Page 53 of Death is Familiar

Sounded like a list to me. Just effort, not results. The last part, however, was of interest. “They kept their familiar status a secret? From everyone?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

If I loved something enough to commit my work, my life to it, I sure as hell wouldn’t be ashamed of it. Even if vamps were secretive, someone in my personal life would know what I really did for a living. Assuming there was someone I was close to. Someone I shared interests with. Secrets. Problem was anyone who meant anything to me was in my line of work. Or dead. “I’m the wrong person to ask.”

“The victims told their family and friends they were hired as personal assistants.” Fawzy gave up on the chilli menu and tossed it next to Zhou’s phone. “We assume it was so they didn’t get questioned for getting called away at all hours.”

“Makes sense, but it’s not much to go on.” Though I didn’t believe for a second no one knew what the familiars really did. “Anything else?”

Fawzy held up her zero again. “Nothing came up from cyber either. Everything was at a standstill… until your visit to the vampire gathering in Huntington.”

“You found something, then? Something useful?”

“Why don’t you show her, Thruppy?”

“Yeah. Well. Just a sec.” Thruppy clicked a few buttons on his laptop. “Your contact. The vampire club owner⁠—”

“Lenore.”

“—Lenore sent us over some footage.” Thruppy turned the screen towards me, and I intentionally squeezed past Fawzy to get a closer look.

With a pinch and flick of my fingers, my foot bumping into the coffee table as a distraction, I rolled my hair elastic onto Fawzy’s wrist replacing her watch.

Apologizing, I turned my attention to the laptop. “What am I looking at?”

Thruppy hit a button and a grid of videos started to play, each square showing a different perspective. “Video footage from the last fang ceremony. From sixteen different cameras.”

I put a hand on Thruppy’s shoulder before leaning over to get a better look. I was close enough to smell the burnt tobacco and mint on his skin. “Is that?”

“Mercy. Zayd.” As he said their names, Thruppy pointed to each victim where they were all alive and well in their video squares. “Celeste. Dorian. Kian.”

“Looks like they all gather in the main hall. Get bit by their vamps,” I scrubbed through the footage on the laptop watching the familiars leave the fang ceremony, “then they head out and get picked up by a… what is that? A van?”

“Mhmm.” Thruppy double clicked, zooming in on the pixelated footage of five familiars getting in a paneled vehicle. “The blurry shape on top says taxi. Which is a bit of a conundrum.”

“We’ve been making our rounds to the local taxi companies.” Fawzy leaned against the cream wallpaper. “None of them have any record of a call. The neighborhood is too out of the way for a cab to have been hailed.”

“So, a phantom taxi appears. They get in, assuming one of them ordered it, and then what? Where did they go?”

“That’s the question.” Thruppy circled the screen. “This, this moment right here, is the last footage we have of the victims alive. They never made it home. No one made contact. And a little over twenty-four hours later, their bodies were found at Spring Grove.”

“I’m assuming we don’t have security or doorbell camera footage from the houses along this road following the ‘non-taxi’ to a final destination?”

“Negative. Nothing useful. Nothing to track.” Thruppy played around with the video footage zooming in and out, moving the video one frame at a time. A glint caught my eye.

“What’s that? On the lawn?”

Thruppy paused his navigation and zoomed out. “It’s a cross. Earlier in the evening the lawn is littered with them. The vamps, or familiars—or whatever the people who work and run the events for the vamps are called—remove them all before the event begins.”

There was an earmarked stretch of video along the timeline at the bottom of the screen. Thruppy scrubbed to the highlighted section. The footage was from earlier in the day, sun still out, and the front lawn spiked with at least twelve, no—thirteen, crosses.

“We don’t have access to the footage before the vamp events team arrives, so we don’t know who put the crosses there in broad daylight.” Thruppy took a deep breath before letting it all out. “I know, not helpful, but a couple more crosses pop up on the lawn throughout the night. Whoever placed them wore head-to-toe black. Can’t get much more than that.”

“You’d think with the fang ceremony taking place at a mansion, they’d have better security cameras.” Zhou’s tone was full of attitude and resentment, but she had a point.

The footage wasn’t great, and I bet there were whole rooms that didn’t make it on camera… for one syrupy reason or another. “And why does the footage only start once the events team arrives?”

“The events team set up the cameras.”