I take in his neck using my enhanced senses. I don’t detect any sign of bruising, but I still can’t resist asking the question. “You know who you work for, right?”
My voice is hard. These monsters kidnap children.
“Yes, sir,” he replies, stiff as an English butler but with the voice of a blue-collar guy from the Central Valley. A flicker of shame crosses over his expression, and his head lowers. “I have family. And… my boss is very difficult to refuse.”
With that, the door closes. It suddenly dawns on me that there are probably more victims here than I originally thought,andthat these vampires must have been doing a lot of very bad things in my town for a very long time.
I never imagined I’d ever ask this, but where the hell have the Monster Hunters been? I get being afraid, but were they just sitting on their hands while all this was going on? If nothing else, they should have gone full Van Helsing the moment Rafa let them know kids were in danger!
But they refused—and Hunters aren’t exactly known for being scaredy-cats. So, why? Do they know that Rafa’s father has been turned? Would that have stopped them? Are they holding out hope for his redemption, too?
I’m about to pose those questions to Collin when the elevator doors open and I’m greeted by a hulking womanwith a shoulder-length bob, wearing a conservative gray pantsuit. My senses are enhanced enough to tell that her heartbeat is much too slow for a human, and my Avatar-supplied heads-up display shows me there are only a fraction of the vulnerable points on her as the human guard. She’s clearly a vamp.
And a bloodsucker of few words as well, as she merely turns and gestures for me to follow. The fluorescent overheads are still off, but the hallway is lined with more lit LED tea candles, placed at even intervals along the gray rubber baseboards. They cast small pools of dim and flickery light. It certainly is dramatic. The vampires wouldn’t need them, so hopefully this means that they still think I’m pure human. Of course, Rafa’s father did see me suspended in the middle of a fire monster, so I can’t exactly expect their guard to be down.
Once again, I’m full of questions it would be great to talk to Collin about. And again, it’s not the time or place. I might not have Sarah Stryker’s experience, but I know that in a negotiation, projecting confidence is everything, and that means acting like you alreadyhaveall the answers. My questions will have to wait.
I expect Chatty Cathy to take me to the dungeon, but instead she leads me to the rough stairs that spill down into the ritual room. She stands at the open doorway and points below.
“Let me guess,” I say. “This is as far as you go?”
She remains pointing, still and silent as the grave. But her eyes glower with barely constrained hate—not at me, but at whatever lies beneath.
“There’s a fair crowd down there,” Collin says, grim. “Multiple humans. Multiple vampires. More undead than I thought were left.”
“Too many?” I ask as quietly as I can under my breath.
Collin’s ocular tension seems to have cranked up a full notch, but he shakes his head. “No. Not for you. Not right now. And I smell Rafa and the kids. Be ready to act quickly, but I’m still game if you are.”
An ice-watery feeling trickles its way into my bowels. But we chose to come to this dance—no point in being a wallflower.
I give cold-eyed Cathy a forced smile and start down the stairs. She stays behind.
The closer I get, the better Collin can use my senses for intel, so a heads-up count of humans and vampires quickly increments in the upper right of my vision. It lands at fourteen for each, which is bad enough, but it still doesn’t prepare me for what we find.
The bright LED lanterns on the walls are lit, casting long shadows in multiple directions. On the black plywood stage in the back of the room, Rafa is kneeling, hands tied behind his back, his head hanging down. Standing next to him is his father in a new finely tailored navy suit. The undead man’s skin is smooth and healed—no sign that I torched him hours ago.
Smug captor and helpless captive on display—that much I expected. But all the kids are here too, positioned at equal points along the outside edges of the circular cavern. And behind them are thirteen new players, big and muscled and dressed in the same tactical Kevlar that Rafa wears.
They’re clearly Monster Hunters. Or they were.
It looks like I’ve just found out why the West Coast Peralta Clan wouldn’t help Rafa. Every last Hunter appears to have been turned—and each one has a Beretta semi-automatic pistol pressed against the temple of one of the kids.
9
This ishow Rafa’s father knows things will go his way. He knows I want to rescue those kids, which means I wouldn’t dare unleash a firestorm in an enclosed room where they could get hurt. (Not that I could actually do that right now!) And even using my incubus super-speed, there’s no way I could save all of them if he gave the order. I’m sure I’m fast, but I’m not faster than a speeding bullet. Not at point blank, I’m not.
It might not be checkmate, but it’s at least a solid check. I can’t act.
My stomach begins to sink along with any confidence I had that coming here was somehow a good idea. Still, I feel a locomotive’s worth of power humming inside my muscles. That’s got to count for something.
“What do we do?” I mutter to Collin, under my breath.
“I don’t know yet,” he replies. There’s tension in his voice. “Buy me some time.”
He wants me to stall.
Okay.
