“Stefan.” Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel.

Months ago, Stefan had been sent by the coven to aid us in our ascent to the ruins on the mountain where the naturi were attempting to open the door between our worlds. I didn’t know how old he was, but judging by the power that rolled off him, he was fairly close to the thousand-year mark, if not already past it. He also didn’t seem to be a very big fan of Mira’s. Of course, neither were most of the vampires I had run across.

“My point is,” I stressed, trying to bring Mira’s dark thoughts away from whatever torture she was devising for Stefan. “Speeding along the Great Awakening meets with the desires of your liege and starting it in your city would give the coven yet another excuse to cut your heart out.”

Mira growled in the back of her throat, balling her right hand into a fist. She raised her hand to pound on the steering wheel, but I caught her wrist in my hand. The nightwalker’s glowing lavender eyes snapped to my face.

“You’ll hurt your ‘baby,’” I reminded her in a soft voice as I slowly released her wrist. The glow in her narrowed eyes instantly faded as a crooked smile lifted one corner of her mouth. Her skin was surprisingly cool to the touch with a somewhat waxy feel. I couldn’t begin to guess how long it had been since she had last fed. A grudging respect for the vampire began to take hold when I realized she hadn’t even made a move to bite me at the feeding earlier.

A new thought twisted in my gut, sending a wave of chills running up my flesh. Would I have stopped her if she had tried to bite me? Lost in one wave after another of mind-numbing pleasure, I couldn’t imagine pushing her away if she had come offering to send me along that next wave. Hell, my own face had been buried in her neck and I could clearly remember the feel of my own teeth running along her skin. Even now, something dark and primal demanded I taste her flesh, to drink her in so that she would become a part of me.

“The coven doesn’t need a fresh reason to confiscate my heart,” she said, her grim voice bleeding into the darkness.

“They already have ample reason to cause problems here,” I replied, forcibly pulling my thoughts back to the current quandary at hand.

“I know,” she whispered, turning the key. The engine turned over with a feral growl then settled into a steady purr that would have been the envy of any large cat. “This is all great speculation, but that’s still all it is. We need answers and I think we’ll have a few more after we have a look at the body and autopsy report.”

First, a rather posh apartment in the heart of the River Street club district, complete with body outline, and now the morgue. Traveling with Mira, I always got to see some of the more interesting sights within a city.

The Savannah morgue was a large, one-story building squatting like a fat toad just on the outskirts of town. Made of faded yellow brick, the building sagged and slumbered in a dreary neighborhood that seemed to be weighed down by the nearby hospital.

Mira deftly pulled into the small parking lot in the rear and settled her car next to a white Lexus with gold trim shining in the overhead parking light. There was only one other car in the lot; a beat-up Chevy Nova with fading gray paint and a sign announcing that it was for sale. At a guess, one car belonged to the coroner and the other to the night watchman.

As we slipped out of the car, the back door swung soundlessly open, revealing a short, balding man in a dark suit. His black-frame glasses were balanced on his large, bulbous nose, making his eyes enormous and almost owlish in appearance. He held the door open as we approached, the stubby fingers of his left hand fiddling nervously with the buttons on his blazer.

“We’re in trouble,” he announced in a low voice as Mira stepped into the brightly lit interior. Her pale skin took on a strange iridescent glow under the harsh fluorescent light. It explained why I had never run across a vampire in the aisles of an all-night mega-store.

Mira’s shoes scraped along the battered white linoleum as she turned to look at the man. “What do you mean? Lose the body?” She looked over the rim of her pale blue sunglasses at him.

“Of course not!” he huffed, puffing up his chest a bit at the affront. He lifted his chin and hurried around me, the top of his head not quite reaching my shoulders.

Mira shrugged, throwing me a mischievous smile over her shoulder. “So much for hoping.”

“Who is he?” the man asked with a jerk of his head before continuing down the hall.

“Forgive my lack of manners,” Mira said. “Archie, this is an associate of mine, Danaus. Danaus, this is the Chatham County coroner, Dr. Archibald Deacon.” Her introduction oozed with irritation.

An associate. I didn’t like the sound of it. It made me sound like a business partner, or in the mind of a human, one of her kind. But I wasn’t a nightwalker. Of course, I wasn’t quite human either. Even though I might not like the phrase, it’s not like she had a lot of options. This is Danaus, the vampire hunter. Just trying to wrap his mind around all the ramifications would probably cause his brains to slide out of his ears.

However, the coroner said nothing. He briefly paused as he pushed open a door leading to a stairwell and nodded to me before leading us down the stairs.

“So what’s the problem?” Mira asked, her voice echoing slightly off the concrete walls.

“This body is the problem,” he said sharply. “I didn’t know it was one of yours.”

“Mira—” I began, a fresh knot of anger twisting in my gut. What kind of an arrangement did she have with the city coroner? Did I not know about all of her kills because she had a deal with the coroner to keep everything nicely hidden?

“He means death by an outsider or death of an outsider,” she grumbled over her shoulder at me then turned her attention back to Archie. “What’s been done?”

“Everything,” he said, throwing up his hands in a helpless gesture. “I wasn’t called to the scene of the crime because it was drawing too much attention. You can’t have a senator’s daughter killed in her River Street apartment and not expect a press circus to set up camp outside. I didn’t see the body until it was brought in.” Yanking open the door with a soft grunt, he led us down a narrow hall to a pair of steel double doors. “I had been told that it looked like she died from an animal attack. I ordered the usual autopsy and thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until later that afternoon that I saw the digital pictures the police took of the crime scene. By then, both my toxicologist and serologist had been all over the body. A pair of zoologists had even been through, trying to make a guess at what made the teeth marks.”

In the center of the cool room crowded with shiny stainless-steel operating tables was a large table under a bright light. A body lay on the table covered with a white sheet. Archie walked around to the far side while Mira and I stayed on the side closest to the door.

The chill in the air seeped through my leather jacket and crept up my spine. I had seen more than my share of death over the years, and been around plenty of dead bodies (not to mention a few dead bodies that sat up and talked when you had been quite sure moments earlier that it was completely impossible). Yet being surrounded by all the shining silver instruments and the rows of stainless-steel refrigerators used for housing the bodies caused the illogical wave of dread to sweep through me. The dead were supposed to be burned or buried when the soul left, not dug into and examined.

“Cause of death?” I asked, shoving my hands into my pockets.

“It’s a tough call. Either blood loss or asphyxiation,” he said blandly as he pulled back the sheet.