Decay. Acid. Sex.
The tastes mingled on her tongue, threatening to turn her stomach. "He had sex with them."
Raphael looked at the bodies strung up from the rafters, his eyes blue flame. "Are you certain?"
"I can smell it." While vampires were the only ones she could track by scent, her sense of smell was far better than that of a normal human's. And, it appeared, even an archangel's.
"No blood."
She stared at the stains on the carpet. "What do you call that?" She wouldn't look up again, she told herself, wouldn't reinforce the pieces of horror burned into her mind from a single fleeting glimpse.
Hanging limbs waving in the air-conditioned breeze, faces frozen in a rictus of terror. Pale skin torn open, lips colored blue, hair used as a noose.
Raphael's hand tightened on hers, pulling her back from the edge of the beckoning abyss. "He didn't take their blood. The wounds are brutal but there are no signs of feeding."
She already knew there would be no medical examiner to verify the findings. If they were to have any chance of finding and stopping Uram, she had to look, had to make sure. It was her job. "Cut them down." Her voice was hoarse. "I need to see the wounds up close."
He released her hand. "Your knife."
She put it flat in the palm of his hand, watched him walk to the vermilion explosion of the living room, his wings held out and slightly flared so they didn't trail on the floor. Then he pushed off with a single powerful beat of his wings. It generated wind.
The bodies swung.
Elena ran out the door and into the garden, where she proceeded to lose everything she'd eaten for the second time that day. Her stomach cramped painfully even after it was all gone, and when the nozzle of a hose was handed to her, she grabbed it like a lifeline, washing out her mouth and drenching her face before guzzling the plastic-tasting water as if it was nectar. "Thanks." She dropped the hose and looked up.
Venom smiled, slow, mocking. "Big, tough hunter, scared at the sight of a little blood." He turned off the tap. "My illusions are shattered."
"Poor baby," she said, wiping a hand down her face.
He showed her teeth, bright white against that exotic skin. "Feeling better?" Insincerity dripped from every word.
"Bite me." Turning her back, she forced herself to take the steps that would return her to the abattoir.
"Oh, I intend to." A drawl full of innuendo. "Everywhere."
She threw a knife in his direction without looking, had the satisfaction of hearing him swear as he caught it by the wrong end and sliced open his palm. Strength restored, she walked over the threshold.
Raphael was in the living area, laying the last of the bodies on the carpet. He held the woman gently, cradled against him. As he placed her on her back at the end of the line of similarly positioned bodies, Elena swallowed and walked toward him. "Sorry about that." She didn't explain, couldn't tell him the truth. Not about this.
He looked up. "Don't be. It's a gift to feel horror."
It made her wonder. "Do you?"
"Too little." An ancient darkness swept over his face. "I've seen such evil, even the loss of so much innocence barely touches me."
The inhumanity of it made her heart twist. "Tell me," she said, kneeling, "tell me the horrors you've seen so I can forget this one."
"No. You already have too many nightmares in your head." He met her gaze. "Go, track Uram. This can wait."
Knowing he was right, she walked outside and spent the next ten minutes trying to find Uram's exit route. It was with frustration churning in her gut that she returned to the house. "He flew from here."
Raphael nodded to the bodies. "Then we need to examine the fallen, see if they can tell us anything."
She gave a jerky nod and went to kneel by the first body. "She was cut open by a dull blade from neck to navel." The girl's internal organs were no longer in her body. "Did you find the rest of her?"
"Yes. There is a . . . collection in the corner behind you."
Bile burned in her throat, but she gritted her teeth and kept going. "No bite marks, no signs he tore into her with anything but a knife." As she moved on to the next body, she realized she hadn't looked at the girl's face. And that was a mistake. Uram could've taken the blood from her mouth. She'd once seen a body that had been sucked dry from a kiss.
Stomach tight enough to hurt, she went to touch the face, stopped. "I need gloves."
"Tell me what you need to see." Raphael's wings filled her vision as he appeared on the other side of the body.
"Don't be stupid," she muttered, pushing off his hand as he reached out to touch the corpse, forgetting he'd carried it down. "She could've been infected with a human virus, or Uram might've infected her like you were worried he'd infected the survivor."
Blue, blue eyes met hers. "I'm immortal, Elena." A soft reminder that smashed into her with the force of a ball-peen hammer. Of course he was immortal. How could she have forgotten?
"The mouth," she said, looking away from that face that could belong to no mortal, no matter how blessed. "Open her mouth."
He did so with clean efficiency. Thankfully, rigor had passed, so he didn't have to break the dead girl's jaw, though she knew it would've been child's play for him to do so. Retrieving a slender torch from the side pocket of her cargos, she shined it inside the woman's mouth. "No bites."
They went through the other bodies with methodical precision. Each had been shredded by a knife, some more mercifully than others. The first victim had been alive at the time of her disembowelment, the last dead. "No bite marks. Doesn't mean he didn't suck up the blood from the wounds." Or the entrails.
"Taking blood with the fangs is part of the pleasure."
"Then he definitely didn't feed." Just tortured.
"One of the bloodborn wouldn't be able to resist feeding."
The pieces clicked. "He did this first, the bodies in the warehouse second." The air-conditioning had kept these bodies from decaying, but now that she was looking, she saw a number of signs that this had happened at least a day, more likely two days, past-the color of the dried blood on the walls, the lack of rigor, the bruises that had bloomed on the girls' bodies as blood followed gravity.
All hunters were required to take a course in the general details of death-they were often the first people to find a vampire's kill. Now, pressing against the bruises, she saw no change in the discoloration-the skin didn't pale, then fill back with blood. Livor mortis was fixed. "These girls were practice."