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laptop was a color photo of a dead teenaged boy. His skin had the telltale gray pallor of death a few days’ old, and his eyes had a milky-white hue, the pupil having faded into an almost imperceptible blue. My eyes roved over the photo, ensuring there were no bite marks on his neck. It didn’t mean there wouldn’t be marks anywhere else, but the neck was the best, easiest place to drain someone.
    This didn’t look like a vampire kill.
    I slid the laptop closer, seeing that this was only the first in a full gallery of photos, and clicked through the rest of them. The boy wore a Papa John’s pizza uniform with a small plastic nametag telling me his name was Petey.
    Petey.
    Sickness flooded my belly. This kid shouldn’t be dead, no matter what had killed him. If he was so young he hadn’t outgrown a nickname like Petey, he hadn’t been old enough to die. It might not be my first time seeing a dead teenager, but seeing death take someone before they’d reached their prime tended to strike a chord with me.
    My teenaged years had been spent fighting for my life and learning how to survive in a world filled with monsters and all forms of despicable evil. I hadn’t gotten to participate in the innocence of youth. Petey had been killed by those monsters, and I felt guilty for it.
    There was no blood on him, and no signs of violent death, but he was dead and the case was in Keaty’s hands. I did the math, and weird potential murder plus my boss almost always added up to supernatural killer.
    “What did it?”
    “I don’t know. The coroner ruled it a heart attack, but his parents aren’t buying it. Someone said I was the right person to find out what had killed their beloved son. That’s what they said. What, not who.”
    “And what do you need my help for?”
    “Funny thing about his last delivery the night of his death.”
    “Oh?”
    “It went to a Starbucks three blocks from your apartment.”
     
     
    In a roundabout way, Keaty was suggesting Marilyn Monroe had killed a pizza delivery boy.
    I had, during my time associated with the vampire council, gotten to know a truly unusual creature known as the Oracle. To me she was just Calliope, but she was the only one of her kind I’d ever met, and Keaty wasn’t out of line pointing his investigation in her direction.
    Calliope, a half-fairy/half-god, had a bad habit of needing to feed off a life essence other than blood—though she was also a fan of the red stuff. She preferred to eat aura energy. Specifically the aura energy of young male virgins.
    I wasn’t implying that Petey hadn’t been a sex stud in his living years, but the sixteen-year-old didn’t strike me as a pussy magnet. However, he would have been Calliope’s type.
    Calliope had been many things in her timeless life: muse, model, destroyer of lives and worlds, lover of vampires, and for a few brief decades, one of the most famous movie stars in the world. It wasn’t that I thought her killing people was outside the realm of possibility. In fact, I’d have been shocked to learn the Oracle hadn’t killed anyone. She didn’t have the same reverence for human life as, say, a vampire who had once had their own mortality.
    Calliope was immortal. Scarily, genuinely immortal.
    So what was the life of a sixteen-year-old to her?
    Logic told me why Keaty believed it was her. But personal experience told me he had to be wrong. I’d seen her victims after she’d fed off them, either their blood or aura. They were often dazed and a little woozy, but they always walked out alive after the fact. And usually with one hell of a big tip. She had thousands of years to hone her control, so no, I didn’t believe she’d had a slipup and accidentally killed someone.
    But if I thought she was innocent, why wasn’t I going to see her to ask her point-blank?
    For starters, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure she was innocent. The evidence was stacked against her, and I didn’t want to run into her house demanding she