'You threatened the Sire.'William continued to talk to the female. 'So he sent us here.'

'Arthur I'm going to call the police.'The woman finally spoke. She was upset now, the nubs of her breasts rising and falling against her shirt. She had a small cell phone in her hand and William wondered if she had pulled it out of her ass. The thought made him smile.

He was on her in an instant and Michael took down the husband almost as easily. The brothers were incredibly fast and strong - and they knew it.

They growled loudly, but that was only an element of surprise, a scare tactic.

'We have money in the house. My God, don't hurt us,' the male shrieked loudly, almost like a woman.

'We're not after your obscene money - we have no use for it. And we're not serial killers, or anything common like that,' William told them.

He bit down into the struggling woman's luscious pink neck - and she stopped fighting. Just like that, she was his. She gazed into his eyes, and she swooned. A tear ran down her cheek.

William didn't look up again until he had fed. 'We're vampires,' he finally whispered to the murdered couple.

Chapter Twelve

On my second day in San Francisco, I worked out of a small cubicle near Jamilla Hughes' desk at the Hall of Justice. I attended a couple of her briefings on the Golden Gate Park murders, which were thorough and highly professional. She was impressive.

Everything about the murder case was weird and wrongheaded, though. No one had a fix on it yet; no one had a good idea, at least none that I'd heard so far. The only thing we knew for sure was that people were being murdered in particularly horrible ways. It happens more and more frequently these days.