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“She’s not buried,” he said. “Yet.”
Great. Vampire riddles. My favorite.
“Davos, you don’t need to do this.” I was trying to appeal to his common sense now, if he had any. “Belphegor is already risen. Sacrificing Sig isn’t necessary.”
A cold smile spread over Davos’s lips.
“If Belphegor is already here, then he can be the first to welcome the rest of Hell with open arms. And you, little one, you can be the first to burn.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I dropped my car back at the apartment building, since it was walking distance from the vampire club, and the three of us made our way over to the scene of the previous night’s kerfuffle. The door was still blocked off by yellow police tape, but with no one around to tell me not to go in, I ducked under the tape and through the unlocked front door.
We had two FBI badges between the three of us, and Emilio had his fancy bag of weapons, so I wasn’t worried about trespassing charges.
I was still shaking from what Davos had told us at the police station. He was a fucking lunatic who just wanted to watch the world burn.
You couldn’t use logic in a fight against madness.
But he’d said I had walked over Ingrid, and the only place he’d known I had walked was the club. So even though I was low on good ideas right now, I was taking the maniac literally.
Inside, the air felt heavy and thick, like the place had been neglected for years, rather than days. It made me wonder how much of what I’d seen the night before had been a result of vampire thrall. The effect didn’t work on me one-on-one, but there was a certain magic created by the thrall that impacted humans naturally. It kept them away from places they shouldn’t be, or in the case of the bar, might make something feel more alluring than it really was.
A bare bulb was lit in the middle of the room, and dust motes floated down from the ceiling like someone had recently given the old velvet curtains on the walls a good shake. The farther into the room we got, the more that sense of age and decay crept out from every corner. Yet for the most part the building looked clean and well kept.
It was just that yesterday there had been an invitation, and today the place was telling us to get out.
Sort of amazing what a little supernatural power of suggestion could do.
We wandered around for a few minutes, because I honestly wasn’t sure what we were looking for. Now that I knew Davos was planning to use Sig for the ceremony, it was too much to hope we would find him here, but this was obviously a place designed for Davos and his crew, the secret panel behind the bathroom stalls told me as much.
Which meant there had to be something here to connect him to the New York cult and perhaps give me some indication where they might have Sig or Ingrid. They had to be keeping them somewhere before the ceremony, right?
“See if you can find stairs somewhere. This place must have an upper or lower level, and I think we’ll find something there.”
“Something like this?” Harry asked, pulling back one of the thick curtains to reveal a heavy metal door.
“Seriously, dude, I could kiss you. You’re coming on every mission, forever. Emilio, let’s get him a badge.”
“No,” Emilio replied.
“You’re no fun,” Harry replied.
The door was locked, but Emilio was about two hundred times better at lock-picking than I was, and using two slim metal picks he pulled from his watch, he was quickly able to release the latch on the door, which opened towards us to reveal a dark, stone staircase that headed down.
Ugh.
Why did our searches always have to involve creepy stone staircases? Just once couldn’t my job take me to a nice, brightly lit room that smelled like a Bath & Body Works?
It’s like they weren’t creating these spaces to be comfortable and inviting, or something.
Almost like they were evil.
I engaged the flashlight on my phone and took the first step down the stairs, with the others right at my heels. At least if s
omething jumped out at me, I wouldn’t be the only one screaming.
Okay, so one of the dudes behind me was a demon and the other was a mercenary. There was a good chance I would probably still be the only one screaming.
