Night Call (Book 2): Demon Dei by L.J. Hayward

might hurt them, but it doesn’t necessarily kill them, or even slow them down much.”
    “He didn’t say. But if this tidal influence is right, maybe you have to kill them at low tide.”
    “When they’re normal humans? For the police and forensics to look at like it’s a run of the mill murder case?”
    Jacob stared at me. “Um, yeah. I guess not.”
    “Disposing of monster bodies is easier, trust me. Right, while you have the book out, did anyone make any noises about the death of a physicist last week?”
    “Geraldine Davis?” Jacob’s eyes lit up. “Nothing about her. Why?”
    “I’m probably going to be working on the case.”
    “Cool, man. You’re turning into a regular PI. Like that chick last May.”
    I carefully ignored the reference to Erin. “Can you check and see if anything was recorded around the time of her death?”
    He flipped back a couple of pages. “Um, that was when Ambrose called me about his were-tide idea. Was it a were-creature?”
    Six months ago I would have scoffed at the thought. Now, I considered it seriously. In popular myth, people were bitten by a were-creature and then turned into said creature. In reality, it was a bit more complex than that. Animals could also be bitten and turned into were-creatures. Erin and I had faced down a dog that’d transformed into a werewolf. Oh yeah. Honest to God. A werewolf-dog. And it’d been a bastard to kill. It had been a very rude awakening to the sheer breadth and depth of the supernatural world. I’d had the last of the conceit knocked out of me with that one. So now, I was wondering if one person could be transformed through the were-virus into another human. Or… an animal into a human.
    Crap. I hadn’t even officially taken the case and I was hating the array of possibilities opening up before me.
    “Let’s not rule it out,” I said. “But if it was, it had to have a way of getting out of the lab without being seen. Anything else?”
    Jacob sped read the page. “Caroline had a dream. Her usual sort, all foggy and whimsical. Just some feeling of something big coming to town. Big and dark and powerful. Happened around the time we began noticing the lack of vampires about the place.”
    I cocked an eyebrow.
    “You thinking it’s significant?” he asked.
    “It’s vague enough to either be nothing or something. But ‘big and dark and powerful’ doesn’t make me think it’s nice. As much as I’d like to think it’s a coincidence the vampires pulled up fangs and left at the same time, I’d be an idiot to believe it. But that was several months ago. The Davis murder only happened last week.”
    Jacob tapped his pen on the entry about Caroline’s dream. “So probably nothing to do with the murder. I only mentioned it because it’s the last entry I have. Hasn’t been much of anything for some time now. Not since the Mount Coot- tha schmozzle.”
    “Tell me about it,” I muttered bleakly.
    It was hard to think I’d made a big enough and tough enough rep for myself with the decapitation of Veilchen that all the other nasties cleared out of town. It was slightly easier to think that perhaps Aurum—the grandest of the vampire granddaddies and the master puppeteer of the Veilchen fiasco—had something to do with it. The whole deal had been his test of how brassy my balls actually were. So while it could be plausible he’d boosted my passing grade with an ‘exceeds expectations’, it was also a little scary.
    “Except for the imp issues,” Jacob said brightly. “But they’re hardly worth noting. Do you really think this Davis thing is your sort of trouble or are you desperate? So they didn’t catch the guy leaving. There could be any number of explanations, only a couple of them supernatural in nature.”
    “There’s also the fact the murderer looked just like the husband, but the husband has an alibi to rival any submarine.” Even as I said it, I realised leaving the note for Ivan had been a mistake. I’d