Once upon a time Sig had given me an envelope that did have Holden’s name in it, and let me tell you, that had been quite the mystery to unravel in and of itself. At the end of the day, I was still nervous about these stupid envelopes though, sure that no good could ever come of opening one.
I broke the seal and opened the flap, and on the thick card inside was the name Davos Kent.
The name was utterly meaningless to me, and I gave Holden a confused look, hoping to get some better insight.
“Kent kidnapped and murdered two young women who were members of a vampire fan club. He lured them in with the promise of making them vampires, which of course is now perfectly legal, but when all was said and done, he didn’t bother to give them his blood. They were found at the High Line Park several weeks ago.”
As someone who worked in the field of supernatural crimes, the public disposal of two bodies murdered by a potential vampire attack had not gone unnoticed by me or my office.
The High Line Park double murder was on our radar, but there had also been a rash of killings over the last five years by humans trying to lay blame on vamps. We had assessed the crime scene reports and sent it back to the NYPD with the verdict that this had been a human killer.
The girls had lost barely any blood, which was not indicative of a real vampire killing. Once a vampire bit with the intent to kill, there was no stopping the frenzy.
Now Holden was telling me I was wrong.
Those girls had been killed by a vampire. I felt a sting of guilt in my belly. We had looked at that file as a group, and every single person on the team had agreed it wasn’t a real issue. We’d passed the buck.
It made me wonder how many times over the last five years we’d gotten it wrong. How many times had we shifted blame or fingered an innocent individual?
How much good were we actually doing?
I gave my head a shake, chasing off the unwelcome thought. We were helping, I knew that much for sure. We saved lives every damned day.
Even the human police didn’t get things right all the time, and they’d been dealing with this shit a lot longer than my unit had.
Everything had gotten so much more complicated with supernatural beings hitting the mainstream. It was as if humans forgot overnight about all the insanely horrific bullshit they’d been doing to each other for thousands of years, and suddenly wanted to pin the blame for everything bad in their life on monsters.
I got it, I did. It was easier to believe a creature out of a horror movie was responsible for the evil and injustice in the world. But I’d looked into the eyes of a monster before, the one who haunted my dreams even now, the man who had taken me to the very brink of my own humanity and threatened to push me over the edge.
I’d seen the face of evil, and it had been human.
So, while I understood how nice it was to have a convenient scapegoat, at some point people had to realize that good and bad came in many forms, and just as there were bad vampires, there were bad humans, and they were all capable of doing terrible things to each other.
“Davos has a history of this kind of behavior, I’m afraid,” Holden continued. “We traced his roots back to Georgia—”
“The country, not the state,” Juan Carlos interjected.
“Yes, and it appears he spent several centuries relatively unchecked in the Soviet Union and pre-Bolshevik Russia running around killing women.”
“If this is where you tell me one of his aliases is Rasputin and you think perhaps the princess Anastasia is a vampire, I think I’m going to need a drink.”
Holden smiled, probably because I’d made a cultural reference he knew. “No. Not every vampire is famous, you know.”
I rolled my eyes. “Tell that to the vampires. This one over here had a New York Times bestseller written about his exploits only last year.”
“That was unauthorized,” Juan Carlos protested, but I sensed a hint of pride in his tone. The book in question, The Immortal Life of the Spanish Beast, had spent three weeks atop the nonfiction bestseller list, and there was talk of it being turned into a Broadway play or a film within the next year. Juan Carlos was an honest-to-God star now.
I got to spend my time on CNN arguing with talking heads in Washington and rednecks who thought vampires en masse needed to die sight unseen. Sometimes the talking heads weren’t much better than the rednecks.
Personally, I’d take a thousand vampires over a single politician.
There was a reason Tyler didn’t let me on the talk show circuit very often. I had a lot of trouble keeping my opinions to myself.
I had once told that annoying blonde woman who yelled about true crime all the time that just because a child had a werewolf for a parent didn’t mean they were being raised by wolves, and she might want to take her perfectly c
oiffed head and stick it up her ass the next time she spoke about pack culture in such a derogatory way.
Tyler hadn’t let me go on TV for about a month after that.