Bad Vampire by Lauren Dawes (read aloud books txt) 📕

caffeine. “What are you doing here? Not to chat. I suck at small talk.”

“I know,” he replied, lowering himself on my couch. He stretched his arm over the back of the cushions and waited. “I got a phone call thirty minutes ago about a body down by the docks. The human department is down there right now preserving the crime scene.”

“Why not us?”

His mouth softened. “Because our department is a team of five and a CSI we do not make. Plus, it’s not within our responsibilities to do that.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee, then begrudgingly offered it to Sawyer.

“No, thank you. But we need to hurry. Every minute we waste erodes scent trails.”

I chugged my coffee, immediately regretting the decision to go without creamer, and placed it into the sink. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be getting any more of that sweet, sweet caffeine jolt anytime soon.

“Give me five,” I told him, rushing back into my room to get changed. Since Sawyer was in his finest cat-bugler outfit, I decided to forego my uniform and slipped into a pair of black skinny jeans and a black cable-knit sweater. Just as I was sliding my feet into my motorcycle boots, he knocked on the door.

“Just a sec. I need to do my hair.”

“Dead girls don’t care about your hair,” he called back.

“Well they should,” I mumbled under my breath and stood up. Despite Sawyer’s bitching, I pulled my hair up into a messy bun, then met him outside. He gave me an appreciative look, and I could swear his eyes darkened for a split second.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Sure. Do you want to take my truck?”

“If you don’t want to freeze your ass off on the back of my bike, then yes, I think we should.”

Scooping up my keys, I looped my badge over my head and put on the gun holster, checking the safety was on and I wasn’t going to accidently shoot myself in the foot. I lead the way down to the street where my truck’s windshield was getting icy. I approached the driver’s side but stopped when Sawyer cleared his throat imperiously.

I glared at him. “It’s my truck.”

“You don’t know where you’re going.”

“You could tell me,” I retorted.

“This will be faster,” he replied.

Grumbling, I threw him the keys and walked over to the passenger side. “You’re a control freak.”

His laughter was sharp in the early morning air, slicing it in two. “Oh, if only you knew.”

Sullen and cold, I got in and pulled the seatbelt across my body. Sawyer coaxed my truck to life an instant later, no early morning coughs or jerks like normal. Resting my elbow on the door, I leaned my face into my palm and watched the still resting Buxton fly past the window. I didn’t bother asking him any questions about where we were going and what I should expect to find. I’d been living in this town all my life, skirting the edges of the part of town known as Hell.

It wasn’t that we were poor. My parents had bought a large apartment building due for dereliction downtown back in the late nineties. They’d spent a solid year renovating the whole thing, then began letting out apartments to friends of theirs. They were both archaeologists, but after I was born, my mom stayed at home more and more.

Until, on her first dig in nearly eleven years, she went missing.

I assumed she’d been killed, but murder was a hard concept to swallow for a nine-year-old. From then on, it was just me and my dad. He didn’t cut back on work. If anything, he worked even more, and I was left in the care of a neighbor called Mrs. Brown. She would spend more time at our place than she would in her own, and became the woman I went to when I got my period at thirteen and then when I had my heart broken by Chris Pachinko in high school.

“Cat?”

I shook my head and turned to Sawyer. “What?”

He studied me for a moment before returning his attention to the road. “I just asked if you were sleeping.”

“No, just…thinking.”

He raised an eyebrow at that statement but didn’t look at me again. Only five minutes later, we entered the docks. Sawyer drove us to a section that was labyrinthine, the giant steel containers stacked into rows which seemed to twist around when I was expecting linear order. I was suddenly glad he did drive.

Like hell I was going to tell him that though.

I got out and shivered. In my haste to get out of the apartment, I’d forgotten to grab a jacket.

“Here,” he said, throwing something at me. It was a navy-blue jacket that had the letters PIG written in yellow on the back. I slid into it, zipped it up, and followed Sawyer down to where yellow tape cordoned off the crime scene. I ducked under the tape behind Sawyer and stood back while he spoke to the responding officers.

Two large four thousand watt tower lights had been set up to illuminate the scene. Laid out in front of me was hundreds upon hundreds of shipping containers, each ranging from green to red to white and every other shade in between. Some were stacked at least seven stories high. The light that was being cast by the tower lights didn’t reach much beyond fifty feet though, leaving a clear demarcation of artificial day and shadowy night.

“Come on,” my partner told me, urging me toward a set of three shipping containers stacked one on top of another. The middle one had its doors thrown open, and I tilted my head up to see if I could see anything other than darkness.

“It’s up there? How in the hell did they find the body?”

“Anonymous tip,” he replied, scaling the side of the container like it was piece of kids’ playground equipment. When he got to the top, he motioned for me to follow. “Come on.”

“Um, I’m not part monkey, so I