Read Online Laws of the Blood 2: Partners by Susan Sizemore - Free Book Online

cautiously onto a hiking trail under the trees, he looked like no more than another shadow in the fog. He knew he wouldn’t be hidden from any vampire’s night vision, but he didn’t think any vampires were out in the forest tonight.
    •••
     
    There was a mortal in the woods. Char could smell him psychically and, frankly, she didn’t think he’d bathed recently. All human senses were enhanced by the change to strigoi, and Nighthawk senses were keener still. This was not always an advantage where smell was involved. She had been able to smell the body in the clearing from a mile away, for example.
    She stepped away from the body and took a few sniffs of the damp night air. Char detected leather and cotton as well as old sweat and the scent of liquor and cigarettes from the man coming toward her. The emotions she caught could best be described as concentrated curiosity, annoyance, disgust. He moved slowly and cautiously up the hiking trail. His caution gave her time to continue her investigation.
    Char hadn’t been around a lot of corpses. What was the point? She understood the need to hunt; it was the very core of vampire nature. There was pleasure in killing, but it wasn’t something you needed to do all the time. You ate what you killed, killed only when you had to, chose the prey carefully, and treated the whole process with a modicum of respect. That was the way it was supposed to work, anyway.
    She blamed modern media, the breakdown in society, and sheer childish irresponsibility for the way some vampires behaved, like undisciplined, spoiled kids who treated hunting mortals like it was a live-action role-playing game instead of sacrament and survival of the strigoi kind.
    Mortals were even more irresponsible when it came to dealing out death. What had this woman done thatshe deserved to die? How had she been chosen? By whom? Char supposed mortals killed more of each other because there were more of them. There were only a few thousand, maybe even only a few hundred, strigoi in the world and over six billion mortals. She didn’t know if it was the sheer number of people available to commit horrific crimes that made the mortals seem worse than strigoi or if most vampires were a better class of killer. Of course, Enforcers were much more effective than mortal law enforcement.
    And none of that had anything to do with her standing in a cold, foggy forest next to a dead body while sensing a mortal’s approach.
    She was thinking again. She should stop doing that so much and focus.
    Char knew the woman had been ritually slain before she saw the wounds, but was it a strigoi ritual? All she had time for now was to quickly memorize the body’s position, how the victim had been mutilated, whatever details Char could discern to help determine what sort of ritual had required the woman’s sacrifice. At the same time she tried to pick up any residue of the sort of energy a vampire would leave. Mostly what she discerned was a lack of energy. The woman had been mentally strong. She’d fought hard enough to psychically call for help, a call that Char had been unable to ignore even a night after the murder. But the woman’s murderer left no mental scent around the corpse.
    Someone was covering their tracks, and doing a very good job of it.
    That was more than could be said for the approachingmortal. He’d left the path and was nearly at the clearing. Why was a mortal on this part of the mountainside at this time of night? Criminal returning to the scene of the crime, she hoped. Some other part of the ritual yet to be performed?
    Char moved away from the body but kept it in view while she waited for the man to come into the clearing. His mental signature was rather overwhelmingly strong, actually. If he was the killer, he wasn’t using magic to disguise his presence at the moment. But if he wasn’t the killer, how did he know where to find the body?
     
    “Why am I here?” Haven complained as he reached the place