Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1

Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1
Book Jacket

Series:
Bloodhound Files-1 [1]

Rating:

Tags:
Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths, American Science Fiction And Fantasy, Serial murders, Mystery & Detective, Fantasy fiction, Contemporary, Fiction - Fantasy, General, Romance, Fantasy, Horror & Ghost Stories, Criminal profilers, Suspense, Women Sleuths, Occult fiction, Serial murder investigation, FICTION, Werewolves, Fantasy - Contemporary, Vampires

SUMMARY:
Her job description is the “tracking and apprehension of mentally-fractured killers.” What this really means in FBI profiler Jace Valchek’s brave new world—one in which only one percent of the population is human—is that a woman’s work is never done. And real is getting stranger every day…Jace has been ripped from her reality by David Cassius, the vampire head of the NSA. He knows that she’s the best there in the business, and David needs her help in solving a series of gruesome murders of vampires and werewolves. David’s world—one that also includes lycanthropes and golems—is one with little knowledge of mental illness. An insane serial killer is a threat the NSA has no experience with. But Jace does. Stranded in a reality where Bela Lugosi is a bigger box office draw than Bruce Willis and every full moon is Mardi Gras, Jace must now hunt down a fellow human before he brings the entire planet to the brink of madness. Or she may never see her own world again…

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DYING BITES

Bloodhound Files - Book 1

By D.D. Barant

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“I’m a vampire,” Cassius says. “Not a demon, not a creature of pure evil, not a figment of some writer’s imagination. I drink blood, I’m extremely allergic to sunlight, I’m effectively immortal. I’m a supernatural creature, not a natural one, and if you’re going to survive here, you’re going to have to learn how to deal with beings like me, because I’m far from the only one.”

And, just like that, I believe him.

“Vampires,” I say calmly. “Lots?”

“Thirty-seven percent of the population. Worldwide.”

“Barely a third. How’s the war going?”

His eyes fade to normal. His fangs recede. “It was over a long time ago,” he says. He straightens up from his feral crouch, seems almost embarrassed. “You lost.”

“So the other sixty or so percent is what, livestock?”

“Forty-three are lycanthropes. Nineteen are golems.”

“Why am I here?”

“Because one of the ways this world is different from yours is in the sickness you call insanity. Most supernatural creatures are immune to disease, our minds as well as our bodies. Only human beings are experienced in dealing with madness, and, well . . .”

“We’re hard to come by?” I’ve already done the math. “One percent. That’s all that’s left of us, you bastard? One percent?”

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“Less than that,” he says quietly. “Your species numbers under a million. And one of them is slaughtering my people.”

“Why should I care?”

“Because catching this madman,” Cassius replies, “is the only hope you have of ever seeing your home again.”

ONE

I think about monsters a lot.

Real ones, I mean, not Frankenstein or Dracula or Godzilla. I work for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, where I use my degree in criminal psychology to help profile offenders; my area of expertise is homicide-fixated nonstandard patterning. It’s my job to figure out why the crazy ones do what they do and who they’re going to do it to next. This makes me Miss Popular at cocktail parties—until my third tequila, when certain details that really shouldn’t be heard on a full stomach somehow become the punch lines to jokes of incredibly bad taste.

I usually don’t get invited back.

Which is why I’m home alone, again, nursing a throbbing hangover and trying to get back to sleep. I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 A.M. guilts—you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression, and self-loathing.

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Okay, I don’t really hate myself. But I do piss myself off—quite a bit, actually—and sometimes I need a good, stern talking-to about important elements in my life. I think I was criticizing my own taste in clothes when I finally fell asleep.

It’s funny. Dreams can be intimately revealing, or incomprehensible. They can be ridiculous or terrifying, deeply significant or inconsequential. I find other people’s dreams intriguing, because extracting meaning from the psychological jumble of a healthy mind is similar in many ways to finding coherence in the fractured mindscape of a psychotic.

But no matter what they represent or how scrambled they are, dreams are just that—

dreams. They aren’t real. But to those whose grasp on reality isn’t quite as solid, a dream can be a message from another dimension, a psychic telegram from their own personal God. It can change their entire life.

I guess that makes me crazy, too.

The dream starts simply enough. It’s not unusual to dream about your work—I know a shoe salesman who kept having nightmares about ogres who came in demanding sandals—so for me, a dream about catching a killer can be pretty mundane. I’m sitting at my desk doing paperwork, when a colleague walks in and tells me I’m wanted in the Director’s office. I get up, walk down a hall, and knock on the Director’s door. A voice I don’t recognize tells me to come in.

On the other side of the door is my bedroom. That’s okay, because I’m wearing my nightshirt. There are two men sitting on my bed, quite formally, backs straight and their legs together. The one on the left is my boss; his name is Robert Miller and he’s spoken to me maybe three times in my entire career. He looks vaguely annoyed—but then, that’s the only expression I’ve ever seen on his face.

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The other man is a stranger. He’s dressed much like the Director, in a plain black business suit, but I can tell at a glance there’s something very unusual about him. Sharp eyes, hooked nose, dark hair slicked back, bony, angular features. I have the immediate, strong feeling that he’s an undertaker from another country—somewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe, or some corner of Mongolia.

“Agent Valchek,” says Miller. “You’re being reassigned, effective immediately. This is your liaison. He’ll get you settled.” Miller doesn’t introduce the man, and I don’t ask.

“You can bring three things with you,” the man says. He has no accent, but somehow that just reinforces the idea that he’s a foreigner. In fact, I’m sure this is the first time he’s ever been to my country. “The three things you feel are most instrumental to you doing your job. Choose carefully.”

I’m pretty straightforward. I grab my handgun, my laptop, and the carton of ammunition I keep under my bed. In typical dream fashion, the undertaker is now standing beside a door in my bedroom wall that wasn’t there before. The Director has vanished. The undertaker opens the door and motions me to step through, cautioning me to close my eyes for my own safety.

“Of course, yeah,” I say. “Thanks.”

The first sensation I’m aware of after stepping through the doorway is the cold wooden floor under my bare feet. There’s a strange noise behind me, like a recording of an explosion being played backward. I open my eyes.

I’m standing in an office, one very much like the Director’s. The blinds are drawn. A green-shaded lamp throws a pool of light on the desk, and leaning against the front of the desk, arms crossed in front of him, is a young man. He’s dressed in standard FBIwear, black business suit and polished Oxfords. He appears to be around eighteen,
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handsome in an innocent kind of way, and has curly blond hair that makes him look more like a surfer than a Federal agent.

I note three things in quick succession:

One—I’m still in my nightshirt.

Two—I have a loaded gun in my hand.

Three—I’m not asleep.

I file number one as embarrassing but not vital, double-check number three and confirm my first impression, and bring point number two to Mr. Surfer’s immediate attention by aiming it at his chest.

“Where the hell am I?” I snarl.

“In my office,” he says. “My name is David Cassius. We’re going to be working together, Jace.”

The gun doesn’t seem to impress him. It’s a Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan, a shortbarreled revolver chambered with .454 ammunition—it packs a bigger wallop than a Magnum .44, and is sometimes even used for big-game hunting. It can take down a grizzly or a bull moose, and it took me every day for six months at the firing range to learn how to handle the recoil. Cassius looks at it like it’s a toy.