I’d had plans for the next day to check out a few places I suspected to be the daytime resting places of some of my vampire prey. I had to put that on hold though, when my cursed phone tore me from my sweet, dreamless slumber a mere two hours after I’d finally fallen asleep.

I groaned when the first screeching ring ripped through the silence of the room. Obito stirred and lifted his head from my chest to look around in confusion.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, scrabbling for the wretched piece of technology vibrating and screaming on my bedside, next to the still open bottle of lube.

When I finally got a hold of the damned thing, I turned it over to glance at the front screen and see who the hell was calling me at 4:45 in the fucking morning. I knew who it was though, even before I saw Sarutobi’s name written in glowing letters. Who else would have any reason to call at such an ungodly hour?

“Sarutobi, there’d better be bodies on the ground or there very soon will be,” I growled unhappily into the phone, bypassing any sort of greeting—pleasant or otherwise. I’d had about five hours too little of sleep for such niceties.

“Just one, actually,” the older man replied, “A nurse.”

I sighed loudly into the phone, wanting the Sergeant to know just how displeased I was with him. Sarutobi Hiruzen was the one who always called me in for any investigations Konoha’s All Nether-worldly Bastards Unit—the ANBU—needed help with. I’m pretty sure that’s not what ANBU officially stands for, but that’s what all the members of the Unit fondly joke it means, and I don’t care enough to find out its real representation.

I was an unofficial member of the Unit assigned to protecting Konoha from all the less than human threats out there. I’d worked with them for six years as a supernatural consultant. And as much as I liked helping catch criminals and solving mysteries—not to mention having connections with the police—I still hated getting phone calls to come look at gruesome crime scenes at all hours of the night.

“Just one? Do you really need me to come down there?” I asked, hoping against hope that Sarutobi would see the folly of his ways and leave me to rest in peace. That wouldn’t happen, of course, because by the time Sarutobi called, the shit had pretty much clogged the toilet, and he needed me to break out the plunger.

“If she was the first one to turn up dead like this…no, but she’s the eighth one, and we’ve got no leads.”

I sighed again, more resigned than before, and rolled over to grab one the pads of post-it notes I kept by all the phones in my house for just such a call. “Where?” I asked, and wrote down the directions he listed off on the neon green piece of paper.

“How long?” Sarutobi asked.

“Mmm…half-hour drive, at least.”

“Hurry up. Forensics and everyone is done with the body and we all want to go home.”

“Yeah, yeah…” I muttered into the phone, but he’d already hung up. Sarutobi wasn’t much for goodbyes, especially when he was impatient.

I pushed the covers off me and sat up on the edge of the bed, trying to force my mind and body to wake up. I needed a shower; that would help.

Obito crawled to me from the other side of the bed to hug me from behind, his forehead resting on my shoulder. “Where you going?” he asked.

“Gotta go look at a crime scene.”

“But it’s so early. Can’t it wait?”

“Haven’t you heard?” I asked, just a bit slap happy, “Crime never sleeps.”

~_~_~_~

I pulled into the hospital parking lot forty minutes later and parked in a space as close to the colorful blinking lights and bright yellow caution tape as possible, which wasn’t very close at all considering all the Press and police cars. The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon when I slipped out of my car.

Rather than go through the whole ordeal of trying to explain to one of the uniform cops that I was allowed on the scene, despite the fact that I had no written permission from anyone, OR any sort of badge to flash, and then have to wait another twenty minutes for Sarutobi to get his wrinkly ass over to us to let me in…I paid one of the spectators—a woman who claimed to be my biggest fan—to distract the guard barring my way so I could just sneak in and find Sarutobi myself.

In order to distract the cop, my fan simply walked up to him, and before the man could tell her to step back, she grabbed his head and shoved her tongue down his throat. Needless to say, with all the Press and other people around, the scandalous act caught not only the Uniform’s attention, but everyone else’s too. I had to hand it to the woman; she’d done an ever better job that I’d anticipated.

With everyone’s attention on the developing spectacle, I easily slipped under the caution tape and through most of the other Uniforms unnoticed. By the time anyone realized I was there, I’d already caught sight of Sarutobi with his back to me.

“Excuse me, sir; you don’t have permission to be back here. I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” I was told by a young uniform cop with a Beatles haircut and eyebrows so bushy it was amazing he didn’t have a uni-brow. He was very polite, but his strong hold on my left arm left no room for argument.

Not that that was about to stop me.

“Actually, yes, I do,” I said, looking behind him at Sarutobi, who was talking to some other plain clothes Detective. “Sarutobi!” I called to him, not fighting the Uniform holding me in place, but still acting like he didn’t even exist.

Sarutobi turned around at the sound of my voice. He glanced at me and then at the officer holding me captive. “Lee, let him go,” he ordered, and the boy promptly obeyed without a fuss.

“I’m sorry, sir! I was unaware of your clearance!” he said to me before saluting me stiffly and marching off.

I drifted over to Sarutobi. “He ex-military?” I asked. The salute the boy had given me was much too formal for the police.

“Yeah, but they kicked him out after he hurt his leg. It’s fine now, but apparently the risk of re-injury makes him unfit to join again.”

I grunted my understanding and shrugged it off.

“To be honest, I’m kinda glad he can’t go back to the army. He does the work of six men all by himself. It’s impressive, but frightening at the same time. I don’t know where he finds the energy…”

“He’s young.”

Sarutobi nodded in agreement and silently began leading me towards the body without another word.

Although the caution tape spanned out into the street of the parking lot, the actual crime scene was in a small courtyard created by all the hospital buildings. The courtyard was apparently used for storing dumpsters. I could smell them reeking long before I actually caught sight of them.

The body was covered up by a large black tarp. It was situated between two amazingly clean-looking, green dumpsters with the words, “RECYCLEABLES ONLY,” written across the fronts.

“How long has she been dead?” I asked absently as I scanned the surrounding vicinity to see if I could spot anything the cops hadn’t.

Sarutobi pulled out his trusty little notebook that he kept somewhere on his person at all times and flipped through its sheets. “Forensics believes the time of death to be somewhere between seven and nine o’ clock,” he read from one of the wrinkled pages.

I hummed in response, not really caring all that much. I finished my search of the premises and settled my gaze on the tarp, waiting for Sarutobi to finish barking orders at someone to come over and remove the thing.

Several moments later, two Officers came over to lift the tarp and take it somewhere to be washed and stored; they’d remove the body when I was done with it, so there was no need to re-cover it.

The body underneath was rather clean, especially compared to most of the others I’d seen helping the ANBU. There was very little blood other than the drying drops oozing from the two puncture wounds on the right side of the girl’s neck.

She was a pretty little thing. Pink hair, shapely hips, not much up top, but then I was betting her aquamarine eyes would have made up for that…if she was still alive and they weren’t turning milky white like she was blind.

I knelt by her side and checked the bite mark. It was neat, no bruising or torn flesh. She hadn’t struggled. She must have known the vampire and trusted him, or possibly her.

She was wearing navy blue scrubs and a light, unzipped, black jacket. I used a pencil, borrowed from Sarutobi, to lift the jacket and peek underneath. She had a name tag. “Haruno Sakura,” it said next to a bad driver’s license-type photo of the girl smiling for all she was worth, as if that’d make the picture better somehow. Smiling in driver’s license pictures usually made them worse, but hers wasn’t all too bad. I was right about her eyes, too.

“Haruno Sakura,” I said mostly to myself. The name sounded familiar.

“She was an RN in the cardiac unit.”

I looked up from the body. Jiraiya was standing next to Sarutobi with his hands in his pockets, looking more grim than usual. Normally, with such a pretty woman, he’d be making jokes about accidentally fucking her to death, or something equally stupid, to lighten the mood. But since he wasn’t, I was guessing he might have known the girl.

“You knew her?” I asked.

He nodded. “Tsunade worked with her. Called her, her apprentice. Come over for dinner sometimes…parties…” He gave me a weak smile that quickly disappeared. He ran his hand through his whitening hair, “I don’t know how I’m going to tell her…”

That's why the name was familiar. I must have heard Tsunade talking about her.

I turned back to the body. “Get her drunk first.” Tsunade would be much less violent when she was drunk. She could very well kill Jiraiya in her grief if he wasn’t careful. It was rare for Tsunade to get attached to anyone, especially someone she worked with, so Jiraiya was right to be afraid to tell his wife about Sakura’s death. She wouldn’t take it well. Even drunk.

“I wonder if she’d just get angry at me for getting her drunk before telling her. Maybe I should just tell her and then run away? Leave her alone for a while.”

I shrugged—my attention back on the corpse. I put my hands over her breasts, feeling for a bra. That was something Jiraiya would usually joke about, but he said nothing. She was wearing one, and it was firmly in place. I lifted the waistband of her scrubs and found her wearing underwear as well. The vampire hadn’t tried to rape her, further proving she’d known the parasite and trusted it.

“What is it, Hatake?” Sarutobi prompted.

“She knew him,” I said simply, still poking around the body, but pretty sure I’d seen all there was to see.

“And?”

“And…I don’t understand why he killed her. She didn’t struggle. Why didn’t he just feed and leave?”

“He did,” Sarutobi said.

I sent him a glare, “You know what I mean.”

“What’s even weirder is he didn’t have sex with her,” Jiraiya put in, seriously.

He was right. Most vampires usually like to play with their food. “Play” can mean any number of things from torturing their victim to making love to them. Usually for such a willing victim, they’d probably have sex with them, or at least make it pleasurable to them in some way. Or if they were planning on killing her from the start, she’d be at least cut up a little. But this girl was completely untouched.

There’d been other vampire victims that had died without being tortured, but those were only when they were jumped by several vampires and drained of all their blood. And even those people were usually raped.

But Sakura only had one bite on her, which obviously meant only one vampire. And a single vampire didn’t need so much blood to survive that they would kill a human in one sitting. I hadn’t even known a single vampire could drink that much blood at once.

And if you had a willing donor that would feed you whenever you wanted, what was the point in killing her? That only made your life harder. Because not only would you have to find a new donor, but you’d also have to deal with the whole being wanted for murder thing. And for a willing victim? It just seemed too much of a hassle. It would have made sense to kill her if she’d struggled and would have gone to the cops if he’d left her alive, but she wouldn’t have. It just didn’t make sense.

Then again, vampires are cruel and heartless, so even if it made no sense to me to kill her, maybe it would to them. Some vampires kill their food just for the hell of it, even if they’re willing. But that’s rare…

I stood up and moved away from the body. “You said there were seven others like this?” I said to no one in particular.

Jiraiya nodded. “All women. No signs of struggle.”

“And the only thing that seems to connect them is how they were killed,” Sarutobi added.

“Why’d you wait until the seventh one to call me?” I asked.

“He killed the first seven all at once, but it took us a couple days to find them all. We hadn’t even thought they were related to each other until this one.” Sarutobi frowned, “Give me something, Hatake.”

I just shook my head. There was nothing to tell him that he didn’t already know. “I’ll ask around and let you know if I find anything,” I said.

He nodded, disappointed.

~_~_~_~

I went to the station after that. Since I was going to be part of the case now, I wanted to know more about it, which meant I was going to have to read the piles and boxes of reports on the seven prior murders, as well as look at all the high-definition pictures of dead bodies.

I walked in the front door and the secretary behind the big desk taking up half the room looked up at me. She smiled, genuinely happy to see me, but then again, Mizuki was happy to see pretty much anyone. She was eerily happy, ALL THE TIME. It freaked me out sometimes. But she was nice and didn’t give me a hard time about having permission and other such nonsense to look at files and records.

“Kakashi-kun!” she said, clapping her hands together and sitting up straighter in her chair. Her face lit up; her smile showing off her perfect, white teeth; and her short, dark hair bringing out how incredibly green her eyes were. I’d only ever seen eyes that green on a cat. For a while I’d been sure she was some sort of feline lycanthrope, but the police—especially the ANBU—had to take all kinds of medical tests to work there, including a blood test to determine if you were human or not. As it was, I was guess she either wore color contacts, or else she was just a freak of nature who had cat eyes.

Since she was a freak of nature even despite the cat eyes, I guess they weren’t all that odd.

“What can I do for you today, Kakashi-kun?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair like I was about to tell her some sort of secret. She always got way too excited about everything. It was like she’d just taken a shot of pure caffeine. Surely even Mizuki worked harder than that Lee kid…

“I just need to see the files for the seven recent vampire murders,” I said calmly, smiling at the woman. Her cheerfulness was contagious sometimes.

“Sure thing, Kakashi-kun! Would you like to take them home, or look at them here?”

“Better take ‘em home. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot to go through…”

“Yes indeedy, it is! Seven murders! That’s a lot of paperwork! A LOT!” she said, happily pulling out and handing me the form I’d have to fill out to take the files home before bouncing away to find them.

Really…that woman liked this job way too much. But as annoying as Mizuki could be, you couldn’t help but like her. She was just too…I don’t even know. She was just likeable. Maybe it was some sort of pheromone that she let off? Yeah…that had to be it…

She came back with a box in her hands and set the thing on the desk before going back into the records room for more.

I groaned inwardly. Reading all those files was probably going to take days.

Three boxes later, Mizuki finally sat back down in her chair to look over the form I’d filled out. She circled some things, checked some boxes, and signed a few lines before smashing a big red stamp on the top that said, “APPROVED.” She slid the form into one of her many perfectly organized paper trays and turned back to me, her smile still firmly in place. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Kakashi-kun?”

“Ah, no, that’s all for today, Mizuki-chan. Thank you.”

Her smile widened, “Of course! No problem, Kakashi-kun! I’m always happy to help! It’s my job!”

“Actually, come to think of it, I do have a question for you,” I said, succumbing to her cheerfulness and needing to act on it.

“Ask away, Kakashi-kun! I’m here to help!”

“You smile an awful lot, Mizuki-chan. Does it ever make your face hurt?”I asked with a grin.

She burst out laughing, her laughter sounding like a wind chime tinkling in a breeze. “Of course not, Kakashi-kun! Did you know it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile? As much as you frown, Kakashi-kun, I should think your face hurts!”

That wasn’t actually true, but I laughed anyway. It actually takes more muscles to smile—twelve to be precise. Frowning only takes eleven. Unless it’s a fake smile, of course, then it only takes two.

I carried the boxes out to my car two at a time and thanked Mizuki again before leaving.

My stomach growled loudly when I finally got back into the car, so I stopped to get some fast food. I couldn’t believe it was already noon. I’d been at the crime scene longer than I’d thought.

Later, I searched through my glove compartment to find the piece of paper I’d written down all the address of the possible daytime resting places on. There were fifteen different places, and they were spread out all over the city. I figured I’d better check them out before the sun went down.

~_~_~_~