I apologize for the tardiness of this update.

Between NaNoWriMo last month, work being hectic, and the depressing state of FF's story stats –haha, what story stats—I just have not had it in me to post on here lately. That doesn't mean I haven't had it in me to write though, so I present to you . . . the next chapter. :)

Driving through the Los Angeles night in his black Corvette with his vampire love by his side made it easy for Lucifer to forget his worries. They looked so damn good together, and he wondered what people thought when they would sit at a stop light and pedestrians would ogle them as they walked by. They were probably jealous of just how amazing the two men looked. Or perhaps wondering what it would be like to have two such lovers and loads of time to get to know them.

Lucifer's Corvette, sexy as it was, was too small to fit more than two people in it. Which meant that Ella couldn't drive with them. Lucifer was still impressed in how she'd managed to bum a ride from Florence, clearly eager to sit in a car with a vampire and ask as many questions as she could possibly come up with. It seemed she wasn't picky about which vampire either, and she'd turned her upbeat personality on the distraught female vampire until she'd agreed to let the forensic scientist tag along with her.

Florence Davis, despite dressing like a dame out of a private eye movie, did not have a car that screamed the 1920s. She drove a rather disappointing four door sedan. It wasn't even clean, let alone waxed to perfection. It was a dull grey under the streetlights of L.A., and Lucifer was still disappointed in it as they slowed down to enter the parking lot of a higher end apartment building.

Well, perhaps the car didn't match Lucifer's perfect case, but the apartment building the woman lived in certainly did. Certainly upscale by Los Angeles standards, it was an older building judging by the architecture. As Lucifer parked the Corvette and popped out of the car, he stared up at the eight stories of lavishly designed opulence and wondered if the insides had been updated for a modern world.

It must, he reasoned. How else would a vampire be able to live there?

Florence closed the door of her car and came to stand next to Lucifer in the dark. The building was lit with pot lots, to showcase the fine architecture up above, and Lucifer wondered . . .

"Have you lived here your entire life?" he questioned.

Florence gave him a pained smile. It was clear her mind was elsewhere, focused on Mark, but she was willing to entertain the devil anyway. "I absolutely have," she told him. "I moved in just as the building opened, over a hundred years ago." She turned to study the building with him. "Of course, I was alive then. Things have changed over the last century."

"I can imagine," Lucifer said, rocking forward when no one seemed to know what to do.

Florence was the first to follow and suddenly took the lead, her vampiric speed showing her unease as she headed toward the back door of the building. She waved her keys in front of the panel next to the door and the door buzzed. She threw the door open in her haste to get inside and Eric sped ahead to catch it before it slammed shut again. Ella rushed to catch up to everyone else as Lucifer stepped inside the back hall of the apartment building.

"Can't you folks respect a girl with short legs?" Ella griped good-naturedly as she hustled down the hall behind everyone else.

"They can't help it," Lucifer said. "When you've got supernatural speed, you tend to use it."

"Yeah? And what's your excuse?" Ella asked, poking him in the ribs with an elbow.

"Long legs," Lucifer replied brightly. "Come along, shall we? Don't want to be left behind."

Lucifer slowed down, shortening his strides to let the bubbly forensic scientist catch up with him, despite his words. The two vampires prowled ahead, turning a corner and disappearing toward what was presumably the front lobby and the elevators.

"Boy, this place sure is swanky, isn't it?" Ella said, and Lucifer couldn't help but look at the wide hallway with a renewed interest.

She wasn't wrong. Unlike most apartment buildings that peppered Los Angeles, this place wasn't designed to cram as many people into its square footage as it could. The hall was wide, and even though the decades had marched on and brought updated carpets, blasé neutral paint tones, and modern, metal-enforced doors, the personality of the building was still very apparent. Crown-molding gave the hallway character, speaking in whispers of the promise of nicer things behind the closed doors that were spaced far apart.

Lucifer counted his steps between doors and was impressed, wondering just how big the apartments were. It was quite clear the building had been built in a time where space was not hard to come by, and while rent had probably been affordable a hundred years ago, he doubted it was now. Florence was a well to-do vampire, indeed.

He and Ella finally turned the corner at the end of the hall, seeing light from a lobby a short distance down. Florence and Eric were there, both of them impatient as they waited for Lucifer to catch up.

"It's like this building never ends," Ella said, impressed at the sheer size of the place. What it lacked for in height, it made up for in width. The city had clearly grown up around it, and Lucifer couldn't help but stare at everything as they made it to the lobby. The lobby itself was two stories high, with gorgeous vaulted ceilings and Lucifer felt a pang of regret that they'd come in from the rear. The front entrance of this place must look like a grand hotel.

Well-kept ferns and plants graced the lobby and there were two sofas facing out toward the street that offered residents and guests a place to sit while waiting for a cab. Ornate but clearly updated mailboxes lined one wall, with a privacy screen between them and the front door. A fancy lobby for the swankiest of Los Angeles's renters. Or condos, perhaps?

Lucifer wasn't quite certain—but if Florence had been here for a century, you'd think she'd own her loft by this point.

With everyone gathered at the elevators, the vampire finally stabbed a finger against the call button, worry etching lines into her forehead. She stabbed it a couple more times for good measure, clearly impatient. If it weren't for Lucifer and Ella being there, Lucifer had no doubt that the two vampires would have run up the stairs and already been in the apartment. Polite, even when under pressure. Fancy that.

The elevator finally arrived and everyone piled in. Florence nearly plastered herself to the far corner after pressing the button for the seventh floor, and Lucifer gave her a curious look. "You all smell too good," she got out. "I haven't eaten in a few days."

Lucifer's eyebrows shot up in surprise and then understanding flooded through him. "Of course," he said quietly, grabbing Ella by the elbow and pulling her into the opposite corner. "I should have offered you a Tru Blood at the office. My apologies."

Florence sneered, a look familiar to Lucifer by this point in his relationship with a vampire. "I wouldn't have accepted even if you had offered," she told him. "That stuff is revolting."

"Do you all hate it?" Ella asked curiously, bold for being stuck in an elevator with a hungry predator.

"It is sustenance, not food," Eric said, just as the elevator creaked to a stop and the doors opened.

"Like drinking Slim Fast when there's a feast in front of you," Lucifer supplied.

"It will keep us alive, but what is the point of living if there is no enjoyment?" Florence asked as she stepped out of the elevator first.

Ella was bobbing her head as she followed. "I get that. And I assume you haven't eaten because your boyfriend is gone?"

"That would be it, yes," Florence said as she led the trio of detectives down the long hall. Lucifer was fairly certain the space between the doors on this floor was even bigger than on the main floor, and he couldn't wait to get inside her apartment to see what it looked like. Sure, he wanted to investigate the disappearance of the supposed halfling, but now that he was here, he wanted to see what a vampire's apartment looked like. Especially since Florence had been living in it for over a century—what changes had she made, what changes had she not made. Lucifer's curiosity was getting the best of him.

When they finally stopped in front of a door, Lucifer stood at the back of the group, hands in his pockets but rocking on his heels in anticipation. Florence unlocked the door and it swung inward . . . onto a basic front hallway.

The first look was disappointing, certainly, but as Florence led everyone in and frowned at them until they removed their footwear, Lucifer knew he was in for a historical treat. Sure enough, as she led them away from the blasé white front hallway, the colours on the walls turned richer and the furniture antique. Problem being, it was clear there had been a bit of a fight here.

Lucifer stopped in the centre of the spacious living room, looking at the broken coffee table—which had been solid oak. It had taken no small feat to snap that thing in half and Lucifer wondered at the strength of both Florence's halfling and whoever had taken him. Beyond the coffee table, which perhaps had simply been a casualty of a body flying across the room, the place was in impeccable order.

Furniture from multiple eras made the room look comfortably lived in, the massive flat-screen TV the only indication the couple living here were indeed living in the 21st century. The big window looked out on the street below and the high-rise across the street. At one point it must have been a beautiful view, but now it was nothing but just another window on another Los Angeles street.

It took Lucifer a few minutes of staring at the vampire's taste in décor before he realized both Eric and Ella were looking around the room in a different way. Right, they were supposed to be looking at a crime scene, not critiquing the place like an interior designer. Although, as he knelt next to Ella in front of the broken coffee table, he couldn't help but wonder where Florence had gotten the rug he was now stepping on.

"Whoever did this was incredibly strong," Ella said, fingers hovering over a splinter of wood but not touching it, no doubt because she wasn't wearing proper crime scene gloves. "If I had to guess, someone was thrown—and hard."

Florence sank onto her couch, a stiff-backed thing from what Lucifer suspected was the 30s. "And yet I never felt a thing when it happened. I would have felt his fear, his pain—but there was nothing. I had no idea something was wrong until I realized he was missing."

"When did it happen?" Eric asked, prowling from one end of the room to the next, deciding that there wasn't anything truly worth looking at in this room except what was glaringly obvious in the middle of the carpet. Ella was still fixated on the table though, and Lucifer couldn't help but look with her. "During the day?"

Florence shook her head. "If it had been during the day, I'd have been home. I would have at least heard what was going on." She shook her head a second time. "I wouldn't have been able to do anything, since only the one room is light-tight, but I would have known what was happening."

Lucifer stood from his crouch in the middle of the room, his eyes going back to the richly textured room around him. The trim was a bright white, but the walls were painted a dark red, popping the colour of the oak wood that almost every piece of furniture seemed to be made of, no matter what style it had come in. There was a streak of something marring the wall next to an archway that led to the kitchen.

He headed that way, assuming it was blood on the wall, an indication of where Mark had been before he'd been thrown into the coffee table. Stepping through the threshold to the kitchen revealed a newly renovated room with state of the art appliances and another archway that led to a small dining room—and back to the hall. The kitchen seemed untouched, no broken dishes, no evidence of a fight. Just a few drops on the floor to indicate that someone had clearly been through here.

Lucifer couldn't stop but look around at the room though. While Florence was a vampire, her lover decidedly was not, and she had decked the kitchen out so that Mark would never want for anything. Pots and pans hung from an overhead rack, the gas range was clean but clearly well-used, and there was a handful of dishes in the sink indicating that while Mark was missing, he hadn't been gone for long.

Lucifer walked through to the dark dining room, not bothering to turn the lights on as he took in the antique dining set—a gorgeous table with matching chairs, including captains chairs, and a matching hutch and sideboard. Did Florence enjoy antiquing or did she simply never update her furniture after she bought the first set? Lucifer wasn't sure, and the idea that she simply accumulated her furniture as the decades passed delighted him. He went back out into the hall, having left the rest of the group behind in the living room. He could hear them, Ella asking questions and Eric being grouchy.

He knew he should be intent on the case at hand—they had a missing halfling to search for, after all—but he couldn't help but satisfy his curiosity. This is what a regular vampire's life was like. This was where a vampire lived, spent her days and nights here both. She coexisted with someone who could see the sun and Lucifer needed to know what it all looked like, not just the tiny bits that he'd seen so far. He wanted to know so he could offer the same to Eric, to his Viking.

He went the opposite way down the hall, away from the living room, intent on finding the bedroom. He wanted to see where another vampire lay their head during the day. He passed the dark washroom and found exactly what he was looking for at the end of the hall. This room he turned the light on, wanting to see everything. He was disappointed though.

A respectable bedroom, it hardly promised him the delights of the night, like Eric's dungeon in Shreveport had. An antique sleigh bed in deep mahogany was the centrepiece of the room, the mismatched furniture from different periods still managing to match its rich, deep brown gloss. A well-loved quilt was folded at the end of the bed and the pillows were in their shams—no one had slept here recently.

Which meant the human might sleep in the bed but the vampire most definitely did not. Lucifer paced to the window and looked out on the street below. Not much of a view, similar to the living room, but at one point perhaps there had. He examined the window edges, not seeing any spaces where shutters could slide in or out, telling him this most definitely was not Florence's bedroom.

So where did she sleep?

Lucifer turned from the window and looked about the bedroom. He was searching for something out of the ordinary—a trapdoor perhaps. Another part of his mind was also cataloguing the fact that there was no evidence of a scuffle in this room, but the case was riding a close second behind his need to see where Florence slept. But try as he might, nothing seemed different about this room. It was just like any other bedroom in a high-end apartment in Los Angeles.

Ever the curious one, he opened the door that led to what he believed was a walk-in closet—only to find the pitch black that greeted him promised a far bigger room than he'd expected. Excitement coursed through him and he knew he'd found Florence's hidey hole, as Eric seemed to like calling them. He felt along the wall next to the door until he found the light switch and dim amber light flooded the room that hid between the outer wall of the apartment and the washroom. There was a matching sleigh style bed, pushed up against one wall to make room for an old coffin that sat against the opposite wall. So she could sleep in bed with her honey, or she could slip into the coffin for a decidedly more final type rest if she preferred.

There was a nightstand between the two with a stack of books and a tablet plugged in to its charger. And zero windows, of course. Rather than the posh artwork that decked the walls of the rest of the apartment, this room was filled with framed photos; unable to contain himself, Lucifer moved further into the hidey hole so he could get a good look at them.

They were all pictures of Florence. The ones closest to the bed were recent and Lucifer studied the young man that she was with in the majority of them. It had to be Mark, the human—most probably halfling—lover. He was young and beautiful, like all of the vampires Lucifer had met so far—save for the Queen of California—and Lucifer wondered if Florence would eventually turn him to keep her companion young and virile for eternity.

That, at least, was not a problem he and his Viking had. The two of them could live forever, side by side . . . solving mysteries together.

Right.

There was a mystery to solve, wasn't there?

And here he was, being a busybody, prying into Florence's vampiric life instead. But it had been what had captivated his thoughts—the living space of a normal vampire, one that didn't have a thousand years of experiences and a previous life ploughing the ocean waves in search of a fight. This apartment was precisely how the regular vampire lived—and it was utterly boring. Curiosity satisfied.

He turned back to the door, pausing to appreciate the second, interior door that had been standing wide open when he'd come in snooping to what was essentially her final resting place. It closed smoothly against the original closet door, giving Florence an added layer of security from the sun, and had multiple locks installed on it. For utmost safety.

But for all that it protected the vampire from the sun and intruders, it hadn't kept her lover safe. Lucifer frowned at the thought, turning off the lights as he went back out into the bedroom. With nothing more to interest him, having seen Florence's coffin and the tiny confines that kept her safe during the day, his thoughts turned back to the man he'd seen in those photos. Mark. A man she claimed was human, but had seemingly supernatural powers of persuasion.

If Eric were correct, a half-fairy. Like that Sookie Stackhouse, waitress from Bon Temps.

Lucifer left the bedroom, intent on heading back to the living room where he could hear Eric explaining to Ella how each vampire possessed certain vampiric talents, but that some had more than others. Like flying, Lucifer mused to himself. He knew that Eric, along with his progeny Pam, both could fly—but that many other vampires could not.

Smiling to himself because he was happy he knew those secrets, he stopped in front of the washroom. No one else had wandered the rest of the house, which seemed silly to him. The man had been thrown into a coffee table, fine. But if he'd valued his life, Mark had probably put up a fight—and not just in one room.

And hadn't Florence said something about blood in the washroom?

Ignoring the pull in his heart to head back to the living room and lay eyes on his vampire, he clicked the light on in the washroom—and realized they were all wasting their time staring at a stupid coffee table. There was, indeed, blood in the washroom.

Plenty of it.

As per my comment about the stats, I am not consistently posting to FF any longer. I've begun migrating my stuff to another site *ahem* and if you are there as well, just search for me under the same username (no spaces). Some of my older fics are also getting a rework as I post them there.