“Too much what?” Emilio knelt down next to me in front of the couch, his eyes full of concern.
I unzipped the sweatshirt. The once stark-white dress shirt underneath was soaked in blood.
“There’s our answer,” I said.
Shit. He’d fed on someone. Maybe even multiple someones. And it hadn’t been a clean job, either, which meant it wasn’t consensual.
That was bad news.
I shot Emilio a worried look. Before all hell broke loose with Gray last month, Darius and I hadn’t exactly been close—not for a long time. But I was pretty damn sure forced feedings weren’t his style. He had too much honor and dignity for that.
“Who was it?” I tried to ask Darius. “And why were you out in the sun?”
He tried to sit up, his eyes blazing as he grabbed my wrist. “Attacked by—” he began, but his words died, his eyelids drooping closed.
He’d finally passed out.
It was probably for the best. His body needed to shut down everything else so it could focus on healing. For bloodsuckers, sun poisoning wasn’t like knife wounds or broken bones. The effects of it could linger for days, and it required a lot more effort to undo the damage. The blood was a double-edged sword, too; he’d obviously fed recently, and fresh blood would help him heal faster. But too much of it would wreak havoc on his nervous system first.
“He OD’d,” I told Emilio, pure and simple.
“OD’d? But Darius doesn’t feed on—”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Alvarez. He’s covered in human blood and he’s completely fucked up.”
Emilio took one more look at Darius, then nodded.
Leaving the vampire to rest, Emilio and I joined Elena in the kitchen, where she was scraping what looked like chopped weeds from her cutting board into a mug. The teakettle whistled on the stove.
“How’s your friend?” she asked, turning off the flame and returning to her chopping.
“Too soon to tell,” Emilio said.
Elena nodded, but thankfully didn’t press. “And the other… guy?”
“Liam,” Emilio said.
“Friend of yours?”
“It’s… complicated.” This from the man in question, who’d slipped into the kitchen like a damn ghost. I almost preferred his Death form—it was creepy as fuck, but at least with the black robes and mysterious riddle-speak, I knew what I was getting. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to seeing him as a regular guy, no matter how artfully messed his surfer-blond hair was, or how much fucking flannel he wore.
“I am bound to a witch in their company,” he continued. “She’s Sh—”
“She’s the one missing,” I said to Elena, then shot Liam a warning glare. As far as Emilio and I were concerned, that was all Elena needed to know about Gray.
Liam wisely shut his trap.
Emilio leaned in close to Elena, lowering his voice. “You, ah, may want to send someone over to Seaside Motel to check things out. Darius obviously fed on someone, and he mentioned some kind of attack.”
Elena slammed her knife down on the cutting board and gave Emilio a look that could’ve turned Hawaii into a frozen wasteland, but she slid the phone from her back pocket and made the call anyway.
“Yeah, it’s Alvarez,” she said into the phone. “Send a car over to Seaside Motel. Make sure he’s one of us—I don’t want any humans in on this, just in case there’s—” She paused, then sighed. “Are you serious? Alright, cancel that car. Just keep me posted if anything else turns up.”
She disconnected and looked at Emilio. “Room fourteen?”
Emilio nodded.
“Apparently a housekeeper reported a domestic disturbance a couple of hours ago, but when one of ours arrived on the scene, she told him she’d been mistaken—it was just the television. My officer asked around, but no one else heard anything. When he entered the room, everything seemed in order. The television was blaring, but that was it. No one was around.”
