“Was it any of the vamps that ambushed us?” I asked.
“No, although it’s likely they were involved, perhaps sent by our guy to make the evidence disappear. I’m not sure what else would explain their presence. The Bay is an out-of-the-way place to begin with. But the morgue?”
I nodded. His theory was sound.
“But the vampire who did this—at least, the man whose blood was injected into the witches—is from an old line. One of the original European families to settle in America in the seventeen hundreds. The Grinaldis.”
“Wait… you could tell all that just from the blood?”
“Only because I’ve crossed paths with them before.” Darius scowled, and anger flickered in his eyes. “I’m not sure what a Grinaldi-sired vampire would be doing on the west coast, though. To my knowledge the elder hasn’t left his home in decades, and he keeps an extremely tight reign on his family.”
“But how? There could be thousands of vamps carrying his blood.”
Darius shook his head. “Only twenty.”
Twenty. The number of the Judgment card in tarot. My mind served up the image from Sophie’s deck—an angel hovering inside a dark cloud, half his face a silver moon, the other half a deep blue. He heralded Judgment Day with a great horn, calling the dead to rise and repent. Judgment often showed up in a reading when it was time for a major transformation—a great burning of the old so that the new can rise up from the ashes.
I shivered, then wrapped my hands around my mug, taking comfort in the warmth that seeped into my palms. “Always twenty?”
“Only when one dies do they create another. It doesn’t happen often—they’re well protected. And they’ve got a strict code about siring. Anyone who breaks it is eliminated.”
“Are they still here in the U.S.?”
Darius sipped his espresso, then nodded. “Just outside New York City—an estate in Tarrytown.”
My stomach flipped. Tarrytown was three thousand miles from the Bay, but less than a hundred miles from where I’d grown up. From where I’d spent my entire childhood—from the time I was adopted as a baby, right up until hunters attacked our home when I was sixteen.
Yes, New York was a big state, populated by millions of people in hundreds of towns and cities.
But any witch worth her spell book knew there was no such thing as coincidence.
“I’ll arrange for one of my east coast associates to track down the elder and request a meeting,” Darius said. “But it won’t easy. Like I said, he’s quite reclusive, and he’s not keen on strangers.”
I sipped my latte, letting this new info settle in. As far as I’d known as a kid, there’d been only one vampire family in my hometown, and outside of an English class I shared with the oldest daughter, we’d hardly ever crossed paths. Chances were the Grinaldi family had no connection to them, or to my past.
But still. It felt too close for comfort.
“What are you thinking?” Darius asked.
I set down my mug, reaching for another piece of cookie. “Let’s assume for now this plays logically. Setting aside the possibility of coercion, it stands to reason that a Grinaldi vampire broke the rules and headed to Washington to murder three witches, or he broke the rules and sired the vamp who did the crimes.”
“That’s the easiest explanation.”
“So… why? What was his motive for trying to turn the witches? If he’d just wanted them dead, there are easier ways.”
“Indeed.”
“And what about Delilah? Her disappearancehasto be connected to the murders, but why was she taken rather than turned? Who’s next? And is the next witch going to be kidnapped, or killed?” I closed my eyes, the thoughts swirling in my brain and turning it to mush.
“It’s a start, Gray. A good one, but just a start.” Darius reached for my hand, his touch surprisingly gentle. Calming, just as he’d been in the middle of tonight’s chaos. “We’ve still got a lot of work do to.”
I opened my eyes, meeting his gaze across the table. “We?”
“All for one, one for all, the more the merrier, etcetera.” Darius’s lips stretched into a grin. “Surely you didn’t think I’d let El Lobo and the demons have all the fun?”
“El Lobo?” I wrinkled my nose.
“It’s Spanish for The Wolf.”
