Page 37 of Damian’s Conquest

At least that meant she hadn’t seen the bottles of blood in the refrigerator.

“But outside,” she added quickly.

He raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“I found a broken bottle in the trash. It was labeled A+ bottled by Scanguards.”

Fuck! The staff knew never to toss any used bottles of blood in the trash. They were recycled and returned directly to Scanguards.

“I had the residue inside it analyzed. It was human blood.”

“That’s impossible,” he lied. “Can I see the bottle?”

She pulled out her cell phone. “It’s still in the trunk of my car, but I took a photo.” She scrolled to her photo app and he stepped closer, now in full damage control mode. “Here. That’s what I found.”

He took the phone from her hand and looked at the photo. There was no doubt about it. It was one of the bottles Scanguards filled with human blood from a blood bank. This was incriminating evidence.

“You said you had the residue tested?”

“Yes, my friend Heather works in a lab at UCSF. She tested the samples for me.”

“Samples? There is more than one?”

She swiped to the next photo. “I also found this vial, which had some sticky red residue. Heather tested it, but she said it must have been contaminated, because she couldn’t figure out if it was human or animal blood, but she was pretty sure it was blood.”

Crap! He knew what it had to be: vampire blood. He would be able to recognize it by its smell. No lab test, at least none available in human labs, would be able to pinpoint what it was.

“Do you still have the vial?”

“Yes, it’s with the other bottle in my car.”

Good. At least that meant he could get the evidence and dispose of it. But that still left a few other loose ends. And even more questions.

“But that’s not all,” Naomi said.

“What else?”

“I spoke to the neighbor who made the allegations about a satanic cult. Well, she didn’t actually say that… that was my editor’s guess. But she did tell me that she saw two men meet near the back entrance of the club several nights a week, and that they exchanged something. I was guessing it was some small-time drug dealing, like at any club. But Mrs. Zhang insisted that she saw blood on them, like on their clothing and their faces.”

That confirmed it. Somebody had been careless and probably fed from a human, not realizing that there was a witness to his actions.

“Perhaps there was a fight out back?”

“No, she never mentioned a fight. But she said that on the night of the Halloween party she saw a person leaving through the back entrance, carrying something.”

“Did she say what?”

“She couldn’t see it. And the person wore a Harlequin costume with a Venetian facemask.” She met his eyes. “You said that the thief who stole something you kept for your father wore a Venetian facemask. What if that was him?”

That was the first good news he’d heard in the last half hour.

“Did she say what time it happened?” he asked eagerly.

“Sometime around three in the morning.”

It was consistent with the time of the break-in.

“She said he stumbled and something fell, and then he tossed something in the trash container, but missed. And that’s where I found the bottle and the vial. At first, I thought maybe he just stole a bottle of booze.”