They found Tim the intern dead the week after Fulbright shipped. Noth's assistant woke her hours before sunset with the news, rapping it out on the panels of her hidden coffin. Bite marks, died from blood loss.
Noth texted from inside: Westwood poncho. Wraparound glasses. James in car.
The blackout shades were drawn and heavy bottomed jar of suncream waited on her bedside table when she emerged. The bed was unmade; Eiri slept there, leaving for work a few hours after Noth had turned in that morning. The blindfold and silk ribbon were neatly put away in her bedside cabinet, and she took another moment to appreciate his meticulous attention to detail.
They fucked furiously in the days following the launch party, sometimes as many as four times in a night. Noth hadn't told him yet when her wedding would occur, in no hurry to terminate their arrangement. She didn't want petty human feelings like jealousy or separation anxiety to spoil whatever time they had left.
Briefly, she checked her wrists - the coffin slumber healed all wounds, but sometimes she could still see silvery traces of their rough play on her skin. She saw a thin line over the base of her palm where the silk ribbon, stiff stiff with her cum from the boutique, gouged into it. She pressed her lips to the mark, lovingly.
"Director?" Her assistant waited downstairs by the door, shifting from foot to foot, making the antique floorboards creak. Anxious.
"Coming." She swiped on the cream, donned the sun-blocking clothes laid out for her and tucked the Starbuck employee badge into a pocket of the poncho before descending into daylight. In the car, she drank from James, one of the human slaves reserved for feeds and employed by Starbucks as administrative assistants. When she finished, he rested his head in her lap to recover, and she read the executive summary on her phone on the drive in, stroking his hair, wishing it were Eiri with her instead.
Multiple bite marks on the neck, chest, groin, she read. The intern was found naked, but it wasn't clear if he'd died that way. Definitely looks bad for us. She sent a calendar invite to the other three Ipomoea family members, flagged high priority. The first thing they'd see when they woke at sundown.
Her fiance waited for her in the south conference room, surrounded by lawyers. Eldunord du Air, the eldest son of the family, was an old elf - his whorled skin long since gnarled and flaked with bark. His face, rendered nearly immobile by the hardening of the skin, showed little expression. But his hair, all leaves and twigs tangled with silvered gossamer strands, stood on edge, rustling. Betraying his agitation.
He's angry with me, Noth realized. The shades were drawn against the late afternoon sun for her sake, but she spied narrow cracks of light along the wall where the blinds weren't fastened properly. For the elves, always so meticulous, this was a deliberate slight against her, not an oversight. She kept to the far side of the room, leaning on the sideboard laid with coffee service.
"Dearest," he greeted her, "I hope you slept well."
"Of course, darling," Noth replied without even a trace of irony. Elves were not big on sarcasm; and she doubted he would even care that she had a lover stay the night. For all she knew, he dallied ten nymphs a night while they dwelled apart as an unmarried couple. "What happened to that poor boy?"
"Apparently attacked somewhere onsite. Security believes he was dragged outside from West Campus," Eldunord was watching her closely. She could not read his mind, but she intuited he suspected her.
"While still alive?" Noth asked, trying to sound shocked instead of morbidly curious. She needed to appear as cooperative as possible in the early stages of an investigation. "How horrible!"
"We do not know." Her husband gestured to one of the lawyers - a human male who looked to be in his sixties - and explained, "Fontaine believes it could be espionage, related to the lunchroom incident eight weeks ago."
Noth felt a little flutter in her belly, thinking of that night, of Eiri stretched over her, his cock buried deep inside her. It felt like so long ago. Each time he took her felt like another lifetime together.
"We'd like to speak with all vampires on staff," the lawyer Fontaine said. "And... perhaps it would be possible to collect impressions of your teeth...?"
Noth stiffened. "The bites were consistent with fangs...? I didn't read that in the summary."
Under her icy gaze, the lawyer paled and glanced at her fiance. Eldunord soothed him with a subtle gesture and the hypocrisy of the elves struck Noth anew. They say they don't keep slaves, but, my, how they love to keep pets...
"No one has accused you," the man who would become her husband said. "But a human dies of blood loss where there are vampires about. Is it really so unreasonable to rule out yourselves out as suspects at the outset? You have nothing to fear."
Don't I? She eyed the lawyer. We both know I'm not the only bloodsucker, here.
...
In her office, she prepared for the fallout. Whenever lawyers got involved, deadlines had a way of slipping. The work equivalent of cock-blocked.
She sent a note to her VP, warning him of a possible delay in the global rollout. Then, she rescheduled the marketing and analytics syncs, moving as many of the meetings up as she could. She canceled what couldn't be moved.
Her kin met for their daily standup half an hour after sundown, three young vampire cousins of the Ipomoea family under her mentorship. Noth informed them of the situation, had the autopsy report ready for them to review.
"Thoughts?" she asked, aloud. It would have been faster to speak in minds, but her office was likely now under surveillance. To ward off as much as suspicion as possible, the vampires had to be as exaggerated as they could in communication. Lawyers did so love their sordid discovery phase.
No vampire did this, Chuka, the eldest, declared, meeting her eyes. Aloud, she said, "Look at the pattern - it's almost a perfect oval. More than twenty marks per bite."
No vampires uses all their teeth, though Antonious, the youngest. These racist assholes don't know shit about us! He said nothing aloud, apparently too agitated to come up with something banal. Noth would have to correct his lapse later.
"And look at the punctures from the incisors - too small," said Philomena, the middle child by age. Why should they suspect us? We've been here half a year already and I know I haven't killed anyone...
"His blood was sucked out of those wounds," Noth said. We may not be the only thing that feeds on blood, but we are the obvious suspects. "Legal wants to take impressions of our teeth."
Now Antonious piped up, "That's ridiculous. I won't do it!"
"It's standard crime investigation procedure. They'll probably do it to the humans, too." Noth fixed her gaze on him, pressing. Get it together, or go home. "Refusal to cooperate is tantamount to guilt. Due processes means nothing to elves."
And you're going to marry one of them? Chuka thought at her. What a nightmare...
Noth bared her fangs, ran her tongue over the tips of them, a silent gesture of dominion. Chuka paled at the sight and gestured a mute apology.
The Director faced her reports, probing hard at each of them with her mind. They were tired, annoyed, and hungry from not feeding as frequently as they liked given their workload. But none of them had done it.
"I'll have a neutral third party take the impressions," she said. "Look for a calendar invite later in the week." We're not going to risk evidence tampering from some racist elf-pig. "Also - I expect some kind of corporate governance to go into effect. A murdered intern is probably grounds for a sexual harassment seminar, at least."
All three vampires groaned aloud.
...
Everything happened just as she predicted: Legal haggled with her over which authorized third party could take impressions of vampire teeth; her follow-up meetings for Fulbright started slipping; calendar invites for management training began to fill her inbox, completely blocking out the following week.
Far more alarming, her husband spent less time with her in the morning and the evening when their work schedules overlapped. He didn't even meet her for their usual walk under the stars at the full moon. Clan Air were freezing her out, either to cast suspicion on her further, or because they really believed her guilt.
With the discipline born of centuries in work experience, Noth rode it out. She had the verified data she needed from marketing to prove that her work met all the key performance indicators agreed upon by House Air and Ipomoea. She had the operations reports to prove she came in under budget, despite the delays. She had her own lawyers. All she needed to do was wait for the dead intern investigation to clear to move forward with the marriage her father wanted. And then she'd make her bonus for the century and relax a bit while her husband still worked. Silly elves still operated on fiscal quarters.
It helped that she had a distraction. She invited Eiri over nearly every night - and he had yet to turn her down. She savored his company, drawing out their encounters until she exhausted him - panting, sweating, sprawled out beside her wherever they fucked. He gave as good as he got, learning new and more meticulous ways to please her; leaving her stretched, sore, and satisfied when she climbed into her coffin at dawn.
Tonight when she ducked out of work early to meet him at her apartment, he greeted her by commanding her to strip right as she got in the door. He bound her hands behind her with the satin ribbon from her expensive dress and led her upstairs, positioning her against one of the four posts of her bed.
He took the belt she'd discarded at the door and wound her belt around both her neck and the post of the bed. Noth writhed under his hands, shaking with anticipation for what he'd invent this time, fighting to hold still. Eiri's movements were careful, deliberate. So maddeningly slow. It was one of the things she loved best about him, and she took a special joy in knowing she'd chosen well.
