The Taste

The body was three days old. Maybe four.

I crouched beside her in the alley behind the meatpacking plant, November wind cutting through my jacket. The vic was female, mid-thirties, dressed like she'd been heading somewhere nice before she ended up here. Silk blouse, now ruined. Designer heels, one missing.

"Blake." My partner's voice from behind me. "ME's on the way."

"Yeah." I didn't turn around. Jamie Park was a good cop, solid, but he didn't need to see my face right now.

Because there was blood on my glove. Fresh enough. Someone had been here recently, touched the body, left traces. And my fingers were already moving toward my mouth.

Don't.

I always told myself that. Never helped.

The taste hit my tongue, copper and salt, the universal flavor of human blood. But underneath, something else. Something that made my stomach clench.

Not a lie. Not truth either. Something stranger.

The word rose up through the blood like a bubble breaking surface: vampire.

I spat into the concrete, pretended to cough. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

"You okay?" Jamie called.

"Fine. Just the smell."

It wasn't a lie. The smell was bad enough to cover any reaction. But my mind was racing.

Vampire. The vic's last coherent thought had been about a vampire. Either she'd seen one, or she believed she had. Either way, this case just got complicated.

I stood, knees protesting the cold concrete. The alley was standard, dumpsters, fire escapes, the kind of urban nowhere where bodies surfaced. Nothing special except the marks.

The marks on her chest.

They looked like they'd been carved with something sharp and precise. Symbols I didn't recognize, arranged in a pattern that hurt to look at. Not gang tags. Not any signature I'd seen in seven years of homicide.

"Detective Blake."

The voice came from the mouth of the alley. Deep, with an accent I couldn't place. Irish, maybe. Old.

I turned.

He was tall. Lean in a way that suggested speed rather than weakness. Dark auburn hair, neat despite the wind. Gray-blue eyes that settled on me across twenty feet of crime scene tape. He didn't blink.

I knew what he was before he showed the badge.

"Cormac Rourke. Paranormal Liaison." He didn't smile. "I believe we need to talk."

"The hell we do."

I was in Captain Torres's office thirty minutes later, and I wasn't happy about it. Torres sat behind her desk, fingers steepled, watching me with the expression she wore when she'd already made a decision and was waiting for me to catch up.

"Blake..."

"I don't need a babysitter. I don't need a partner. Jamie's on family leave for two weeks, not two years. I can handle my cases."

"This isn't about what you can handle." Torres leaned back. "This is about what walked into my precinct claiming jurisdiction."

"Jurisdiction." I laughed, but it wasn't funny. "A vampire claims jurisdiction over a human homicide?"

"A vampire with NYPD credentials and thirty years of service." Torres's voice hardened. "You think I like this? The brass is breathing down my neck. There are marks on that body that match three other unsolved cases. Cases that crossed into paranormal territory and went cold."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her that I didn't work with vampires, that I didn't trust them, that the last time a paranormal liaison "consulted" on one of my cases, evidence disappeared and the perp walked.

But I couldn't say any of that. Because saying it would raise questions about why I cared so much. Why I knew things I shouldn't.

"Fine." The word tasted sour. "Where is he?"

"Waiting in Interview Two." Torres's expression softened slightly. "He's not the enemy, Blake. He wants the same thing we do."

Sure he does, I thought. Vampires always want something.

I just had to figure out what it was before he figured out what I was hiding.

Interview Two smelled like coffee and old fear. Standard interrogation room, table, chairs, one-way glass. Rourke sat on the far side, hands folded on the table, perfectly still in a way that living people never managed.

I dropped into the chair across from him. Didn't offer my hand.

"Detective Blake." He inclined his head. Formal. Old-world courtesy that felt out of place under fluorescent lights. "Thank you for agreeing to this partnership."

"I didn't agree. I was assigned."

"Ah." The corner of his mouth twitched. Amusement, maybe. "Captain Torres is... persuasive."

"She's my boss. There's a difference."

Silence. He watched me with those gray-blue eyes, and I felt the weight of it. Centuries of practice reading people. I kept my expression flat, forced my pulse to slow. Vampires could hear that. Could smell fear, arousal, deception.

I'd learned to control what I gave away. Mostly.

"The victim," he said finally. "Elaine Marsh. Age thirty-four. Worked as a palm reader in the Village."

"I know who she was."

"Do you know what she was?"

I didn't answer. Let him fill the silence.

"She had a gift." Rourke's voice dropped. "Minor precognition. Not enough to predict lottery numbers, but enough to tell when someone was lying about their future. Enough to be valuable to certain... collectors."

"Collectors."

"There are those who believe paranormal abilities can be harvested. Transferred." He unfolded his hands, spread them flat on the table. "The marks on her chest are ritual marks. Old magic. Older than me."

"And you're what, two hundred?"

"Two hundred seventeen." No hesitation. "I've seen those marks before. On vampires, mostly. Never on a human with a gift."

I filed that away. Vampires being targeted. Humans with gifts being targeted. A pattern I didn't like.

"Why are you telling me this?"

He tilted his head. Studying me. "You have an impressive clearance rate, Detective. Your instincts are uncommon. Cases that should go cold, you close. Witnesses who should stay silent, you make talk."

My pulse jumped. I controlled it.

"I'm good at my job."

"You're better than good." His eyes narrowed slightly. "At the crime scene today. You knew things you shouldn't have known. The way you touched the blood..."

"I was checking lividity."

"You were tasting."

The word hung between us. Ice in my veins.

"That's insane."

"Perhaps." He stood, movement fluid, inhuman. "I've been doing this for thirty years, Detective. I know what hidden gifts look like. I know when someone is carrying a secret that could get them killed."

"Is that a threat?"

"It's an observation." He moved to the door, paused with his hand on the handle. "The person killing these people, human and vampire alike, is hunting abilities. Rare abilities. If you have something worth hunting, you should be very careful who knows."

He left.

I sat in the interview room for a long time, staring at the empty chair across from me.

He knew. Or he suspected. Either way, I was compromised.

And somewhere out there, a killer was carving symbols into people with gifts like mine.

I touched my lips. Still tasted copper.

Vampire, Elaine Marsh had thought in her final moment. But was she thinking about her killer, or about something else? Someone else?

I needed to find out. Before Cormac Rourke figured out exactly what I was hiding.

Before the killer figured it out first.