Force of Knight Magic (5 page)

Myles looked at the girl.
She looked to be about twenty
,
maybe less
,
but no more than that. Pretty little thing with dark hair and dark eyes.
That’s all he could tell by the photo.
He looked at the back of the picture and read her name and address. It was an address in Jersey City.
He put the photo down and looked at Gregory.
The man had yet to tell him anything all that helpful
,
but Myles thought the best was yet to come.

“You want to tell me what it is you’re hoping I’ll guess?
I’ve got a few murders to solve and so far
,
all you’ve told me is that you have a crime similar to mine that happened a long time ago.”
Myles watched as he pulled out another envelope from the other side of his jacket.
“What’s this?
More ancient pictures?”

The first picture sent a wave of cold air over his body.
It was another bar, more dead people
,
and more blood. These pictures were in color.
While Myles looked these over
,
Gregory stacked the first set of pictures up and told him about this set.

“Those were taken five years later.
There were two more like this between the first and those
,
but the pictures were ruined during a fire in the basement of the station.
I heard that the bodies were the same, three men and a woman.
Same as the one you have in your hand.
I got another two envelopes of picture if you need to see them
,
but you’ll pretty much see the same thing. Blood, bodies
,
and three men and one single woman.”
He put the first pictures back into his pocket.
“That is the girl who called it in.”

It was the same girl.
Her hair was different, lighter than
in
the first one of her
,
and in this one he could see that her eyes were a deep brown.
He flipped the picture over.
The name was the same too.

“This one says she lives in Hudson district.
That’s about two hundred miles away.
How did you get to be on both crime scenes?”
Myles kept staring at the girl so it took him a few minutes to realize that Gregory hadn’t answered.
“You’ve been gathering this information since then, haven’t you?”

“Yes.
After the second killing
,
I started keeping my own notes and files. It wasn’t as hard back then, just ask the clerk at the print job to make you another set.
And the newspaper didn’t care if I slipped them a few bucks to have anything extra they might have taken.”
He took out a larger envelope
,
this time from the back of his jacket.
“Those are my notes and anything else I have.
I got more in my hotel room here.”

“Why?”
Myles was going to take it all. If even half of what he was seeing in these pictures were true
,
then he wanted it all.
“And what is the connection to all these deaths other than the girl? Why is she killing them?”

Gregory laughed.
“Took me nearly five years to realize she was the killer.
She had me fooled with the hair changes.
And I suppose the way she didn’t age nary a bit.”
He dumped the last pictures, these glossy color eight
-
by
-
tens.
“She called in that one about a month ago.
I was visiting a friend or I might have missed it.
An old buddy of mine called me and told me about it.”

The pictures could have been duplicate
s
of the scene from all the others.
And the blood and gore seemed to be more…well, simply more.
He looked for the girl, knowing there had to be a picture
,
when he found it.
She looked to be exactly the same as she had in the first picture.
Myles looked up at Gregory.

“When was the first murder committed?
What year?”
Myles didn’t really want to know
,
afraid to know really
,
but knew that as sure as he was sitting here it had to
have
been at least twenty or so years ago
—
maybe as many as thirty.

“I’ll be seventy-five on my next birthday.
I was eighteen when that first one happened.”

Myles sat in the same chair long after Gregory left, leaving him the key to his room.
He told Myles that he was leaving as soon as he got in his car and not coming back.
He said he wasn’t going to be long for this earth
,
that he’d been a heavy smoker all his life and it had finally caught up with him.

“Cancer got me.
I guess I had it better than most, lived myself a long life.
Not much of one
,
mind you
,
but a long one.”
Gregory had stood and so did Myles.
“You find her for me.
Find her and kill her.
That’s the only way to make sure that nothing like this happens again.”

He told him he’d do his best and sat back down at the table to look over the crime scene photos.
Whatever this girl was, and he
had
no doubt that she wasn’t quite human
,
she was one pissed off bitch.

~~~

Theresa
watched everything going on with a smile.
Humans were so stupid and she laughed harder when one of the policemen came out and threw up all over the hedge near the hotel.
Yes, they were incredibly stupid.

She wanted to move closer but stayed back.
She’d learned recently that there were cameras all around and sometimes they’d catch her in the crowd.
Then she thought about her buddy Gregory.

He’d been here.
Later
,
but he’d been here.
She could find him by scent now and sniffed the air to see if he’d been close enough that she could brush by him.
Nothing.
She did smell something…almost something she liked
,
but decided it was the scent of blood and dismissed it.
It wasn’t until she was moving toward her den that she realized what she’d smelled.

Vampire.
An old one too.
Turning to go back to where she’d been standing,
Theresa
changed her mind.
If she could smell him then he would be able to smell her too.
Picking up speed
,
she made her way to her resting area with five minutes to spare and wondered if the old one had made it as well.
Huddled down into the deepest part of the cave
,
she thought about what she’d done last evening.

When she’d first entered the bar it
hadn’t been
her intention to kill anyone.
She’d only wanted a fast meal and had happened upon the place because it was open.
Going into the bar
,
she could feel the others there
,
but not in view of her.
She went to the wall where she could hear them but not see them and listened.

She could hear that they were there to kill a woman who they believed was a hired killer.
Intrigued, she slipped into the room where they were using all sorts of equipment she’d only just recently started to pay attention to.
She realized that they were listening in on someone.
It only took her a few seconds to realize that here was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
But it wasn’t until she was actually in the room that she realized she’d miscalculated and there were only two men in the room with a woman.

Killing the two men had been easy.
She simply took the woman to her body and sank her fangs deep into her throat while they watched.
She had no idea why some people thought this was incredibly erotic
,
but they sat long enough for her to get fed enough to handle the two of them and dropped the woman to the floor.
Theresa
had the neck of the first man broken before he could even make a sound.
The second man was a bit trickier
,
but he was no match for her strength and when he stood to attack
,
finally
,
she simply moved to him and lifted him off the floor by his neck until he stopped struggling.
He was dead before she went back to the woman to finish feeding.

Tearing them apart had been fun. She loved the sounds the body made when it was torn in to bits.
The bones cracking, flesh tearing.
She did miss the sounds
of
them crying and of the begging for their release
,
but this hadn’t been planned and she was doing the best she could with what she had to work with.
It was then that she went to the bar and tore the man up with the other woman
,
wishing the entire time that she’d waited for his companion, the female with him.
She would have been much more fun.

Theresa
hadn’t been a vampire long when she realized how much fun she could have with her newfound strength.
The first time she’d killed had made her climax better than she ever had
,
even as a human. She’d had to do it again and again for the same thrill
,
getting better all the time.
Smiling
,
she remembered the first time she’d killed four and found it to be the perfect combination of humans so that she had the optimum fun.
Three were nothing but a lot of fun and five had taken too long and she’d been too exhausted to enjoy the aftermath.

The third time she’d killed her quad was when she’d seen Gregory.
He’d been on the case with some other detectives
,
or back then they’d simply been cops.
And he’d been so nice to her when she’d told him what she’d
“
witnessed
”
that she’d made sure over the years that he’d get a call either from her or another person she’d made call him so she could see him again.
She wished he hadn’t gotten old
,
but it wasn’t until recently that she realized she could have changed him into what she was and he would have been around for a lot longer.
Now
,
he was old and dying and she was getting bored with him.

As the sun started to rise
Theresa
thought of the scent she’d picked up in the bar and wondered who it had been. She thought that she’d go back there tomorrow and sniff around and see what she could find.
Maybe she’d be able to find whoever it had been in the room by following its trail.
Smiling at the prospect of finding the scent she closed her eyes just as the sun crested the horizon.
Theresa
was out before the sun was much more than a bright spot in the sky.

Holly woke with the sun streaming through the windows.
She couldn’t believe that she’d forgotten to close the curtains again and started to get up. She realized several things almost at once.

First
,
she was naked.
That wasn’t really a big thing
,
but on a scale of one to ten on her what the hell happened last night scale
,
it rated about a five.
The second thing was that she was sore.
Sore in places she’d…well, with the naked factor right there
,
being naked and sore gave her enough of a pause to bring the first score up a notch or two.
But
what
was freak
ing
her the hell out was the huge arm around her waist.
The one that was currently pulling her back into the bed and growling at her.
Then he spoke.

“I didn’t get back in until just a few hours ago.
If you go back to sleep now I’ll make it worth your while later after I’ve had another hour sleep.”

Her heart started pounding in her chest and when he slid his very naked leg up and over hers
,
she nearly swallowed her tongue.
But she had to be sure.
And closing her eyes so she could think without screaming she turned slightly before speaking.

“Phil?”
He growled again. “Phil, what the hell are you doing in my bed and where…oh my fucking
—w
e had sex.”
She started to pull away again.