"Sizemore, Susan - Laws of the Blood 2 - Partners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sizemore Susan)

Maybe she should trust her instincts and go looking for her. There might be a trace of energy around the body that she could follow.

"And then what do I do? Avenge her death?"

It was none of her business, but Char couldn't help but answer "Yes" to the question she'd asked herself.

As long as her thoughts dwelled on the murdered woman, she had trouble thinking about Daniel. Maybe the two were connected, maybe not, but somehow the woman's death preyed on her conscience more than looking for the lost kid did.

"Besides, it's a start," she told herself. "Have to start being an Enforcer sometime, somewhere. This might as well be it."

How to go about it? Char stood in the living room and took a few deep breaths to calm down. Then she walked back out on the balcony and closed her eyes in order to let all her other senses roam free. When she opened them, she found that she'd turned away from the city.

"That way." She pointed. "In the mountains."



Haven followed his instincts. He followed a trail he couldn't see and couldn't question. If he thought, he'd lose the mental scent. He focused on remembering the dream, on seeing the woman's green eyes, on hearing her scream for help. He followed the dream when he got into his Jeep Cherokee and drove.

He didn't try to make any sense out of what he was doing; he didn't think at all, not for the first few hours, anyway. He'd gotten into this kind of weird trance state a few times before, hunting vampires by somehow sensing some kind of invisible something. He couldn't explain it, certainly hadn't tried to. Santini and Baker wouldn't get it - or they'd suspect he'd gotten bitten and was turning into one of them. He hadn't and he wasn't, but he guessed the more you hunted the bastards, the more you became like them.

Or it was more likely that he was out of his mind. He decided this as he pulled off a narrow gravel road halfway up a mountain. He was deep inside a state park, and it was the middle of the night. Haven killed the headlights and switched off the Jeep's engine. He was tired, hungry, and nearly out of gas. Haven rubbed an aching spot on his forehead. He wanted to cynically ask himself what he thought he was doing and turn around and head back toward the city. Instead, he reached under the seat, pulled out his favorite sawed-off shotgun, and got out of the vehicle.

Haven had done a lot of night work in the last few years, so his vision quickly adjusted to the thick forest darkness. It was foggy under the trees, but at least it wasn't raining. It was cold this high up at this time of the year, but Haven was used to the way the high desert chilled down after the sun set. He took a black leather jacket out of the backseat and zipped it on. When he moved cautiously onto a hiking trail under the trees, he looked like no more than another shadow in the fog. He knew he wouldn't be hidden from any vampire's night vision, but he didn't think any vampires were out in the forest tonight.



There was a mortal in the woods. Char could smell him psychically and, frankly, she didn't think he'd bathed recently. All human senses were enhanced by the change to strigoi, and Nighthawk senses were keener still. This was not always an advantage where smell was involved. She had been able to smell the body in the clearing from a mile away, for example.

She stepped away from the body and took a few sniffs of the damp night air. Char detected leather and cotton as well as old sweat and the scent of liquor and cigarettes from the man coming toward her. The emotions she caught could best be described as concentrated curiosity, annoyance, disgust. He moved slowly and cautiously up the hiking trail. His caution gave her time to continue her investigation.

Char hadn't been around a lot of corpses. What was the point? She understood the need to hunt; it was the very core of vampire nature. There was pleasure in killing, but it wasn't something you needed to do all the time. You ate what you killed, killed only when you had to, chose the prey carefully, and treated the whole process with a modicum of respect. That was the way it was supposed to work, anyway.

She blamed modern media, the breakdown in society, and sheer childish irresponsibility for the way some vampires behaved, like undisciplined, spoiled kids who treated hunting mortals like it was a live-action role-playing game instead of sacrament and survival of the strigoi kind.

Mortals were even more irresponsible when it came to dealing out death. What had this woman done that she deserved to die? How had she been chosen? By whom? Char supposed mortals killed more of each other because there were more of them. There were only a few thousand, maybe even only a few hundred, strigoi in the world and over six billion mortals. She didn't know if it was the sheer number of people available to commit horrific crimes that made the mortals seem worse than strigoi or if most vampires were a better class of killer. Of course, Enforcers were much more effective than mortal law enforcement.

And none of that had anything to do with her standing in a cold, foggy forest next to a dead body while sensing a mortal's approach.

She was thinking again. She should stop doing that so much and focus.

Char knew the woman had been ritually slain before she saw the wounds, but was it a strigoi ritual? All she had time for now was to quickly memorize the body's position, how the victim had been mutilated, whatever details Char could discern to help determine what sort of ritual had required the woman's sacrifice. At the same time she tried to pick up any residue of the sort of energy a vampire would leave. Mostly what she discerned was a lack of energy. The woman had been mentally strong. She'd fought hard enough to psychically call for help, a call that Char had been unable to ignore even a night after the murder. But the woman's murderer left no mental scent around the corpse.

Someone was covering their tracks, and doing a very good job of it.

That was more than could be said for the approaching mortal. He'd left the path and was nearly at the clearing. Why was a mortal on this part of the mountainside at this time of night? Criminal returning to the scene of the crime, she hoped. Some other part of the ritual yet to be performed?

Char moved away from the body but kept it in view while she waited for the man to come into the clearing. His mental signature was rather overwhelmingly strong, actually. If he was the killer, he wasn't using magic to disguise his presence at the moment. But if he wasn't the killer, how did he know where to find the body?