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Sig had been in this basement—maybe even at the same time I was upstairs the previous night—but he had been refusing to cooperate with Davos’s plan to raise the demons. Suddenly I knew exactly how this had all played out.
Davos must attacked Ingrid in order to get Sig to back down on his initial death warrant. It was the only logical reason for Sig to have told Shane to back down. Davos would have shown Sig evidence of what had been done to Ingrid, and told him to call off the warrant or she would die. Then, when it was time to release her, Davos double-crossed the Tribunal leader, and taking advantage of him being alone and emotionally unbalanced, managed to get him to turn himself over to the cult in order to save her..
I could picture the scene in my mind. Ingrid, bloody and dying, and Davos would have said something like, “Agree to my terms and I’ll let you save her.”
And Sig had.
He would have done almost anything to keep Ingrid alive.
I don’t know a lot about love, but after seven hundred years together, Ingrid was the closest thing to the love of his life that Sig would ever have. He wouldn’t let her die if there was a way he could save her. He would have agreed to Davos’s stupid terms in a heartbeat.
Which meant that somewhere out in the Manhattan night the mindless followers of a vampire cult now had a willing sacrificial lamb in a two-thousand-year-old master vampire.
Ingrid moaned and instinctively batted my hands away, pushing down the hem of her shirt. It took a moment or two longer before she opened her eyes, and then, in a flash, a wave of panic hit her. Suddenly she was sitting up and scrambling backwards, her arms raised in a gesture of self-preservation.
She was right back at the last thing she remembered.
And the last thing she remembered was almost dying.
“Ingrid.”
She’d wedged herself into a corner of the room next to a metal cot, her feet kicking out blindly to keep us at bay. I wasn’t sure how far gone she’d been when Sig had brought her back. If she’d been teetering into the afterlife, there was a very real possibility this version of Ingrid wasn’t going to be all there.
“Ingrid,” I repeated. “It’s Secret.”
As quickly as she’d turned on her fight-or-flight response, she went still, lowering her hands from in front of her face and staring at me like she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
“Secret?”
I waved a little pathetically.
A calmness came over her, and almost instantly she was Ingrid again. The Ingrid I knew. As if the panic were a jacket she had simply been able to shrug off.
She glanced around the room, her face wrinkling in unmasked disgust as she remembered where she was. Then her eyes widened as if she had just recalled a buried memory, and she asked, “Where’s Sig? Did they take him?”
“We’re trying to figure that out, but we need your help,” I said. “What do you remember?”
“For the last four days, that asshole Davos Kent has been bloodletting me like a goddamn medical experiment. He drains me to the point of near death, making Sig watch, then gives me a transfusion to bring me back.” She held up her arm where there were bruise marks from repeated needle pricks. “For the last few nights he’d also been dosing me with something that kept me really woozy. Tonight, they decided they were done playing games
and just started cutting into me. They told him he had one shot to save me. I guess it worked.”
“How did they even get you here?”
“I was sort of out of it when they took me from the apartment, but the men working for Davos aren’t shy about their chatter. Seems like this club is connected to the subway line underneath. They can come and go unseen that way.”
Which explained why the cops watching the club hadn’t seen anyone move Sig. He’d been taken underground.
“Do you remember them taking Sig, or saying anything about where they were going?”
“I know the guys holding me wouldn’t stop talking about a ceremony. Some great demon uprising, blah, blah, blah.”
“Yeah, I think Sig has something to do with that.”
I gave a condensed rundown of the theory I had come up with moments earlier, and was impressed that no one tried to argue or disagree. A hundred points for the obvious answer.
“This is all my fault,” she said, peeking under her shirt to look at the healing wounds, then letting the blouse fall back into place. “And whatever they were giving me for drugs, that’s in him now too. He’s strong, but that stuff will keep him fucked up for awhile.”
Her usually tidy blonde braid was in a state of absolute disarray. This was the first time I’d ever seen Ingrid look anything less than a hundred percent poised. It was jarring. I didn’t like it. Of course, I also wasn’t a big fan of someone trying to murder her.
