A hand closed over my shoulder. Lena didn’t say a word. She stood beside me, giving me time, but letting me know she was there.
“He didn’t deserve this.” I swallowed, trying to ease the tightness in my throat. I had always had a vivid imagination. It was part of what made me a good libriomancer, but now it tortured me, recreating the possible details of the attack: the jolt of adrenaline as the door crashed inward; the shock, pain, and confusion as inhumanly strong hands ripped him from the couch; the fear when he realized what was happening. Had he called out for help as the vampire hauled him into the kitchen?
I steeled myself and stepped past Ted, who had stopped at the boundary of the kitchen where carpet met brown linoleum. Faded smears of blood marked the walls, and the floor was tacky. Someone had done an initial clean-up, possibly the landlord, but it would take industrial cleaners to make this place habitable again.
The pantry was smashed in. A few stray Cheerios crunched beneath my feet, and I spotted tiny ants moving across the floor. The knives from the wooden block beside the sink were missing. Probably taken to a police forensics lab.
I opened Smudge’s cage, allowing him to climb up to my shoulder. He immediately turned around and perched low to watch Ted. Heat wafted from his small body.
“It’s the blood,” Ted said. “I can taste it.” His face was even paler than usual, and his tongue flicked over his lower lip. His eyes had taken on a reddish tinge. “I’ll just wait back here.”
“Good idea.” I’d hate to have to kill Ted after going to all that work to drag him down here. Not to mention the questions a layer of vampire ash could raise in whoever came to clear out Ray’s belongings. Probably his ex-wife or daughter. I wondered whether the Porters had talked to them. They deserved to know the truth, but that would never happen.
Lena had moved to the round wooden table tucked into the corner. Bloodstains darkened every scratch and gouge in the surface. Thin streaks through the stains showed where the police had swabbed samples of the blood. Of Ray’s blood.
I forced myself to move closer, examining the fresh scars in the wood and the faint spatter of blood on the wall. I stepped to the side, moving my hand down as if I were swinging a knife, then wrenching it free. “Whoever killed him stood here.”
The white ceiling showed the blood better than the walls. There was nothing careful or precise about what had been done to Ray Walker. Every violent wrench of the knife would have sprayed blood from the blade onto the wall and ceiling. From those lines, Ray had been stabbed at least six times.
“This feels personal,” Lena said. “It’s overkill.”
Personal, and completely different than the attacks on me back in Copper River. The sparklers had been pissed, but not like this. And Deb had tried to trick me into coming with her. “How does it compare to the attack on Doctor Shah?”
“The vampires who hit us were organized and smart.” Lena’s words were tight. “If they’d come in with this kind of uncontrolled fury, I’d have taken them apart.”
I closed my eyes, listening to the cars rushing past on Grand River Avenue. “Why didn’t anyone hear?”
“It’s easy enough to stop someone from screaming,” Ted offered from the other side of the doorway. “Crush the throat with one hand. If you’re into knives, jab the lungs. Or if you’re lucky enough to have some of that vampire mojo, you can mind-control them.” He took a step back, hands raised. “Hey, you asked, man.”
I stared at Ted, then back at the bloodstains on the walls and ceiling. I dropped to my hands and knees by the table. Faint outlines showed where blood had puddled on the linoleum. Ted could barely enter the room without losing control. “What kind of vampire enters without needing an invitation, kills with no restraint, but doesn’t drink the blood of their victim? ”
“Does that narrow down the possibilities?” asked Lena.
“Too much.” I slammed a fist into the wall. “None of the species living in the Midwest fit.”
“It’s a vampire, all right,” Ted took a single step back toward the kitchen. His eyes turned a vivid red. Lena readied her bokken, and I heard the telltale puff of Smudge’s flame. Ted hissed and backed away, shaking his head.
“What is it?” Lena asked.
Ted rubbed his jaw. “You know how I’ve stayed alive all these years, Isaac?”
“By hiding in a basement?”
He ignored me. “Instinct. Pure, animal instinct. When I step into that room and get a good whiff of the thing that killed your friend, those instincts tell me to get as far away as possible. You’d be wise to do the same.”
“But you can smell it?” I asked. “Which means you can track it.”
His animalistic snarl eased into an expression of disgust. “Aw, shit. I shouldn’t have said that. Yah, I can track it.”
I turned away from the blood, though I doubted I would ever be able to scrape the image from my mind. The vampire would have been drenched in blood. They couldn’t have simply strolled away without attracting notice, but some vampires could move too fast to see, especially at night. “Let’s go.”
“I’ll follow this thing, but once we find it, you’re on your own,” said Ted.
I straightened my jacket, taking comfort from the weight of my books. “You find it. We’ll take it from there.”
Chapter 7
I wasn’t surprised when Ted led us onto campus, directly toward the remains of the MSU main library. A dead Porter and a destroyed archive in the same city? How could they not be connected?
Nightfall had added strength to Ted’s step, making him seem somehow larger. He puffed on a cigarette as he walked. Apparently smoking didn’t interfere with his ability to track the other vampire. “This is a bad idea,” he muttered.
I remembered the MSU library as an imposing four-story fortress of brick and glass, built on the northern bank of the Red Cedar River. As a freshman, I had gotten hopelessly lost on the third floor, trying to track down a journal article about Jacques Derrida’s contribution to literary theory.
The attack had smashed the entire building to rubble.
Roads were blocked off, and the smell of smoke and dust choked the air. A hastily erected chain-link fence circled the ruins. Yellow caution tape was woven through the fence, framing a hill of broken bricks and twisted metal. Intact sections of wall and floor jutted from the pile at random angles. Broken glass glittered in the street, illuminated by enormous halogen lamps set up around the edges. Generators and construction equipment growled like angry metal beasts.
A crew in reflective orange vests and hard hats was working to clear the debris. Others worked with dogs, presumably searching for survivors trapped within the wreckage. A bulldozer was parked a short distance away. I spotted a police car and an ambulance as well.
Ted lit another cigarette and spat the butt of the first onto the street, earning an annoyed look from one of the students who surrounded the site at a safe distance. Many were snapping photos with their cell phones. Others were murmuring to one another, and I saw several people crying. Ruined books and magazines were everywhere, the breeze ripping through their pages.
The trees around the library were gray with dust, but appeared intact. Likewise, the neighboring buildings were dirty but unharmed: not a cracked window anywhere. This had been a deliberate, carefully-controlled attack on the library. On us.
“No vampire did this,” Ted growled. “Not even sparklers are this tough. Whatever busted this place, they’d swat you and me like mosquitoes.”
“We’ll see,” said Lena. She had twisted her bokken into a single thick cane, like a hand-carved double helix. It was a nifty trick, one that allowed her to retain her weapons without drawing much attention. She leaned on the cane and asked, “Can you tell if anyone’s alive in there?”