Stormrage (19 page)

Sphinx looked surprised.
"You know the vic?"

"
Yeah, I arrested him four years ago for drug running," Raven replied. "What drawer is he in?"

Sphinx pulled a clipboard off the wall in his office and consulted the chart.
"Uh…7B. Doctor Zhu sewed his head back on so he sort of looks like Frankenstein's monster."

"I doubt that,"
Raven said darkly. "Thanks, Sphinx. You can go back to your game."

Sphinx smiled and went back in his office.
Raven watched him resume his game and then proceeded down the hall into the freezer. Her upset and anger was enough to block out all the scents and for the first time ever she pulled open a drawer like a normal police officer.

Kenny lay on the tray, his milky eyes staring at the ceiling.
The report Sphinx had mentioned was on his chest in a plastic sleeve. Raven picked it up and thumbed through it. Unlike Christina Shevlin and Cassidy Stryker, his cause of death had been a single blow with an extremely heavy and sharp implement. His other wounds, though probably extremely painful were not immediately fatal. His liver temp indicated he had been dead approximately three hours before being found.

"Three hours?"
Raven asked the room. "And nobody noticed this guy hanging on meat hooks in plain view? Dawn was at least an hour before he was found."

She finished the report
, which didn't help much. There was still no explanation for the corneal decompensation and no trace of Thirst in the man's system.

Her mind racing, Raven opened all the drawers and compared the four known victims side by side.
They all had milky white eyes, traces of an unidentified red powder on their skin and cuts from some kind of metallic claws; they were clearly all connected, but what was the actual connection?

She began tapping her fingers on Shevlin's chest and then realized
what she was doing and pulled her hand away. But something didn't feel right. She touched the body again. It felt colder than it should. Way colder. So did Kenny and Christina. Cassidy, however, was slightly warmer. Still cold, but warmer than the other three.

That's really weird
, she thought.

Out of curiosity she opened other drawers in the same banks as the victims.
Their temperature was the same as Cassidy's. Warmer than the Shevlin's or Kenny.

Raven closed her eyes tight.
When she opened them again her thermographic vision lit the room up in shades of yellow, red and blue. As she suspected, the ones that felt colder really were, by as much as ten degrees.

What would make some bodies colder than others?
The freezers are all at the same temperature,
she thought.

She closed the drawers and blinked her thermographic vision away before heading back down the hallway to Sphinx's office.
He was still playing his game. Raven knocked, startling him so bad he flipped his chair over with a crash. When he stood up he had a sheepish grin on his face. "Sorry, Detective Storm. What can I do for you?"

"I need you to run another exam," Raven replied.
"Pull Cassidy Stryker and run a microscopic search of the area over her carotid artery. You're looking for a puncture wound, probably about the size of an insulin needle."

"What for?"
Sphinx asked.

Raven arched an eyebrow.
"Because I'm the detective and I'm asking you to."

"Fair enough,"
Sphinx replied. "I will get right on it and have the results before my shift ends."

"Thanks.
And ask Doctor Zhu if there was any blood left in the artery or cranial cavity," Raven continued. "If he has a sample, have him test it for Thirst, specifically looking for the catalyst enzyme that turns it from a mixture of powders into a single compound."

"I think all the victims tested negat…"
Sphinx began to say.

Raven put a hand over his mouth.
"I'm aware of that. Run the test."

Sphinx's vo
ice was muffled when he replied, "Yes, Ma'am."

"Thank you."

Raven turned and jogged back up the stairs and out into the night. The Ninja whined to life and Raven headed south toward the records division where the tape of her supposedly killing Cassidy was being held. Traffic was heavy, but she weaved between the cars like she'd been doing it all her life. It wasn't even an hour before she was parking the borrowed motorcycle in front of the records office.

The inside hadn't changed much;
beige walls, off-white tile, a dying Ficus Benjamina and a customer service window. She rang the bell next to the window and held the button down till the night clerk turned from his television. His eyes widened when he recognized her at the window and Raven smiled sweetly.

"Find me the evidence box for the Cassidy Stryker case and buzz me through so I can review it in the back room," she said.

The kid buzzed Raven through and guided her through the office and into the warehouse-sized records room on the other side without saying a word. He used an iPad-like device to look up the file and led Raven straight to the box. He pulled it down and handed it to her.

"Please just sign and date the box label," he said.
"You can use any of the rooms three rows over."

Raven smiled, surprised at the change in the kid.
"Thank you. Enjoy your show."

The kid smiled back and ambled off
toward the front desk.

Raven watched him for a moment wondering what he'd heard about her an
d then walked around the corner toward the small conference rooms. She found one with a DVD player in it and plopped the box on the table. A few minutes later she was skimming through the video watching officers come and go with suspects. It took about thirty minutes for her to find the spot where she supposedly entered. She stopped the video at that point and moved as close as she could to the screen. The woman did indeed look like her, but there were differences that only someone who saw her own face in the morning would notice. The hair wasn't exactly the same and though the video was black and white, she could tell the woman had black hair, not red hair. The woman also had long, pointed nails, the kind Raven could never wear as a police detective, but the final nail was the shoes. The woman was wearing the kind of shoes Valentina was always trying to get Raven to wear and she wore them like she was born in them, something few women of her height and musculature could pull off.

"Vampire,"
Raven muttered. "But who are you, you bitch, and why do you have my face?"

She put the video back in the box and pulled out Cassidy's prison jumpsuit.
She sniffed it, detecting the scents of a female mixed with perfume, cigarette smoke, the odd soap they allowed in cells…and blood. On the right side of the collar were three small drops of crimson that had gone unnoticed in the confusion of a cop killing a suspect.

Raven smiled to herself, put everything back in the box, signed the label and sent a message to Doctor Zhu that she had found blood on Stryker's jumpsuit and she'd like it pulled and tested for Thirst.

That task completed, she left records and headed back toward Old Town and the Mambo who had overseen her birth. She had a few questions to ask.

* * *

One a.m. struck Old Town, the sounds of the nearby church bell muffled by the thick fog that was rising all over the city. The gas lamps were barely keeping the fog at bay, and for once the fenced-in section of the city was quiet and almost devoid of foot traffic. Raven parked the Ninja just outside Marie's and entered. The shop smelled of raw chicken and a variety of herbs, a scent that the Mambo was in the middle of either casting a spell or making a midnight snack. Raven glared at the squawking crow, which slammed its beak shut immediately and huddled against its perch. She then continued through the store toward the back, one hand idly tracing over the cases of skulls, beads, chicken feet and other trappings of voodoo. She passed through the beaded curtain at the back and found Marie finishing a ceremony. Raven stopped and folded her arms, watching the Mambo finish draining the chicken's blood into a pan that contained a variety of bones and herbs. Marie tossed the chicken carcass into a trash bin and stirred the contents of the pan with the end of a palm leaf. She chanted over the mixture and then carried it to a large wood-fired oven. She slid the pan into the oven and closed the door and then turned to face Raven.

She smiled and wiped her hands on her apron.
"Ravenel my child, what a pleasure! What brings you to me tonight?"

"Hello, Marie,"
Raven said, reaching out to hug the older woman. "I need more of your help if you have time."

"Of course, child.
I have little to do until the chicken blood is dry. Please, sit and tell me," Marie said.

Raven hopped onto Marie's workbench like she had when she was a child while Marie sat in her overstuffed velour recliner.

"You look tired, child," Marie said. "Have you fed?"

Raven made a face but nodded.
"I'm not happy about it but yeah. I had to trust my vampire side."

"It is part of who you are, my sweet.
You must learn to trust in your abilities."

Raven shook her head.
"I don't think I will ever trust them. But that isn't why I am here. Mambo…you attended my birth, right?"

Marie smiled proudly.
"Your mother and father chose me as their midwife, yes. You were not an easy babe to deliver, were you not so stubborn you would have died in your father's arms."

Raven nodded and looked away.
The next question was difficult. "Mambo…did I have a twin?"

"A twin?"
Marie asked. "Of course not child, your mother's pregnancy was difficult enough. You were a single birth. Why do you ask?"

"Because there is someone out there who looks just like me,"
Raven replied.

Marie reached for her battered corncob pipe and tapped it on the side of her chair.
She then opened a jar of pungent tobacco, rolled a nut between her hands and tamped it into the pipe. She brought fire between her fingers and lit the pipe, inhaling deeply as she thought.

"And this woman is of the blood?"
she asked.

"I believe so,"
Raven replied. "The way she acts, the way she moves, I am almost positive she is a vampire and aside from having black hair she looks just like me."

Marie nodded and
blew a square of smoke. "Ravenel, I know for a fact you are the only child produced by the union of your mother and father. After you, your mother could carry no other children. You have no sister that looks like you."

Raven breathed a sigh of relief and sagged a little, only now realizing how tired she was.
"Thank you, Marie," she said. "I was having nightmares thinking there was another me out there."

Marie laughed and patted Raven's leg.
"No matter what this vampire looks like, you are unique, child. The universe broke the mold when you were born."

Raven smiled.
"Do you have time to assist me with my case?"

"Of course, Ravenel,"
Marie replied.

Raven pulled out her phone and showed Marie the photographs of the room in DeGrey's apartment, as well as the blurry shape of the creature that rose from the pit.

"I found this in a suspect's home," she said. "While I was there I think I messed up something because a blood-covered thing came up out of the circle in the floor."

Marie nodded.
"The sigils you scuffed were part of a protection circle. You disturbed them, freeing the creature from the pit."

"Any idea what it was doing there?"
Raven asked.

"The only reasons to summon a minor demon and keep it imprisoned are information, power or both,"
Marie replied.

"It said it was hungry,"
Raven said.

"Power, then," Marie replied.
"It was hungry because someone was using it to draw magikal energy. You were quite lucky. Do you have cold iron with you now?"

"Yes, I have som
e of Thad's specials in my boot," Raven said.

"Good girl,"
Marie replied. "As I told you as a child, any creature from the pit may be returned to hell with cold iron."

"That is what saved me,"
Raven said with a laugh. "I remembered you telling me about cold iron and I happened to have an old frying pan close to hand."

Marie snorted.
"I'm glad you remembered something of my teachings. Your mind was always elsewhere."

Raven looked down at the floor as another question rose unbidden to her lips.
"Marie, why were you always trying to teach me so much about our world?"

Now it was Marie's turn to consider her words.
She sucked on her pipe until lights danced before her eyes and then exhaled a heart.

"Child…
your father knew," she said at last.