Page 70 of Hunted

“I’ll be careful. Hey, did you get a chance to look at that report I forwarded you that Topher wrote about weird vampire signatures around campus?”

“I saw.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Not much. Any chance they could be residual from the old prison complex Zara kept for years in the tunnels underneath the university?”

“Short answer, maybe? But usually vampire signatures fade within hours. That was a year ago. There shouldn’t be anyone down there now. Topher says these feel new.”

“So not to knock Topher’s spidey sense for vamps, but is he sure he can fingerprint a vamp mind, say part of Vlad or Cris’s crew, after encountering it only once?”

“According to Topher, he believes he can, but other than him and his brother Kieran, there are only two other shifters out there that we’ve identified with their particular magic for sensing vampires.”

“Which you only develop after years of blood slavery and torture,” Brody finished dryly.

“Right. Topher admitted that he can’t swear for sure it’s hostile fang-heads casing the scene.”

“But you’d be crazy to dismiss it given that the lab is a high-value target.”

My screen flashed with another incoming call. “Hey, I need to take this. It’s Vlad.”

“Talk soon. And, River? Be careful.”

“There’s been a bombing,” Vlad shouted over the sound of pouring rain. “One of the covens.”

“Casualties?”

“We don’t know yet. My mother will be putting the Vampire Nation on high alert and people from the lab’s wide perimeter detail may get pulled.”

“Do we know if Jori had time to reset their wards before the explosion?”

“She was there last week. She used the blood sample from the Davies cousin that Cris’s guy obtained.”

“Is it possible she missed a step somehow, left that particular coven vulnerable?”

Vlad scoffed. “Have you met Jori? Her idea of a fun Friday night is to reorganize her bookshelves by genre, author, spine height and color. Jori didn’t miss a step. We’re missing something here. And if the covens are vulnerable—”

But I’d already ended the call, speeding back towards downtown Austin.

If the covens were vulnerable, Ellie’s lab was, too.