“He’s missing three fingers,” said Falin, clearing away the snow from his hands. “And it looks like the kill shot was in the gut. No reason for a Partial to have done any of that.”

“No reason for a human, either,” said Kira.

“What I’m saying is that a Partial’s more accurate,” said Falin. “We would have hit him up here, in the chest or the head—”

“There’s no exit wound,” said Green. He was crouching on the other side, by the body’s back, and Kira stepped over to look. “That looks like a gunshot in his stomach, but whatever it was didn’t come out the back. I don’t even know what would make a wound like this. The entry hole’s too big for a knife.”

“Oh no,” said Kira, and tried to roll him over to see the wound; he was frozen to the ground, so she scrambled back around to examine it more fully. She felt her heart sink. “Oh no.”

Kira could sense their alarm on the link; they were already fanning into defensive positions, cued by her words that something was wrong. Green crouched next to her. “What is it?”

“I’ve seen this kind of wound before,” she said. “Once. On your squad mate I found on the dock back at Candlewood.”

Green held her gaze for a second, his mind adding up the ramifications, and he came to the same conclusion she had. “The Blood Man.”

“I’m not saying it is,” said Kira, standing up. “It could be a coincidence.”

“Who’s the Blood Man?” asked Falin.

“We don’t know,” said Kira. “Some kind of . . . murderer? Collector? We escaped from a group of modified Partials that seemed to take orders from him, but we never saw him. He killed a bunch of Partials and drained their blood, and the last Green heard he was headed south to do the same to humans. We don’t know why.”

“Modified Partials?” asked one of Falin’s soldiers.

Green placed his hands on either side of his neck, and flapped them up and down. “Gills.”

“There are only two good reasons to collect blood,” said Falin. “One is you’re crazy, and two, you need it for a transfusion or something. Maybe he’s dying.”

Kira shook her head. “If all he needs is a transfusion, he wouldn’t hop around taking a pint or two each from a dozen different people. He’s definitely collecting it, almost like he’s curating it, trying to get a variety of different samples. In Candlewood he took at least one each of the three Partial models he had access to.” She looked up. “I’ve done a lot of blood tests in my work as a medic, and experiments and all kinds of things. Maybe he needs it for that?”