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I put it all together Young Master Pellissier would have been Leo Who was having his hu for records about Joseph Gotcha

And Pinkie wasn’t kidding Maybe a televisiona trace, but no normal human or vamp could have, not unless the filested that vah cracks From the hallway, the door was padlocked, three h rings set in the door; each ring had a lock, besides the one in the door itself Over the years, the wood had swelled from the Louisiana hu the frahter still

Pinkie pulled a ring of keys from a pocket and held the at the top, she unlocked each padlock, bending back the metal strips as she worked The roaned as it was bent, but tiny little Pinkie was a lot stronger than she appeared

When the door was unlocked, she indicated that it was ours to open Eli slipped in front ofall around the edges forI had no idea, not in such an old room, but Mr Paranoid didn’t heal as well as I did, so I let him take whatever precautions he wanted Once he was assured it was safe, he stepped back and I took the oldthe lines that had been etched or pressed into the ht, or a fleur-de-lis Then I thought about a shotgun set up to fire when the door opened, and I stepped to the side Eli and Pinkie both stepped to the other side, as if readingsound, made much worse as I pushed on the door, swollen into place, wood against wood I set , still thinking about the possible shotgun But no gun went off

The smells that rushed out of the dark, overheated room were mice, damp, mold, old wood, rotten linens, old blood, anddead vamp

CHAPTER 11

A Sleepover with My Bestie, Adrianna

Death, even old death, has a s on the floor beside the bed, her head a few feet away

"Holy Mother of God" Pinkie crossed herself and took a step back I took two steps in and closed et a better scent pattern of the dead and of the roo no noise Not a true, catlike, flehood breaths of the sealed space, and I found that I could identify varying scent signatures of several people--vamps and hun of Joseph Santana or anyone else, just old, old, old smells

Once I was satisfied of that, and of the scents I had taken in, I opened estured Eli in He stood to my left, the open door to his side, his body positioned to cover the hallway, the rooether we studied the dead va a long, vertically striped blue dress with a high waist, ribbons, lace, and a locket pinned to her chest Her head hadblond hair up in a bun, and a perky hat The mice had been at it all, and her hair had been a nest for more than one family of rodents Said nesters had eaten the soft parts of the valy, most of her bone structure and tendons were still intact, if dried out and brittle looking

When Acton House had been retrofitted for AC, this room hadn’t been included in the renovations Rooallery and tall, narros, all sealed shut, which accounted for the heat, all with shutters, which were latched closed from the inside

More critter nests were between the shutters and theglass Yet more had taken the best location inside--within the pillows and mattresses on the four-poster rice bed The bed was hand carved and had been made up with silk sheets and feather pillows, faded and disintegrating, but probably the height of style and comfort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Curiously, I didn’t sense any mice in the room now, but maybe the heat had driven therin, which I knew Pinkie would consider unseemly

The floor ood; the walls had been papered Moldy shreds of pink roses and darker pink stripes were falling in curls where the walls weren’t blood splashed There, it was brown and dried and had been partially eaten by nawed and threadbare but had once matched the wallpaper in color tones A bedside table held a hurricane la with the ubiquitous rodent droppings

A turn-of-the-previous-century bathroom stood open and looked as awful as the rest of the suite The chifforobe doors were closed and warped, a key dangling from a chain on one little knob A pair of shoes lay in a corner near a small overturned chair A tea cart was beside the chair, its contents splattered with blood From the spatter I could tell that the teapot had been broken prior to the beheading

Eli pointed to a place on the here no blood marked the wallpaper The killer had likely stood there and taken the blood spatter with hiood that observation did us Any clothes and trace on the killer would have been long gone by then, and the blood silhouette wasn’t over-helpful except to suggest height, which had been average

Iphotos and sending the a crione So were pads of graph paper, probably

To the side of the dead valeam and carefully stepped around her outstretched skeletal left hand to get a good photograph The shiny thing was a quartz crystal, the kind found in nature, but this one had been a really spectacular specimen before it was busted I had seen one in this condition before They were used by es for arcenciels The sentient, shape-shifting dragons of light were fros who could slow or bend time the way I could, but much better The master of such a creature could force it to bend tiical ability to that end if he kne, on creature got free, its bite was dangerous at best and could be deadly if untreated, even to vamps

And oddly, Bruiser had mentioned arcenciels as part of his research, research initiated by Leo, who had been in this room on the day that the Son of Darkness had been hidden from the world Leo had surely seen the shattered crystal that day, but I knew for certain that he’d had no idea what it had been used for, because an arcenciel had bitten hio, which e had all learned the nature of the creatures and their poisonous bites At so bitten, the Master of the City had ether with the existence of arcenciels and with the condition of the Son of Darkness so long ago, and sent Bruiser searching