“They were trying to kill me at the time,” Edward said.

   “When people first become vampires, the bloodlust is so powerful that they will attack anyone. They just want food, and that means fresh blood,” I said.

   “Is that why we found the daughter here with her family?” Sheridan asked.

   “No,” Edward said, “you found her here because some of them remember enough of their humanity to go home. They can be drawn to places they knew well in life, and it’s easier to persuade family to get close so they can feed.”

   “Also they can enter their own homes without being invited in first,” I said.

   Edward nodded. “I told them that vampires can’t enter a private residence unless invited.”

   I added, “So any private house or building that they were invited into when alive they can still enter as a vampire, unless someone who owns the building revokes the invitation.”

   “How do you revoke an invitation?” Sheridan asked.

   “You say, ‘I revoke my invitation.’”

   “Really, that formal?”

   “I don’t know. I’ve literally only done it by saying those words.” I looked at Jake and Kaazim. “Gentlemen, does it work without the phrase?”

   “Telling them to get out and that they are no longer welcome in your home would work,” Jake said.

   “Simply telling them, ‘You are no longer welcome,’ or ‘You are no longer my guest,’ works as well,” Kaazim said.

   “Unless they lived in the house in life,” Jake added.

   Kaazim agreed. “That does make it more complicated.”

   “It seems like there are a lot more rules to vampires than we knew,” Sheridan said.

   “Yeah, there are rules,” I said.

   “We need to know all the rules,” Pearson said, “but right now I would like the Marshals to accompany us to look at the victims.”

   “If they have fangs, Superintendent, they aren’t victims. They’re vampires,” I said.

   “I talked to Helena Brady for the first time a month ago, and then two weeks ago. I’ve been looking at the picture of her daughter Katie for weeks hoping we’d find her alive. Her best friend is Sinead Royce. When she went missing just after Katie, we didn’t think it was vampires; we thought we had a child abductor that knew the girls. We thought it was a child molester, or a stalker, or anything but vampires, and now they’re all lying in there dead, or undead, but whatever they are, something did that to them. Something drank Katie Brady’s blood and turned her into this, and that makes her a victim, Marshal Blake.”

   “Yes, of course it does, but . . .” Edward grabbed my arm and stopped me. He was one of the handful of people on the planet who could grab me and tell me to stop, and I’d stop. I looked up at him, waiting for an explanation.

   “One step at a time; let’s see what there is to see first.”

   “Sure, Ted, whatever you say.”

   Kaazim and Jake had been so helpful that Pearson let all four of them stay by the door with only one uniformed officer standing by to make sure they didn’t touch anything. We were all inside the crime scene, which was more than I thought we’d get, and if the vampires in the next room rose early we had at least four people within earshot who would be more than just humanly helpful. If I didn’t piss Pearson off completely, we were part of the investigation at last. I didn’t want to piss the Irish detectives off so badly that I got put back on a plane for home, but I had a bad feeling that they were going to try to treat the vampires like people with fangs. That would be a mistake; eventually it would be a fatal mistake for someone.

40

   THE ROOM WAS done in bright colors. One half of the room was a circus theme complete with a cartoon-circus-parade wall mural and a clown lamp beside the twin bed. The other half of the room was covered in posters of boy bands I didn’t know, some actors that I did know, and a rugby poster that seemed to be mostly a shot of buff men in small shorts fighting in mud. I’d never really thought of rugby as the male equivalent of women wrestling in oil, but suddenly I could see the analogy, because I was trying to see anything but the bodies in the room.

   Helena Brady lay on the twin bed underneath the rugby poster with her daughter curled beside her. She had a protective arm around the girl, and if they’d been breathing, it would have been a charming example of mother-daughter love. The only positive was that Katie Brady looked to be about fifteen or sixteen years old. If we could keep Katie from killing anyone else and the Irish legal system didn’t want to execute her for anything she’d already done, then as the years passed and she grew older in her mind and emotions, she’d have a body that would be adult enough to have a grown-up life.

   Sinead Royce lay on the other bed underneath the circus parade. She looked older than Katie and could have easily passed for eighteen. “How old is this one?” I asked.

   “Sixteen. They’re both sixteen,” Pearson said.

   “How old is the younger sister that’s at the hospital?”

   “Eight.”

   “That’s a big age gap to share a room,” I said.

   “They moved Michael Brady’s mother in with them after his grandfather died, and then moved her mother in when she had a bad fall, so the girls had to share a room.”

   “The dutiful son and daughter,” Edward said.

   “They were, or are, good people,” Pearson said.

   I stared down at the bodies on the bed and was angry. “This isn’t right.”

   “No,” Edward said, “it’s not.”

   I shook my head. “One of the few taboos that all vampires have is you don’t bring over children. The two teenagers you could make a case for, because if the vampire is old enough they may think of sixteen as an adult, because for centuries it was, but whoever made Katie Brady a vampire let her loose on her family. Whoever made her had an obligation to keep track of her until she was able to think for herself, because like Ted says, one of the first things vampires do is go home. The vampire creator is supposed to keep that from happening.”

   “Why?” Pearson asked.

   “One, it’s morally questionable, but two, it’s bad for business. One of the ways that vampires got discovered back in the old days was that one person would die from some unknown disease, a wasting disease they used to call it, and then one by one the rest of the family would die, so someone would get the bright idea to dig up the first family member that died, and voilà, there’s the vampire. Most of the old vamps liked to stay in their coffins during the day, because it was the most sunlightproof place they knew, and some believed that they needed to sleep in their original coffin at night or they’d die at dawn and not rise again.”