“This is it,” Lysander said proudly.
I couldn’t see the house beyond, but I picked up the distinct smell of blood wafting in the air. Human blood. “Do you smell that?”
Nicholas sniffed at the air and a scowl flashed across his face. “Yes. Old blood.”
“We should be careful. No doubt we are in other vampires’ territory. We may have stumbled across their hunting ground,” Lysander warned.
“In a neighborhood?” I asked. Lysander was very adamant about us not hunting in neighborhoods back home. He said it drew too much attention.
“We don’t all follow the same rules,” Lysander answered.
“Whoever it was, they left a mess,” Nicholas scoffed. “The air reeks of it.”
“Great! Let’s just hurry up. I have a bad feeling about all this now.” I took the stone steps two at a time. They went up farther than I expected. When we finally broke through the tree line, a huge three-story red house stood before us. It was a gorgeous old home, with a wood deck jutting out beyond a large sun room. Even in the dark I could tell the richness of the terracotta paint on the wood siding. It contrasted nicely with the creamy white trim around the windows and roof. Lysander really knew how to pick a nice home. It made our place back in Vegas, nice as it was, seem shabby.
Lysander stopped short, just to the side of me. He smiled and nodded approvingly at the old building. “They have certainly kept up the place.”
No lights in the windows gave us any indication as to the state of the place. The smell of blood, though, was thicker now that we were close. A foul tinge of rotted meat hung in the air as well. My senses went on red alert. I listened as carefully as I could, but didn’t pick up any other sounds except for the buzzing of mosquitoes and the loud chirping of crickets. I didn’t sense any others around either.
“Do we go in?” I whispered, half hoping Lysander would tell us to turn around and regroup at the hotel.
“Yes. Let us get this over with,” he answered, taking a few careful footsteps toward the house. Leaves crunched underneath him as he approached the short flight of stairs up to the wood deck.
He held a hand up for us to wait and then approached the sliding glass door. He smoothed a hand over the edge of the frame and inspected it, then tugged on the handle. “The door is not locked,” he said, sounding oddly apprehensive.
A shiver of fear streaked up my spine. Blood in the air, house left abandoned and unlocked. Something wasn’t right here. “I don’t like the sound of that.” My voice cracked. I took a careful step up to the deck.
“I am not sure I do either,” Lysander said. “But I do not sense any presences inside. Let us press on quickly.” He slid the door open slowly, hardly making a sound, and then waved for Nicholas and me to follow.
We crept into the house. Though it was dark, I had no trouble seeing. The smell of blood much became stronger. I was sure the source must be close. And I was right.
As we rounded the corner from the living room to the kitchen I saw it, smeared all over the walls. A large red streak ran across the floor leading to a door that I could only assume led to the basement.
“I don’t think we’ll find any human alive in here.” Nicholas said matter-of-factly. He pointed out other stains speckling the walls. “Their choice in décor indicates they left quite quickly.”
It was a terrible joke, but Nicholas was right. The blood-soaked kitchen was as sure an indicator as any that the human inhabitants were gone. The underlying threat, though, still remained. We might not find any humans here, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any other unfriendly beings around.
Lysander pointed to the door that I guessed led to the basement. “If my things are still here, they would be down there.”
“If?” I gulped back a dry breath. In the back of my mind, I wondered what we would find.
Streaks of blood traveled down the old wooden stairs like a trail of breadcrumbs for us to follow. It was as if whoever killed the people living in this house had set a specific scene for us, deliberately making it as bloody as possible. Was it another vampire? Surely not—why waste the blood? That didn’t make sense. What it did do, however, was make me feel as if we were walking into a trap.
We descended slowly into the darkness, my fingers tracing the lines in the cold brick walls. The basement was as black as a cave. Even with my enhanced sight, I could barely see the end of the stairs. Lysander reached the bottom first and flicked on a light.
Compared to the rest of the house, which seemed huge, the cellar felt small and cramped, like half the room was somehow missing. The original gray color of the painted brick wall peeked out in speckles as we descended into the damp room. The light, from a single overhead swinging lamp, flickered. I looked around for another source of light, but there wasn’t any. Only very small windows set toward the ceiling would have let light in during the day, though I doubted they did much good. Each one looked caked in a heavy layer of dirt. The floor was a simple slab of concrete. Except for the streak of blood running across it, the floor was as drab and lifeless as the rest of the room.
Speaking of lifeless, the stench of death was unbearably strong down here. The whole room reeked of it.
“Whoever the killer was, they knew about my secrets,” Lysander said solemnly as he pointed to the wall where the trail of blood suddenly ended.
“Where’s the body?” I asked, my nose wrinkling at the noxious smell in the air. “The room stinks like whatever died is still here.”
“It is,” Nicholas replied with a sigh.
Lysander walked to the wall and traced a finger along the edge of one of the bricks. “The hidden door here was opened not too long ago. Look, you can see the blood on the ground, but it stops clean at the wall.”
“Someone’s trying to leave us a message,” I said as a chill ran down my spine. I started to feel claustrophobic, as if the cramped space was closing in on itself. Whether it was real or imagined, I began to feel that eerie sensation—as if there were an extra set of eyes on us, only it wasn’t the same sensation that accompanied another vampire’s presence. This was completely foreign, but no less creepy. “Maybe we should go.”
“We have to see if the memoirs are still here. They would have been behind this door, hidden from any humans living here. Only someone of superhuman strength could open it,” Lysander said with a hint of frustration as he searched the bricks, probably trying to remember how to open it. “They might be our only hope to getting rid of that poltergeist.”
He dug his fingers into a crease between bricks and, with a groan, pulled the section of the wall toward him. A puff of dust clouded the air as part of the wall opened with a loud scrape, revealing the rest of the missing basement. It exposed a few other things, too.
The sour smell of death intensified, flooding into the room with the dust and debris kicked up in the wake of the now open doorway. When everything settled, I could make out shapes in the cave-like chamber. Even in the darkness, the lumps of flesh that must have previously been the renters of this large house were plainly visible.
I clamped my hand over my mouth in an attempt to muffle the stench, but it was no use. I might be a bringer of death myself, but I’d never smelled its foul odor. Though the victims had been killed only a day or so before, their bloated and decomposing bodies were unbelievably rank. My stomach lurched and I turned to make for the stairs. I couldn’t stay in that room any longer.
“Back for a midnight snack? Thought your kind didn’t eat dead meat,” a rich baritone voice called from above me.
It stopped me in my tracks. I looked up and found a man flanked by two huge wolves, glaring at me from the top of the stairs. I hadn’t heard him approach nor felt any new presence in the house, but that could have been due to the overwhelming odor assaulting my senses. He stared down his pointed nose at me. His golden brown eyes studied me with as much deep interest as I had in him. Now that he was my focus, I could sense something different about him. His features seemed sharper, more angular. Even the arch of his honey-brown eyebrows had an edge to them. I was usually good at reading a human’s emotions: I still couldn’t read thoughts, but judging their inner emotional state was a step in the right direction. But with him, I sensed nothing. He either had no feelings about us, or was too well cloaked from my senses—which meant he wasn’t human.
I took a step toward the stairs, but Lysander beat me to them, even though he’d been behind me just moments before. “Is this your mess?” He practically growled the words at the stranger. “What happened to the writings and scrolls left here?”
The wolves flanking the strange man bared their teeth. The fur rose up on the back of their necks. The stranger held his hand out and halted the angry beasts without a word.
Lysander tensed. I saw the muscles in his arm tighten. His hand pulled into a fist.
The stranger sniffed the air and winced. “I take that to mean this is not your doing. It’s not mine either, though I was beginning to wonder when someone would be round to clean up. The people in this neighborhood will certainly smell something soon enough.” He waved a hand in front of his nose as if brushing away the noxious odor. “You should be aware that this kind of behavior is not tolerated in my territory.”
“This is your territory?” Lysander asked, his voice much calmer now, his body relaxing.
“Yes. You must be new to the area,” he said condescendingly. “My wolves complained of odd activity a night ago. Said someone had been a bit messy.”
“And you instantly thought vampires?” Lysander quirked an eyebrow.
“That was my guess. Your kind do tend to get a bit … overzealous at times with your food.” He held out his hand, indicating the bloody house.
“Vampires drink blood, we don’t paint the walls with it.”
“Yes, well, wolves don’t eat humans,” he said with a scoff.
The two men eyed each other suspiciously.
“Look, we’re not from here. We’re just stopping through for a night,” I said, trying to break the tension in the room.
“What brought you here?” The stranger folded his arms in front of his broad chest.
“Someone is playing games with us. Sent my mate and me a cursed ancient artifact. I am the original owner of this house, and some of my important historical documents were left hidden in these walls. We came here to retrieve them, and found this mess.” He raised his hand to indicate the fresh pile of bodies lying in the secret space behind the fake wall.
“You vampires play some very odd games.” He crinkled his nose. “Perhaps we can discuss this somewhere else, once you’ve taken care of the bodies.”
“I assure you, this is not a friendly game.” Lysander said with an air of superiority. “And our issues do not need concern you or the rest of the wolves.”
“You’re in my territory, sir, stirring up trouble.”
Lysander opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, the stranger turned away. “Your fault or not, we can’t have supernatural beings implicated, no matter what species we are. I’ll be waiting in the parlor.”
“Arrogant pricks,” Nicholas growled. “I never did care for them. Always so territorial. Everything is their business.”
“He is right about one thing,” Lysander sighed as he turned to look at the hidden room. “Someone is being cavalier about killing, whether it is a vampire or not. A scene like this would definitely get media attention. The last thing we need is something to alert the Acta Sanctorum. I would rather only deal with one problem at a time.”
“Do you want me to take care of the bodies while you clear things up with Wolfy?” Nicholas asked, though I could tell by his tone the question was more of a statement than inquiry. He didn’t want to have to deal with the wolves at all.
Lysander nodded and took my hand. “Please let me be the one to talk here. Wolves can be difficult to deal with at the best of times.”
I was a little taken aback by his comment. I hadn’t been planning to say anything to rile up the werewolf, and it seemed without even giving it a thought, Lysander assumed I would. I snatched my hand out of Lysander’s grip. “Don’t worry, I’ll just smile and nod. I won’t embarrass you.”
Lysander sighed, shook his head, and started up the stairs without saying another word to me.
Reluctantly, I followed. Going upstairs with Lysander seemed a better choice than cleaning up the dead bodies with Nicholas.
The strange man sat on an oversized striped chair in the living room. The two huge wolves looked like sleepy grizzly bears lying at his feet. Though they appeared to be at rest, their ears were perked up, like little radar dishes. I sensed they were alert and ready for action.
“Perhaps we started off on the wrong foot. My name is Lysander. I am here with a few of my clan.” He extended his hand to the stranger.
“Connor Whelan,” the stranger responded as he shook Lysander’s hand. “I’m the local Alpha for the Olde Town Pack.”
Lysander turned to me. “And this is my mate, Alyssa.”
I nodded and so did Connor. He pointed towards the loveseat, indicating we should sit.
“I’m not going to mince words,” Connor said as he retook his seat. He lifted his arm and pulled back his sleeve to reveal a large gold watch. “I don’t like strangeness interrupting our way of life here.”