Crimson Death by Laurell K. Hamilton Read Free Book Online

from another the next night. Our stomachs can’t even hold the quantity of blood in an adult human being’s body, so there’s absolutely no reason to kill your blood donors.”
    â€œUnless you want to make them into vampires,” I said.
    â€œOr you’re a sadistic serial killer who just happens to be a vampire,” he said.
    â€œYou’ve told me that She-Who-Made-You is exactly that.”
    He nodded, staring at his hands where he’d spread them on the pale wood of his desk. “Yes.”
    â€œThen how did the human authorities miss a serial killer all that time?”
    â€œYou have to remember the times she began her . . . career in, Anita. People vanished all the time. They died young and tragically. Life expectancy was less than forty years and most died much younger than that. By forty, people were usually grandparents, or even great-grandparents.”
    â€œAt forty?” I said.
    He smiled. “The look on your face is priceless, and yes, at forty. Ireland has had a bloody history and a lot of battles fought especially since 1170 when the Normans invaded and stayed. It’s so easy to disappear someone when there’s a battle close at hand. Then there’re displaced people trying to escape from the fighting. No one questions if they don’t turn up at the next town, or a relative’s house, or rather theyassume that the enemy killed them or took them prisoner. It can be months or years before they finally learn that no one knows what happened to them, and by that time it’s too late. The jail in the town was a place where people died of disease and starvation. No one ever questioned if they died a little quicker, and the jailer didn’t give a damn as long as the dead prisoner was one of the ones who hadn’t been able to pay him for better care.”
    â€œSo you’re saying I just don’t understand how easy it was to kill people back in the day.”
    â€œYes, that is exactly what I’m saying.”
    â€œBut it’s not the olden days now, Damian. How have she and her kiss of vampires gotten away with it in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries? People freak out if someone is late sending them a text. It’s not so easy to disappear a person now.”
    â€œIt’s harder now, much harder, but not impossible, Anita. You’re a U.S. Marshal. You know better than I do how modern killers work. You’ve worked enough serial killer cases here in the United States to know just how good people can be at getting victims and hiding the bodies. And that’s human serial killers. Think how much better they would get if they’d had centuries to perfect their techniques.”
    â€œI’ve worked cases where the perp wasn’t human.”
    â€œI know that, but my point is still valid.”
    â€œHow many vampires were there in your group?”
    â€œIt was small, but then we were hiding. The more vampires you have, the harder it is to feed and stay undetected.”
    â€œI get that, but how small is small?”
    â€œNever more than a dozen vampires, and usually less. We were harder to hide than the humans and shapeshifters that were part of her retinue.”
    â€œOne of the reasons that vampires have human servants and
moitié bêtes,
beast halves, is that they can both move around better in daylight than their vampire master,” I said.
    â€œShe-Who-Made-Me could walk in daylight.”
    â€œThat’s right. I’m sorry. It’s such a rare ability that I forgot.”
    â€œPerrin and I were the only two of her vampires that were able to live in the light, even holding her hand. All the others that she’d triedto take for a walk in the sunlight had burst into flames and died, while she laughed at them. It was an envoy from the vampire council that suggested the evil thought that made her risk burning both of us alive.”
    I’d literally shared the memory