“Drop it.” I jerked the blade free. Derek hurled the vamp out and onto the stone floor. The pale body landed with a wet thud, and I beheaded it with one quick stroke. The vamp head rolled toward Desandra. She nudged it with her foot and wrinkled her nose. “Stinks, doesn’t he?”

I wiped Slayer down.

Derek rolled to his feet and stuck his head into the opening. “I can see a ten-foot-wide passage to the side with a vertical shaft at the end.” He indicated a rough rectangle of the wall. “This is plaster. Looks like the size of a small doorway. The rest is stone.”

A light staccato of steps came down the hallway and four djigits ran into the room and halted.

“Tell Hibla we need maid service,” I said. “We could handle trash in our room and an odd smell, but now we have a dead body. If this continues, we won’t be able to give your hotel a decent rating.”

“Yeah,” Derek said, his voice completely deadpan. “The continental breakfast better kick ass or we’ll complain to the manager.”

* * *

Dinner was served at midnight. I had expended some calories—Doolittle’s healing made the body burn through food with wild abandon—and I was so ravenous, I could’ve eaten one of those mountain goats in the courtyard raw.

Sitting still while Desandra napped and the castle staff poured alcohol on the vampire blood, set it on fire, and then scrubbed it off the floor, diligently ignoring my questions such as “How did a vampire get into the castle?” and “What was it doing in the wall?” gave me a lot of time to think.

I started thinking about Curran and Lorelei, decided it would drive me nuts, and focused on the winged shapeshifters instead. I wished I had access to the Keep’s library. I wished I could call a couple of people and ask them if they’d ever heard of something like that. But I had no resources beyond what was in my head and what few books I’d brought with me. Fixating on lamassu would do me no good; there was no indication that lamassu were shapeshifters. When an investigation first began, you simply collected facts. I was still in the collecting-facts stage. Drawing conclusions at this point would cause me to select facts that supported my theories and ignore those that didn’t. That was a slippery slope at the end of which lay more dead bodies.