Marked by Midnight

Last year, when Sloane finally conceded to settle down and take a mate, he invited Mathias to the reception that followed at the family Darkhaven. Mathias didn’t know who’d been more u

Sloane’s broad smile didn’t falter as he clapped Mathias’s shoulder in greeting and glanced at the array of titanium blades and semiautomatic firearms holstered on the warriors’ weapon belts from the night’s raid. “Anything JUSTIS needs to be concerned about?”

“Not anymore,” Mathias said. He gestured to the floater being unloaded onto the riverbank. “Anything the Order needs to be concerned about?”

Sloane shook his head. “Just another dead scarab.”

The remark referred to the tattoo each of the recent gang war victims had in common. This death brought the body count to seven. Although it wasn’t unusual to find a corpse in the 213-mile river that spat them out at an impressive average of one a week, the Thames was suddenly choking on members of an unknown, but apparently lethal, new gang.

Mathias and his squad followed Sloane over to the recovery in process. Three JUSTIS officers hoisted the tarp-wrapped body onto the concrete riverbank. As the corpse settled on the ground, the plastic fell away, revealing a large human male.

“No ID on the body,” Sloane said. “We’ll run his prints, but it if this case follows the other six we’re processing, this guy isn’t likely to pop a criminal record either. Aside from the common tattoo on all of the victims, we don’t have much to go on.”

The dead man was dressed in dark, sodden clothing, his harsh, ugly face blanched white in death, contrasting sharply against the russet color of his full beard and shaggy red hair. On his biceps, under the short sleeves of his blood-stained T-shirt, an array of tattoos ran the length of both his beefy arms. The scarab rode the back of his right hand, the same mark and placement as on the six other murdered men.

Sloane dismissed his fellow JUSTIS officers with a curt wave as Mathias stepped closer to the corpse, studying its damage. Multiple wounds peppered the thick neck and barrel chest--deep punctures, many of them concentrated in tight clusters.

He frowned. “The other victims were pulled out of the river with bullets in their heads. This guy was stabbed with something. Repeatedly, and with a hell of a lot of force. Or passion.”

“Dead is dead,” Callahan murmured from beside Mathias and the rest of the team. “Maybe his killing was meant to send a stronger message than the others.”

Sloane shrugged. “It’s possible.”

“The last body surfaced two days ago,” Mathias recalled. Despite the obvious co

“Out,” Deacon replied.

Away from London, then, toward the North Sea.

Thane’s pensive glance said he was following Mathias’s line of thinking too. “A couple more turns and the tide would have carried this corpse out to open water. He hasn’t been in the river as long as the others had been.”

“Based on the condition of the body,” Sloane interjected, “we don’t expect this poor bastard’s been dead for even twenty-four hours.” He met Mathias’s gaze with one of concern. “You sensing anything out of the ordinary down here?”

His friend wasn’t talking about investigator hunches or forensic evidence. Sloane was familiar with Mathias’s extrasensory ability.

Every Breed vampire and every half-human Breedmate female was born with a unique ESP or telekinetic gift, some of them more useful than others. Some of those gifts were very dark, more of a curse.

Mathias’s fell somewhere in the middle, though given his choice of occupation, the ability to pick up the psychic traces of violence left behind at a scene where harm was done to someone gave him an edge over most other law enforcement officials.

Still, he wasn’t sure what to make of tonight’s floater. “I don’t feel anything unusual here, but that only means the killing didn’t occur nearby.”

“But you’d know if it did,” Sloane prompted.

Mathias nodded. “Violence leaves a psychic mark on a place, the same way a physical blow leaves a bruise. The trick is finding it before it fades.”

One of Sloane’s men called to him from across the way. He raised a hand in acknowledgment, but kept his gaze trained on Mathias. Shaking his head, he blew out a chuckle. “I tell ya, Rowan, life just isn’t fair. My best parlor trick is the ability to tie a decent sailor’s knot without using my hands. A gift like yours, I’d have gotten promoted to JUSTIS Commissioner by now. Instead, I’m stuck bagging and tagging the city’s dregs on the shit side of town.”

Another vehicle rolled on to the scene, and Sloane’s fellow officer shouted for him again. “About time the medical examiner showed up,” he muttered. “I gotta go handle this. As for you and your team, I know I don’t need to tell you that the Order’s presence down here is going to make some people uncomfortable and twitchy.”

Anxious looks were coming from the unit of human and Breed officers and the newly arrived coroner. Mathias grunted. “I thought uncomfortable and twitchy was standard operating procedure for you JUSTIS folks.”

Sloane smirked. “You turn anything up, let me know, yeah?”

“Sure,” Mathias agreed. “God knows, you need all the help you can get.”

With a low laugh and a one-fingered salute, Sloane pivoted and shuffled off to join his colleagues.

“You see all the ink on this guy?” Deacon said when the warriors were alone with the body. “He’s sporting some seriously hardcore tattoos.”

Mathias glanced down at the elaborate artwork, cold words and cryptic symbols. The meanings of a few were easy enough to comprehend--grim indicators of kill counts and carnage, glorified, bloody depictions of violence and death.

He took out his comm unit and snapped a few quick photos of the dead man and his collection of body art.

Peering closer, Mathias noticed something interesting about one of his tattoos.

“Look at the Celtic cross on his left forearm. The six-pointed star behind it is fresh.”

“And only half-finished,” Thane added, staring down at the reddened skin and black ink.

Even incomplete, the star was intricate, rendered by a highly skilled hand and an artist’s eye for detail.

“Hope the dumb fuck didn’t pay in full for half a job,” Callahan joked lamely.

None of the warriors laughed along with him. Thane and Deacon were looking at Mathias with the same glint of possibility.

“Something’s not right about this whole situation,” Mathias said, thinking out loud. “Six dead members of a gang no one’s ever heard of, now a seventh body turns up days later. Why?”

Callahan shrugged. “Gangs kill each other all the time. If you ask me, we should let them carry on and thank them for saving us the trouble.”

The kid had a point, albeit a wrong-headed one. And dangerous besides. If a gang had ideas about bringing their war into Mathias’s city, under the Order’s watch, they would need to think again.

And something was nagging him about the slayings, even before this last body was pulled out of the Thames. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on yet. He needed more information. Seemed to him, the best place to begin that quest was the place where tonight’s floater might have spent some of his final hours.

“Wherever he had this work started was likely one of the last places anyone saw him alive,” Mathias said. “I want to find that tattoo shop. As in, tonight.”

Deacon cast a skeptical look in his direction. “London is full of tattoo shops. We’ll be looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.”