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he could play doorman and guard later so I could catch up on the doings in the land of Nod, myself. Grendel was more interested in the food. I put on a jacket against the exterior chill as he devoured his breakfast.
    I’d never had a dog of my own as a kid—no pets at all in fact after the disaster of my mother’s first post-Dad boyfriend and his dopey Labradors. It hadn’t occurred to me, until I moved in next to Rick, that happy pit bulls, by nature, are just as playful and silly as any other well-trained dog. Grendel didn’t look too scary most of the time, grinning and wagging and doing the play-with-me bow. But in defensive mode, he was a terrifying bundle of crushing teeth and hard muscle. That’s what the asete and his plain-vanilla vampire buddy must have seen last night when Rick came out into the hall: eighty pounds of pissed-off pit bull. But they hadn’t dominated the dog or frightened it. They’d shot at it. And they were pretty lousy shots—not that I was surprised about that.
    Vampires think of themselves as top predator and they aren’t afraid of much at night, not even mean dogs. They generally don’t carry weapons since they think they don’t need them. But the specimens in the hall had been packing guns. That seemed kind of odd to me. I thought about it as I walked Grendel twice around the water tower green space, stopping several times while he left various doggy messages.
    The vampires had come to my door. They hadn’t just wanted in: they wanted to raise a ruckus. They didn’t come with just their natural weapons, so they hadn’t come with the intention of killing—No. Wait.
    They had come to kill me. But it would have to be the right kind of kill since the whole point of pushing me close to death was to bend me into the Grey form Wygan needed for whatever plan he had in mind. And the more trouble the whole scene caused, the more likely I was to be forced out of my home if they weren’t entirely successful. Wygan wouldn’t want them to bite me, just in case someone was a little too thirsty: he couldn’t risk my not being in his control by being blood-tied to another vampire—if that was even possible. It also wouldn’t be difficult to explain the wounds on any bystanders who caught a bullet, unlike the classic broken necks and gouged throats of the usual vampire victim.
    Solis had said violence and homicide were up, that the crimes fit a pattern, but he hadn’t said exsanguinated bodies or unexplainable wounds were part of it—Simondson had looked like a hit-and-run but I was pretty sure he was a vampire victim one way or another. The pattern of last night’s crime looked like thugs with guns who’d left some odd piles of human ash scattered around. That might be strange or creepy, but from the reports, the police were already thinking of the uptick in violence as weird gang crime with some bizarre ritual or marker. Witnesses wouldn’t be too eager to say they’d seen something as crazy as one apparent gangbanger roasting another into a pile of ash in the space of a few seconds. That’s nuthouse talk, and vampires are damned good at leaving only foggy memories in the minds of survivors. If anyone had been talking, they’d only say what the vampires wanted them to say—or something so crackpot the cops wouldn’t pay attention. The SPD gang unit was still based in West Seattle, even after the biggest gang problem was cleared out by the demolition of the projects. If they had related crimes downtown, they’d be working with Solis or one of his colleagues, which explained the detective’s swift appearance. Quinton had mentioned vampires making trouble downtown, including some shootings, while I was in London, but that had been centered on the clubs and bars around Belltown and the financial core—the vampire neutral zones where faction fighting was supposed to stay off the streets and not attract the attention of the sheep. But if it was part of the pattern Solis had noted,