“Don’t move,” called Joaquin, to stem the surge of the crowd in the direction of the commotion. Somewhat to Dahlia’s surprise, everyone obeyed him. She found that interesting.

Even more interesting was the fact that Joaquin searched the crowd until his eyes met hers. “Dahlia,” he said, in lightly accented English, “take Katamori with you and find out what’s happened.” Katamori had been something of a policeman a couple of centuries ago.

Dahlia had to work to keep her face expressionless. “Yes, Sheriff,” she said, and jerked her head at Matsuda Katamori, a vampire who had an apartment near Little Japan. Katamori, who appeared just as surprised as Dahlia at being singled out, immediately glided to her side. They moved quickly to the door to the passage leading to the mansion’s kitchen.

It wasn’t a wide space, and the carpet had been installed to deaden sound, not to beautify. Both the vampires were alert as they moved silently down the passage to the kitchen. The swinging door had been propped open.

When the mansion had been built in the early 1900s, the builder could not have imagined that the kitchen would be used by non-eaters. The white tile floors and the huge fixtures had been maintained, even updated, once or twice during the century that had passed. When Cedric had bought the mansion at a bargain price (glamour had been involved), he’d left the kitchen as though it would still be needed to prepare a banquet. Normally, the stainless steel fixtures shone in the overhead lights suspended from the high ceiling.

Now the stainless steel was splashed with red. The smell of blood was overwhelming.

From where they stood just inside the doorway, Dahlia and Katamori couldn’t see the body because of the long wooden table running down the middle of the room, but a body was undoubtedly there. The only thing living in the kitchen was one of the half-demons, a skinny girl Dahlia hadn’t met before. The girl was standing absolutely still, very close to the corpse, if Dahlia’s nose was accurate, and her hands were up in the air. Smart.