1

1

The streets of downtown Chicago echoed with the wind’s shrieks, bouncing off windows gone dark, slamming into whatever hapless bodies were caught in the winter storm. Hunched against the gale, two figures darted between a pair of parked cars as they raced for safety. They passed from pools of light cast by the streetlamps to the pitch separating them, over and over until they reached the haven of the doorway they sought. Then they had to stop, pressing themselves to the walls, as one fought to catch his breath and the other scowled into the darkness.

“As much as I love this town,” Gideon Keel muttered, “I hate the fucking winters.”

Jesse nodded, his teeth chattering. “Maybe we should migrate south for the winter. I hear Florida’s nice. A million senior citizens can’t be wrong, right?”

A snort of laughter created a white plume in front of Gideon’s face that quickly dissipated in the night air. “Let’s just hope Rina’s not wrong about this party going down tonight,” he said. His ungloved hand found the doorknob at their backs, snapping it open, and he stepped out of the way, allowing Jesse to enter first. The wind and blowing snow were small annoyances for Gideon; for Jess, they could be deadly.

Jess hurried inside, rubbing his hands together and stomping his feet. “Let’s hope if she’s right, they don’t have some sort of brute squad for security.”

Silently, Gideon echoed his agreement, but now, with the door slipping shut behind them and the unknown looming ahead and above, conversation needed to cease. According to Rina, some soiree was supposed to take place in the apartment over the sporting goods store—out-of-towners who’d been bragging around town about showing off their “good taste.” She wasn’t the type of vampire who brought tips like this to Gideon, but when one of the college girls she hung out with disappeared, Rina took the right step and came to him. He credited part of it to her wanting to atone for attacking Jesse the previous summer when she’d been high on obsidian, too. But the why of it didn’t matter too much to him.

All he cared about was making sure it wasn’t the massacre he feared it might be. One sniff of the stale stairwell air, however, told him they were too late.

Holding his hand against Jesse’s chest, Gideon kept his partner behind him as he turned his attention to the narrow steps leading upstairs. His features shifted, his vampire visage coming to the fore, and he cocked his head as he strained to hear any sounds that might filter from the rooms above. Nothing came. Not the faint pulse of a human heartbeat, not a whisper of a breath.

“Stay behind me,” he murmured.

Jess nodded, falling in step. They climbed the steps quickly and silently—Jess was getting better at stealth. There was a single door at the top of the landing. Gideon tested the knob. Unlocked. He looked over his shoulder, and Jess had his crossbow at the ready. But Gideon knew before he pushed the door open there wasn’t going to be anybody there.

The stench as they walked into the front room was overwhelming. Blood and semen and sheer, unadulterated terror lingered in the air, crawling under Gideon’s skin like an army of fire ants determined to eat him from the inside out. The wind made the glass rattle in the panes, but all the lights had long been extinguished. It didn’t make a difference to Gideon. He still saw everything perfectly. He saw everything tooperfectly.

“You can put it away,” he said without looking back. “We’re too late.”

Jess dug through his bag. The click of a flashlight preceded the narrow beam of light flashing over the room, before falling on the body. The beam shook as it illuminated what remained of the party—the carnage—before it snapped suddenly away.

“Oh…Christ.”

There were reasons why, even after nearly three years of working together, Gideon didn’t like Jesse coming out with him when he was on a case. It wasn’t just that he wanted to keep the man he loved from harm; Jesse had become quite adept with weapons in the time they’d worked together. There was also the overwhelming desire to keep the darker shadows from tainting Jess, shielding him from witnessing the evil Gideon attempted to keep at bay on a nightly basis. Some things were better left unseen.

The body pinned to the wall was one of them.

It had been female when it had been alive, and Gideon knew, as he closed the distance to Jesse’s side and rested a reassuring hand on his shoulder, it was better for the girl that she was now dead. Her wrists were fastened in place with heavy shackles, and her left hand had been posed with heavy wire to be extended, fingers crooked as if to beckon someone even closer. The same wire positioned the head and legs, but none of it was molded over the muscles. Instead, it had been threaded beneath the skin to act like a second skeleton, and the rivulets of dried blood left in the wire’s wake looked like open veins along her skin.