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sheath. "There was a second body brought in with this one."
    "Yeah. Kind of hard to forget that one."
    "Any trace evidence?"
    "Nice try." Julianne smirked. "That's classified."
    "I see," I said. "What about an m-scan?"
    "That's classified, too."
    I sighed. Greg with his dark eyes and perfect face, mangled and broken, locked away in some cubicle in this lonely, sterile place. I fought the urge to double over and cradle the empty space in my chest.
    Julianne touched my shoulder. "Who was he to you?" she asked.
    "My guardian," I told her. Apparently my efforts to appear impartial had suffered a spectacular failure.
    "You were close?"
    "No. We used to be."
    "What happened?"
    I shrugged. "I grew up and he forgot to notice."
    "Did he have any kids?"
    "No. No wife, no children. Just me."
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    Julianne glanced at the vampire's corpse with obvious disgust. "You'd think the Order would have enough sensitivity to assign someone not related to this mess."
    "I volunteered."
    She gave me an odd look. "How about that. I hope you know what you're doing."
    "So do I. There is no chance you'd let me glance at the m-scan?"
    She pursued her lips, thinking. "Did you hear that?"
    I shook my head.
    "I think someone's at the gate. I'm going to go and check on it. I'm putting my binder right here. Now, these are confidential reports. I don't want you looking at them. In particular, I don't want you looking at the reports from the third of this month. Or taking any copies out of this file." She turned and marched out of the room.
    I flipped through the notebook. There were eight autopsies on the third. Finding Greg's didn't prove to be a problem.
    The trace evidence consisted of four hairs. In the origin column someone penciled Un. Psb Feline der.
    Unidentified, possibly a feline derivative. Not a feline shapeshifter. They would've pegged it as Homo sapiens with a specific felidae genus.
    The long folded sheet of the m-scan came next. Obeying the shake of my hand, it unfolded to its full three feet, presenting a graph drawn by the delicate needles of the magic-scanner. The faint colored lines on the graph wavered, a sure sign of many magic influences colliding in one spot. It was inconclusive by the most lax of standards and no court would have permitted it into evidence. The small header in the top corner identified it as a copy. Oh, goodie.
    I squinted, trying to make sense of it. Greg's body had continued to release its magic even after his death and the scanner recorded it as a sloping gray line, sometimes an inch wide, sometimes almost invisible.
    The deep jagged purple cutting across it had to be the vampire's magic. I looked harder. There was a third line, actually a series of lines, faint and dashing at irregular intervals through the reading. The longest was about a quarter of an inch long and the color was undeterminable. I raised the graph so the light of the ceiling bulb shone through it. The ink stood out. Yellow. What the hell registered yellow?
    I tugged at the graph, tearing it along the perforated lines and slid it into my folder. Julianne returned shortly. "Nobody there. Well, I'll leave you to it."
    She took the binder and walked out, leaving me with the vampire's corpse. I slipped on a pair of medical gloves and approached the body. The placement of brands depended on the personality of the Master of the Dead. Phillian marked his with a big Eye of Horns smack in the middle of the forehead. Constance marked hers in the left armpit. Since the forehead on this one was conveniently missing, it could have belonged to Phillian. Theoretically. I set about finding the brand.
    The armpits were clean, so was the chest, the spine, the back, the buttocks, the inside of the thighs and ankles. The only place remaining was the scrotum, so I spread the vampire's legs. The testicles diminished immediately after the human's death and continued to shrink during the vampire's life. There Page 24

    was a whole study on dating the bloodsuckers based