Sanctuary

Chapter 5

Jaynah

I watched expressions of the people around the table change as Debbie spoke. Luke and Kelly smiled. Dieter and Debbie grinned. Duncan took a while to spot it, then smiled as he did. Kieran and Pete were the last ones to find the bite marks.

"Well, it's easy to see where I got my intelligence from."

"Back down Kelly. You had an advantage in that you knew what to look for. Kieran didn't." Luke's voice was sharp and held a low growl to it that silenced her.

"This vampire first showed up about six months ago in Lyon. I think. It's possible that there were other bodies going back further than that. We didn't know what to look for."

Kelly gave a derisive snort. "Some warrior. You couldn't even spot bite marks on a leg."

I held up my hand to Pete. Even without looking at him, I could tell his eyes were narrowing. Kelly's barb may have hit him, but she aimed it at me. I smirked at her as I continued. "Not a good look Kelly, insinuating that the leader of a stronghold is somehow less of a warrior. You knew what to look for because you recognised one body. The last one was from when you and Luke were in Paris with me three months ago. Remember how I pointed out the wounds to you? Showed you and Luke where to look in case you found any more bodies like that." I placed my hands, curled into fists on the edge of the desk and leaned forward. "Tell me. Would you have found those bite marks if I hadn't shown you what to look for?"

Kelly's face went pale, and she fell silent. Her head lowered as she looked at the table.

I didn't need to hear it to know her response. "I thought so. Now, if you're finished with your interruptions, I'd like to continue." I stood up and pressed a button on my laptop. The original slide appeared, with marks on the upper thigh. "I was on another case when the first body appeared. After the third body, Blaise put me on the case. I sat down with the photos and a pot of coffee. I examined each photo with a magnifying glass. It took until my third pot for me to find the connection. When the bodies were just succubus kills, the Council gave them a lower priority. As vampire kills, they gave me all the resources I needed to track the vampire responsible."

"Why the leg though? Is it to fool us?"

I shook my head, then shrugged. "To be honest, I'm still not sure. The femoral artery is one of the largest in the body, so it's almost as good as going for the jugular. It also comes with the side benefit of being a place we don't look so it would take longer for us to discover the pattern. It could have started as an accident then evolved when the vampire realised that we weren't hunting her."

"You keep saying her. What makes you think it is a female?"

"The perfume for one, lipstick traces near the bite and evidence of sex in the seconds before death." I flipped the slides to one body. "We found vaginal fluids around this guy's mouth and saliva on his penis."

The men around the table looked uncomfortable as they realised what I was talking about. The women smirked. I continued on. "After this man, we found no fluids on the body. But we found traces that showed someone had cleaned up with baby wipes. The perfume has vanilla, sandalwood and musk as the dominant notes. The lipstick is not unusual, just your average, standard red."

"Vampires hunt in groups. What makes you so sure there's only one like this?" I turned my head towards Pete and nodded. It was a valid question.

"I'm not sure. A week ago, I would have been. Just like I would have been sure that Luke, Kelly and I, along with my squad, killed her." I pressed a few more buttons on my laptop and a series of photos came up. "These changed all that. The first is from Sydney a few days ago. The second just last night." I turned to Luke and shrugged. "I got copies from Pete when I arrived this afternoon. He said Mike had called him." Luke nodded, and I continued from where I left off. "I thought we had killed the vampire responsible. I wasn't getting any more reports of strange bodies and things went quiet. But these photos, and these reports paint a different picture. Several scenarios come to mind, but the most likely are that the original is still alive; she has an apprentice, or there is a vampire that worked out how to disguise their kills and is teaching others to do the same. There is the chance that this is all the work of a copy cat, but I don't think it is."